World Transformed

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

For the best part of four centuries, enslaved Africans were the human cogs in a vast machine which transformed the face of the Americas, enhanced the well-being of the Western world, and created cultural habits we are familiar with today. In A World Transformed, celebrated historian James Walvin presents a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. It is a global story that ranges from the capitalist economy, labour and the environment to social culture and ideas of family, beauty and taste.

Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, A World Transformed collects the most recent scholarship to illustrate just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labour of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, promoting the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems which had profound global consequences which reverberate down to the present day. The labour and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions - in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonised 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 its legal or historical limits, confirming that the world created by slave labour lives on today.