Trouble of the World

Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital

Author: Zach Sell

Traces American slavery's significance to colonial land-based dispossessions on a global scale, showing how slavery molded the United States as an empire-state while other imperial powers looked to it as a model for their own colonial projects.

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In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. slavery was characterized by relentless expansion and unrelenting exportation, not only of commodities but also of ideas. Zach Sell traces U.S. slavery's significance to colonial land-based dispossessions on a global scale, showing how slavery molded the United States as an empire-state while other imperial powers looked to it as a model for their own colonial projects. The narrative follows British factory owners and southern plantation owners as they worked to incorporate various kinds of laborers into global circuits of production and consumption, bringing enslaved African Americans, colonial subjects, Indigenous people, and factory workers together. Looking to the rough edges of empire, Sell narrates the struggles of overseers hired away from U.S. plantations to introduce rice and cotton production across colonial India, the efforts of investors in plantations to bring formerly enslaved people and U.S. slaveholders to British Honduras, and more. What emerges is a tale of a system too powerful and too profitable to end, even after emancipation; it is the story of how slavery's influence survived emancipation, infusing empire and capitalism to this day.

Critic Reviews

“Zach Sell writes a powerful history of global capitalism as racialized domination...revitalizes a Black intellectual thesis of racial capitalism, beyond doubt."-- Business History Review”

"In a powerfully imagined study, Sell turns his attention to 'the relationship between slavery and empire within capitalism, ' focusing on the histories of American slavery, British imperialism, and global capitalism across the mid-nineteenth century (p. 1). . . . Those looking for new approaches to the slavery-and-capitalism question would do well to start here."--Journal of American History
"Trouble of the World asks readers to wrestle with the complexities of a world imperialism has shaped. Notably, Sell's contribution extends understandings of the global entanglements, elevating the idiosyncrasies of interconnections through an analysis that integrates Atlantic and Pacific frames."--H-Labor
"[This] majestic work applies a close reading of the collected works of W. E. B. Du Bois to archival material from England, India, Australia, Belize, and the United States to articulate the global scope of seemingly 'national' issues. . . . As Sell painstakingly demonstrates, the so-called Pax Britannica produced not peace but a world defined by imperial violence and destruction in service of metropolitan capitalist profit and plunder."--Journal of Southern History
"An expansive, thought-provoking work worthy of reading by those seeking to better understand the global intersections of slavery, race, and capitalism."--North Carolina Historical Review
"With obvious import for our understanding of the historical bases of present crises in the U.S. and around the world today, Trouble of the World offers tremendous insight, detail and argument to the reader. The research is meticulous and the detailed findings from small case studies are all purposefully woven into an argument about how the demands of emergent global capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century were generative in reworking racial domination and colonial occupation."--Ethnic and Racial Studies
"Zach Sell writes a powerful history of global capitalism as racialized domination. . . . Revitalizes a Black intellectual thesis of racial capitalism, beyond doubt."--Business History Review