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3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Western Capitalism and Slavery in the Early Modern Era

Western Capitalism and Slavery in the Early Modern Era

Paperback

EconomicsGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral World History

ISBN13: 9798233283550
Publisher: Colloquium Verlag
Published: Jan 20 2026
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

In the spring of 1788, a group of Liverpool merchants gathered in a paneled counting house to review their quarterly returns. Among the ledgers documenting cotton imports, sugar futures, and tobacco shipments lay another set of accounts detailing a more disturbing commodity: human beings. The ship Enterprize had recently completed a profitable voyage, carrying 394 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. After accounting for the sixty-three who died during the passage, the sale of the survivors in Charleston generated returns of nearly forty percent. The merchants reviewed these figures with the same clinical detachment they applied to any other cargo, their quills scratching calculations that reduced human suffering to columns of profit and loss. This scene, repeated in countless port cities across Europe and the Americas, reveals a fundamental truth about the early modern world: the rise of Western capitalism and the expansion of chattel slavery were not parallel developments but deeply intertwined phenomena, each feeding and sustaining the other in ways that shaped the modern world.

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General World History