Empire of Necessity: Historian Greg Grandin on Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World
1,445 views · Published 6 February 2014 · 16:33 · Indexed 30 September 2026
Channel: Free Speech TV · 2014 · News & Politics
In his new book, "The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World," acclaimed historian Greg Grandin examines how the transnational slave trade transformed the world, causing mass economic, social and political upheaval in ways that continue to reverberate today. Grandin tells the true story of a slave insurrection aboard a ship named the Tryal in 1805, in which West African men and women rose up and seized the vessel. The uprising inspired Herman Melville to write his novella "Benito Cereno" that drew on the memoirs of Captain Delano, a distant relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, Grandin has used the dramatic incident to show how slavery was the "flywheel" that drove the global development of everything from trade and insurance to technology, religion and medicine for nearly four centuries. A professor of Latin American history at New York University, Grandin's last book, "Fordlandia," was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.
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