This work focuses on “the rise and fall of slave regimes that prevailed in the US South, Brazil and Cuba between 1800 and 1860, and which met their demise shortly thereafter” as well as the aftermath, in which a steady growth of the number of enslaved people of African descent, what they produced, and the territory that enslavers owned increased, particularly in parts of Imperial Brazil as well as in the Latin American republics.

In both cases of the ‘first slavery’ as defined by the author, as well as the second, enslaved people were organized into ‘gangs’ or through a ‘task’ system and were chattels who could be ‘bought and sold without regard to family ties.’ Enslavers also encouraged the enslaved people of African descent who they owned to cultivate their own food, particularly corn (maize), “tending chickens and working garden plots in their scant few hours of ‘free’ time.”

As the author asserts, the revolts of the enslaved people in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) from 1791 to 1804 “removed one potential rival producer [of cotton] but there were many others - Brazil, Cuba, Egypt, Anatolia and India.”

Planters enslaved those of African descent because they needed a labour force that “lacked the protections won by the common people in Europe,” according to the author, not simply because of race-based hatred — although I see the point the author is trying to make, and it is true, I found this statement a bit misleading. There are so many scholars and historians, documentary makers, who have established that regardless of this labour force need, many of the white planters and enslavers did, in fact, hate those of African descent and resented them and took pleasure in inflicting as much pain and terror as possible, particular white men against Black women (see Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Dorothy Roberts, Nikole Hannah-Jones and many, many others).

This is a very long, detailed, and comprehensive text which may be daunting to the average lay reader. For those who have a specific research interest in the area, the book contains a ton of information that they will find useful. For those wanting more general reading, it may be best to look to more texts intended for a more general audience.