A New World of Labor The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic

"A New World of Labor is a landmark event in British Atlantic history. It is a major book by a major historian and will have an enormous impact on the way we conceptualize any number of topics, from the importance of integrating once again seventeenth-century British developments with developments in Africa and the Americas; to the necessity of seeing the Atlantic slave trade as considerably different in Africa and America; to reassertions of the centrality of labor in understanding New World social and cultural development."-Trevor Burnard, author of Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World "This wide-ranging study persuasively argues that flexible and adaptable forced labor systems existed in the British Atlantic, and that Barbados was a major cultural hearth, where planters invented a new and exportable form of bound labor. A New World of Labor is a powerful and impressive work."-Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University "A New World of Labor possesses a number of strengths to recommend it. Importantly, Newman contrasts the conditions for workers with indentures in England versus those in the Caribbean, pointing out how much more in keeping with slave labor the indentured worker was in Barbados. Also significant is the equal attention he gives to European and African workers in the Royal African Company. Indeed, in Newman's hands, the English are finally given the same sort of comprehensive treatment that other scholars have devoted to the Dutch and Danish employees on the gold coast."-John Thornton, author of Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680