Robin Blackburn, longtime editor of the New Left Review, is probably the foremost Marxist historian of New World slavery working today. In The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (1988) and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (1997), Blackburn charts the construction and revolutionary downfall of the slave systems of the colonial Atlantic.

These two volumes — complemented more recently by An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), and The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (2013) — together comprise a comprehensive transnational account of what Blackburn’s newest book designates “the First Slavery.”

With The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 (2024), the historian provides the long-awaited concluding volume to his chronological trilogy on racial slavery in the New World. Owen Dowling sat down with Robin Blackburn to discuss the book, his now-completed trilogy as a coherent whole, and what a Marxist perspective brings to the study of slavery, racism, and capitalism in global history.