W. E. B. Du Bois called the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history.” It is a drama that continues to grip the popular imagination, which has its own varying interpretations: slavery as an “original sin” cursing the New World to perpetual racial domination; abolition as a pure moral crusade against a white supremacist regime run by and for a class of cruel slaveholders; slavery as a premodern blight holding back progress; abolition as the historically inevitable forward march of progress; abolition as a historical aberration.

Historians, even those who have embraced these sweeping narratives, have found it helpful to see the drama of New World slavery as occurring in two acts. From the first years of European colonization up through the early nineteenth century there was a “First Slavery,” pioneering the growth of commodity plantations in the Americas under the aegis of imperial protection.

Then, following the Haitian Revolution and the destruction of slavery in much of the Caribbean and Latin America, there emerged a nineteenth-century “Second Slavery” centered in America, Brazil, and Cuba (the ABC territories, respectively focused on cotton, coffee, and sugar). In addition to covering new geographic space, this slavery was “more autonomous, more durable and, in market terms, more ‘productive’ . . . capable of withstanding the challenge of the Age of Revolution and meeting the rising demand for plantation produce.” This is the periodization offered by eminent Marxist historian Robin Blackburn in his The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888.