Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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"