Introduction
PART I: SETTINGS
Chapter 1. England
Chapter 2. The Gold Coast
Chapter 3. Barbados
PART II: BRITISH BOUND LABOR
Chapter 4. "White Slaves": British Labor in Early Barbados
Chapter 5. "A Company of White Negroes": The Lives and Labor of
British Workers on the Gold Coast
PART III: AFRICAN BOUND LABOR
Chapter 6. "A Spirit of Liberty": Slave Labor in Gold Coast Castles
and Forts
Chapter 7. "We Have No Power over Them": People and Work on the
Gold Coast
PART IV: PLANTATION SLAVERY
Chapter 8. "The Harsh Tyranny of Our Masters": The Development of
Racial Slavery and the Integrated Plantations of Barbados
Chapter 9. "Forced to Labour Beyond Their Natural Strength": Labor,
Discipline, and Community on Eighteenth-Century Barbadian
Plantations
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
A New World of Labor connects developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast and with the initial development of African chattel slavery in Barbados, whose labor system played a foundational role in defining how plantation slavery developed throughout British America.
Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History at the University of Glasgow and author of Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic and Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"Newman's terrific book is among the very best studies we now have
of labor systems and of ordinary people in the British Atlantic
World. It focuses on workers-Europeans, Africans, and people of
mixed races-who, of course, accounted for the majority of the
inhabitants of that world. It also explores the range of labor
systems developed by British, Africans, and Barbadians that formed
the economic engine shaping many of the societies bordered on or
surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. A New World of Labor both
represents the maturing of Atlantic World history and charts new
directions for scholars studying that area."
*Reviews in American History*
"Newman's contributions are many: to reemphasize class as a
determinant for the dehumanizing features of slavery; to place
chattel slavery onto a spectrum of labor exploitation to further
complicate and diffuse the relationship between race and slavery;
to pinpoint Barbados as the birthplace of this class-based
exploitation, but also to place Barbados into an integrated
circum-Atlantic perspective that includes thorough analyses of the
labor regimes of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century
West Africa; and to decenter narratives of slavery's genesis that
focus on the American mainland and on race. The overall effect of A
New World of Labor is a biographically textured and geographically
expansive labor history that will act as a provocative foreground
for established narratives about the development of racial
slavery."
*American Historical Review*
"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*
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