A World Transformed - by James Walvin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.

A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.

This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions--in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

From the Back Cover

"No historian on either side of the Atlantic has captured this sweeping, epic story of inhumanity, mass migration, cultural transformation, and global empire quite like James Walvin. Walvin is to slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world what Dickens was to English literature in the nineteenth century. He writes like a perfectly tuned machine that cannot be stopped; the results are lyrical and deeply informed. With each new book, Walvin widens our view--he is at home in telling this tale in Jamaica, on the Gold Coast, at the quays of Liverpool, or in the tobacco fields of Maryland. A World Transformed is timely and will reach the hearts and minds of Walvin's multitudes of readers."--David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

"Walvin draws on his deep well of knowledge to offer an ambitious and capacious account of the ways in which slavery has shaped our world. This extremely compelling and important contribution draws on the key scholarship throughout, but it does so in a way that allows readers to understand connections and the big picture. It will help everyone grapple with this vital topic."--Laurent Dubois, author of The Banjo: America's African Instrument and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

"While it may be true that, in William Wells Brown's famous phrase, slavery 'never can be represented, ' Walvin describes with admirable brevity the contours of its massive global impact. Drawing on more than fifty years of research and reflection, he has produced a reader-friendly study of the great historical crime that was foundational to our modern world. It's ideal for students but should be read by anyone interested in the history of the Americas, Europe, or Africa."--Ned Sublette, coauthor of The American Slave Coast and author of The World That Made New Orleans

Review Quotes

"A World Transformed provides a much-needed explanation of how the transatlantic slave trade operated and the world powers involved. As a valuable synthesis of existing scholarship on the subject, the book is an excellent reference and introductory text for scholars and graduate students whose work intersects with any aspect of the transatlantic slave trade."-- "Society for U.S. Intellectual History"

"Walvin is skilled at making complex history accessible to a broad readership without diminishing its intellectual force. . . . Recommended."-- "CHOICE"

"A World Transformed is an important new history of Atlantic slavery that should find a wide readership, especially given the growing public interest in the history of slavery."-- "New West India Guide"

"Meticulous and eye-opening. . . . This richly detailed yet approachable history makes clear just how far and wide the grip of slavery reached."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"This single volume, written in clear and energetic prose, covers everything from the beginning of European slaving operations in West Africa at the end of the 15th century to the worldwide wave of anti-racism protests that followed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. . . . Its compendious, comprehensive coverage makes it very valuable."-- "Post and Courier"

"Walvin shows that slavery mattered in the past and matters now, in powerful and compelling prose. It is a tour de force."-- "Family & Community History"

"Walvin's beautifully written and compassionate narrative artfully synthesizes modern scholarship on slavery. He successfully decenters the nation-state to show the interconnectedness of the slave trade and the Atlantic economies and to demonstrate slavery's enormous human and environmental effects. . . . Walvin masterfully conveys the tragedy and enormity of his subject without losing details or forgetting his subjects' humanity."-- "Library Journal"

About the Author

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York. He has published widely on modern social history and the history of slavery. He has held fellowships in Britain, the United States, Australia, and the Caribbean. In 2008 he was awarded the O.B.E. for his services to scholarship.