The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Invention of the White Race)

The second volume in a monumental study of the origins of racism in the US. In this second volume of his acclaimed study Theodore Allen explores how the degradation of African bond-laborers into slaves produced, for the first time in Anglo America, racism based on color differences. Theodore Allen traces the historical roots of the white supremacism that led European-American workers to oppose Abolitionism. This was in contrast to an earlier common feeling of oppression shared between European and African-American laborers. Allen examines the means by which European workers in the tobacco colonies were reduced from tenants and wage workers to chattel bond-labourers. The imposition by plantation owners of such onerous conditions of servitude created a potentially explosive situation that ultimately detonated in the famous Bacon's Rebellion -- the greatest demonstration in history, argues Allen, of solidarity between European-Americans and African-Americans against slavery. Rocked by the laboring class's solidarity, the plantation bourgeoisie sought a solution in the creation of a buffer stratum of poor whites, who now gained a privilege in their skin color protecting them from the enslavement visited upon Africans and African Americans. Such was, as Allen puts it, the invention of the white race, `that peculiar institution' that continues to haunt social relations in the US down to the present. An authoritative, masterly work, The Invention of the Whife Race is essential reading for students of US history and politics.