Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

How a desire for profit led to the invention of race

Eric Foner

  • Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin
  • The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn

This article is not currently available online. Buy reprint of this article.

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. Our Lincoln, an edited volume, will be published in the autumn.

From the archive

Reasons to be Miserable
James Meek: The Day My Pants Froze

The G-Word
Mark Mazower on the Armenian Massacres

The Old Country
Thomas Laqueur: the troublesome marriage of Poles and Jews

Land of Pure Delight
Dinah Birch: Anglicising the Holy Land

Partnership of Loss
Roy Foster: Ireland since 1789