What do you think?
Rate this book
Slavery and Human Progress
Pulitzer Prize-winner David Brion Davis here provides a penetrating survey of slavery and emancipation throughout world history--from ancient times to the 20th century. He demonstrates that slavery, once regarded as a form of human progress, played a crucial part in the expansion of the Western world, and that not until the 18th and 19th centuries did views of slavery as a retrograde institution gain far-reaching acceptance. Illuminating this momentous historical shift from "progressive" slavery to "progressive" emancipation, Davis ranges over a wide array of important developments--from the transition from white to black slavery, to the impact of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, to 20th-century debates about slavery in the League of Nations and the U.N. He probes the intricate connections among slavery, emancipation, and the idea of progress, shedding new light on two crucial issues--the human capacity for dignifying acts of oppression and the problems of implementing social change--and placing the most recent international debate about freedom and human rights into much-needed perspective.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
Paperback
First published October 4, 1984
5 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
David Brion Davis
43 books47 followersDavid Brion Davis was an American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He was a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of 17 books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis played a principal role in explaining the latest historiography to a broad audience. His books emphasized religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 2, 2020
In the past three hundred years, the kind of slavery that permits one human being to own another has gone from near universal acceptance to being all but eradicated.
Scholar David Brion Davis attempts to explain why this momentous transformation occurred in his dense and highly academic tome, Slavery and Human Progress.
Davis’s work is not so much a history of slavery and how it came to be (mostly) abolished as it is a recounting of what people have thought and said about the institution.
Though his theme is sometimes hard to follow, Davis’s book is a pleasure to read simply because the author knows so much about his topic and can comment with authority. Among the most important points he raises is in reminding us just how radical a change the abolitionists wrought and how that change is in danger of being underappreciated, especially as our society struggles to define what perfect racial justice looks like.
Equal Opportunity Oppression
The general historical principles regarding slavery that Davis does recount are illuminating.
He points out, for example, that for the vast majority of our existence human beings have accepted slavery as a common and intrinsic function of society—as common as waging war.
In fact, for millennia slavery seemed to be inexorably linked to war, as the chief way for obtaining new slaves was to conquer enemy tribes or nations. Any concept of a corporate right to freedom was reserved for one’s own people. Outsiders existed to be subdued or exploited.
At least in this way the misfortunes of slavery were meted out with a kind of barbaric equity.
In fact, slavery did not become an essentially racist enterprise until the era of European exploration and colonization.
Exploiting the Dark Continent
Several factors contributed to this change.
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century cut off Europe from its main source for white slaves, as “the Turks soon diverted the flow of Black Sea and Balkan captives to Islamic markets.” European slavers in turn increased trafficking in black Africans, bound primarily for the plantations of the New World.
Though driven in part by market forces, this change soon took on social and religious dimensions. Even while some Christian leaders denounced the practice of enslaving white fellow believers, the trafficking of Africans was justified as a means of improving the lot of benighted savages by civilizing and evangelizing them.
Of course, by the eighteenth century this rationale was countered by a rising abolitionist movement, mostly in Britain and North America. Davis recounts how this movement was driven by a new strain of Christian evangelicals who called not only for delivering the gospel to black Africans—slave or otherwise—but for whites to then obey the command of Christ to love these converts as equal recipients of divine salvation.
Davis notes that the Christian foundation of the abolitionist creed was coupled with other arguments including a rising focus on human rights and a belief that history is ordained to progress toward equity and prosperity.
To this end reformers cited writers from the French and Scottish enlightenment and published studies purporting to show how slavery actually undermined economic growth. But ultimately, asserts Davis, abolitionists forwarded their case by presenting it as a biblical imperative: slavery tainted man’s endeavors with a demonic blight, but freeing the captives would propel society into a glorious age of jubilee.
Victory
History records that the abolitionists prevailed. By an act of parliament in 1807, the United Kingdom banned the slave trade. The emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire (except for India) was set in motion by legislation in the 1830s.
In the United States, it took a long and terrible war to finally abolish slavery, an effort formalized by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
The millenarian raptures of the abolitionists, however, did not necessarily carry over into discussions about how to integrate newly freed people into broader society. The topic certainly generated much debate, but by necessity it tended toward the finer points of policy, including things like land use, education, fiscal impact, and even logistics.
Related to this but beyond the scope of Davis’s book is how the abolitionist model lives on today as activists against various kinds of perceived inequality often claim for their causes both a righteous mandate and the irresistible tide of human progress.
But as Western civilization has increasingly abandoned its Christian heritage, would-be reformers have had to invoke powers other than a divine judge to account for how their supposed ameliorations are to be impressed upon society.
The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel imagined that humans engage in an epic, cyclical struggle to finally attain a “rationally ordered community.” Karl Marx forwarded as scientific certainty that economic upheaval and class warfare would ultimately bring about a communist utopia.
And a recent American president apparently believed strongly enough in the inevitability of progressive reform that he often chided his political opponents by declaring them to be “on the wrong side of history.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...
Amazing Grace
Given the tendency of human nature to succumb to its darker impulses, however, can these secular theories really account for a change as remarkable as the campaign against slavery?
Perhaps the abolitionists were right—that the attempt to eradicate such an age-old blight on civilization could only happen because of divine grace. How else can we explain how human beings finally, at least in this one area, collectively agreed that enslaving others violates one of God’s fundamental tenets—to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Would it be so out of place to invoke the prophet Jeremiah, who cited this pledge from God to his people: “I will put my law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Scholar David Brion Davis attempts to explain why this momentous transformation occurred in his dense and highly academic tome, Slavery and Human Progress.
Davis’s work is not so much a history of slavery and how it came to be (mostly) abolished as it is a recounting of what people have thought and said about the institution.
Though his theme is sometimes hard to follow, Davis’s book is a pleasure to read simply because the author knows so much about his topic and can comment with authority. Among the most important points he raises is in reminding us just how radical a change the abolitionists wrought and how that change is in danger of being underappreciated, especially as our society struggles to define what perfect racial justice looks like.
Equal Opportunity Oppression
The general historical principles regarding slavery that Davis does recount are illuminating.
He points out, for example, that for the vast majority of our existence human beings have accepted slavery as a common and intrinsic function of society—as common as waging war.
In fact, for millennia slavery seemed to be inexorably linked to war, as the chief way for obtaining new slaves was to conquer enemy tribes or nations. Any concept of a corporate right to freedom was reserved for one’s own people. Outsiders existed to be subdued or exploited.
At least in this way the misfortunes of slavery were meted out with a kind of barbaric equity.
In fact, slavery did not become an essentially racist enterprise until the era of European exploration and colonization.
Exploiting the Dark Continent
Several factors contributed to this change.
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century cut off Europe from its main source for white slaves, as “the Turks soon diverted the flow of Black Sea and Balkan captives to Islamic markets.” European slavers in turn increased trafficking in black Africans, bound primarily for the plantations of the New World.
Though driven in part by market forces, this change soon took on social and religious dimensions. Even while some Christian leaders denounced the practice of enslaving white fellow believers, the trafficking of Africans was justified as a means of improving the lot of benighted savages by civilizing and evangelizing them.
Of course, by the eighteenth century this rationale was countered by a rising abolitionist movement, mostly in Britain and North America. Davis recounts how this movement was driven by a new strain of Christian evangelicals who called not only for delivering the gospel to black Africans—slave or otherwise—but for whites to then obey the command of Christ to love these converts as equal recipients of divine salvation.
Davis notes that the Christian foundation of the abolitionist creed was coupled with other arguments including a rising focus on human rights and a belief that history is ordained to progress toward equity and prosperity.
To this end reformers cited writers from the French and Scottish enlightenment and published studies purporting to show how slavery actually undermined economic growth. But ultimately, asserts Davis, abolitionists forwarded their case by presenting it as a biblical imperative: slavery tainted man’s endeavors with a demonic blight, but freeing the captives would propel society into a glorious age of jubilee.
Victory
History records that the abolitionists prevailed. By an act of parliament in 1807, the United Kingdom banned the slave trade. The emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire (except for India) was set in motion by legislation in the 1830s.
In the United States, it took a long and terrible war to finally abolish slavery, an effort formalized by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
The millenarian raptures of the abolitionists, however, did not necessarily carry over into discussions about how to integrate newly freed people into broader society. The topic certainly generated much debate, but by necessity it tended toward the finer points of policy, including things like land use, education, fiscal impact, and even logistics.
Related to this but beyond the scope of Davis’s book is how the abolitionist model lives on today as activists against various kinds of perceived inequality often claim for their causes both a righteous mandate and the irresistible tide of human progress.
But as Western civilization has increasingly abandoned its Christian heritage, would-be reformers have had to invoke powers other than a divine judge to account for how their supposed ameliorations are to be impressed upon society.
The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel imagined that humans engage in an epic, cyclical struggle to finally attain a “rationally ordered community.” Karl Marx forwarded as scientific certainty that economic upheaval and class warfare would ultimately bring about a communist utopia.
And a recent American president apparently believed strongly enough in the inevitability of progressive reform that he often chided his political opponents by declaring them to be “on the wrong side of history.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...
Amazing Grace
Given the tendency of human nature to succumb to its darker impulses, however, can these secular theories really account for a change as remarkable as the campaign against slavery?
Perhaps the abolitionists were right—that the attempt to eradicate such an age-old blight on civilization could only happen because of divine grace. How else can we explain how human beings finally, at least in this one area, collectively agreed that enslaving others violates one of God’s fundamental tenets—to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Would it be so out of place to invoke the prophet Jeremiah, who cited this pledge from God to his people: “I will put my law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
July 9, 2019
Fantastic bookend work to a trilogy of seminal historical writings on slavery. The institution of slavery is explored in-depth and with fact-based clarity across recorded human history, but especially from the 15th century through the 19th century. To see how the concept of 'progress' was envoked and manipulated by nations and peoples throughout history to justify and keep slavery profitable is awesome. It truly puts slavery into context of human evolution and reveals the evils and ability of it to happen again in a sanctioned way in our lifetime.
The thesis of the book is developed wonderfully and flushed out across the 320 pages in a meaningful way. The prose does not remain idle and helps to drive the reader onward when the details get heavy.
Highly recommend.
The thesis of the book is developed wonderfully and flushed out across the 320 pages in a meaningful way. The prose does not remain idle and helps to drive the reader onward when the details get heavy.
Highly recommend.
Want to read
December 14, 2021Joseph Ellis praised David Brion Davis as the foremost slavery historian during a discussion of his latest book "The Cause".
Read
April 6, 2009Hero of Alexandria harnessed steam power two millennia ago, yet humans were so invested in slavery as a system that they failed to see the potential of steam to transform the way we interact with the world until less two centuries ago. As we develop green energy practices, I hope we improve our pace & remember those who struggled to bring us to this point.
March 16, 2015
A display of outstanding scholarship, I really wish I had read this book long ago.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews