In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the United States …
The extraction of the world’s resources—the coin, food, and commodities needed to keep up the growth rate of an expanding world economy—produced the wealth that allowed more and more Europeans and European settlers to enjoy more freedom. Slavery (not the old feudal-servant slavery of Las Casas’s Mediterranean childhood, but a new system in which humans as property provided the labor for large-scale debt-capitalized, export-oriented plantations) was as essential to the emergence of bourgeois order as was the right of commerce and communication and the freedom of the seas.