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Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award--and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage , Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come."
Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of
slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise.
A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.
Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of
slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise.
A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
October 15, 2020
What people like to do is justify their terrible atrocities and try to sleep at night, and they can be quite successful at this. European Christians busily enslaving Africans liked to quote the Curse of Ham from Genesis 9:18-27. This is a weird story about Noah and his sons after the flood. Noah got drunk “and uncovered himself within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside”. Shem and Japheth took up a cloth and walked backwards (!) into the tent and covered up Noah’s nakedness without looking at him. Now, for this crime Noah issued the following statement :
Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers
Over the centuries there was a blurring of meanings and Ham and his son were mysteriously associated with blackness (no mention of that in the Bible) and the story was cited a million times to give Biblical authority for the slave trade.
Likewise when the idea of abolition of slavery was raised in the USA the slavers never tired of saying what great lives the slaves had down on the plantation and how they would have a terrible time if they were free, nowhere to go and no one to look after them. (No one to whip them and sell their children either, but they didn’t mention that.)
(Before that Southern slave owners used to like to say that slave owning was a great burden inherited from Britain and entirely not their fault.)
Interesting fact :
Slaveholding Southern presidents governed the nation for roughly fifty of the seventy-two years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
In this sorry story of slavery in America there are a few inspiring moments, and one of them is the unlikely story of the British abolition of the slave trade. After being the principal organisers and profiteers from African slavery for a couple of centuries, within a few decades (1780 to 1820) the British made a complete U turn and abolished the whole thing and spent a considerable amount of money and resources making sure nobody else could carry on slave trading. Many cynical historians then wrote that it wasn’t anything to do with a sudden onrush of altruism but just a way of ensuring existing West Indian economies were protected, but DBD carefully dismantles these arguments and says no, it was entirely altruistic, and you can see how the West Indian colonies suffered as a direct result. And plus, the British freed all their slaves too.
One excellent section in this jam-packed book deals with the way racism and slavery has been remembered in the USA since the Civil War. Or should we say, how it’s been airbrushed away.
Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and this pride in knowing where and when general Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia. As the early 20th century progressed, the Civil War came to resemble in many minds the nation’s greatest athletic contest, a kind of mid-nineteenth century Super Bowl between all-American heroes.
Professor Davis takes on a huge subject here, and deals with its dizzying complications and entanglements as well as anyone could, I think. There is a lot of detail here, at times a bit too much for my poor brain. But still, highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfbps...
February 27, 2014
NEW WORLD SLAVERY
Describing the rise and fall of slavery in the New World in a mere 320 pages is a demanding project for a historian, and one that David Brion Davis largely (with a few caveats) accomplishes with no small amount of skill in his book "Inhuman Bondage".
The books begins with the Amistad case from the late 1830's which is somewhat at odds with the Spielberg version, though far more interesting and revealing for being so. Davis then makes room to contemplate the roots of slavery in the Near East, the Greek and Roman Empires, and on through history until it erupted into the New World with the "discoveries" of the late fifteenth century. This, for me, was the highlight of the book, and also includes reflections on the interaction between slavery and racism (and the accompanying arguments between cause and effect) as well as examining the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Ancient World and Enlightenment views of race and slavery.
As regards the main subject of the book, slavery in the New World, Davis focuses on the North American experience, followed by that of the Caribbean, with Brazilian slavery in the rear. Spanish slavery, except in so far as it applied to the Caribbean, is largely absent. Other subjects that receive attention are Slave revolts in the various colonies, the role of the Haitian revolt in the demise of Slavery, British and other European emancipation, the debates about the role slavery played in the industrial revolution, the American Civil War and emancipation, as well as the astonishing case of the Brazilian slave revolt that brought about emancipation in that country, the last in the Western hemisphere to do so. Paradoxically the actual day-to-day realities of the slaves and slavery remain relatively untouched by the text.
I didn't agree with all of Davis's analysis, but to his credit he makes the reader aware of other historical views even if his dismissal of the connections between slavery and industrialisation is more than a little heavy handed. The book only truly irked with regard to Davis's opinion on the Turner rebellion; his remark that the massacres of whites was brutal and counterproductive is reasonable, but to then go on an claim that this was little different psychologically from the mental state that leads to the genocide of Jews, is to put it politely, a grotesque overstatement. For a start the Nazis were not treated by the Jewish people in the way that White Americans treated Black slaves. If Davis himself applied this assertion systematically his account of the Haitian revolt would have been very different, and less enlightening for that. He certainly doesn't apply it to the putting down of Slave revolts, including those in the British Caribbean where hundreds of blacks died, many cold bloodedly executed in response to wide spread insurrections that resulted in less than a handful of white deaths.
In short, "Inhuman Bondage" is a thoroughly interesting exploration of New World slavery. As a book its fascinating and enlightened scholarship easily out-weigh its occasional defects. The accounts of the roots of slavery in the old world are easily, and somewhat perversely given the books title, the highlight of the book. Readers interested in reading further into the subject can do no worse than Robin Blackburn's dense but comprehensive "The Making of New World Slavery"; for the Haitian revolt C.L.R. James "The Black Jacobins" is still a remarkable account; those interested in the experience of the North American mainland will find that Peter Kolchin's "American Slavery (1619-1877)" will supply the details that are largely absent from Davis's account, and Eric Foner's "Reconstruction" is an immensely detailed account of the post-emancipation experience of American blacks.
Describing the rise and fall of slavery in the New World in a mere 320 pages is a demanding project for a historian, and one that David Brion Davis largely (with a few caveats) accomplishes with no small amount of skill in his book "Inhuman Bondage".
The books begins with the Amistad case from the late 1830's which is somewhat at odds with the Spielberg version, though far more interesting and revealing for being so. Davis then makes room to contemplate the roots of slavery in the Near East, the Greek and Roman Empires, and on through history until it erupted into the New World with the "discoveries" of the late fifteenth century. This, for me, was the highlight of the book, and also includes reflections on the interaction between slavery and racism (and the accompanying arguments between cause and effect) as well as examining the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Ancient World and Enlightenment views of race and slavery.
As regards the main subject of the book, slavery in the New World, Davis focuses on the North American experience, followed by that of the Caribbean, with Brazilian slavery in the rear. Spanish slavery, except in so far as it applied to the Caribbean, is largely absent. Other subjects that receive attention are Slave revolts in the various colonies, the role of the Haitian revolt in the demise of Slavery, British and other European emancipation, the debates about the role slavery played in the industrial revolution, the American Civil War and emancipation, as well as the astonishing case of the Brazilian slave revolt that brought about emancipation in that country, the last in the Western hemisphere to do so. Paradoxically the actual day-to-day realities of the slaves and slavery remain relatively untouched by the text.
I didn't agree with all of Davis's analysis, but to his credit he makes the reader aware of other historical views even if his dismissal of the connections between slavery and industrialisation is more than a little heavy handed. The book only truly irked with regard to Davis's opinion on the Turner rebellion; his remark that the massacres of whites was brutal and counterproductive is reasonable, but to then go on an claim that this was little different psychologically from the mental state that leads to the genocide of Jews, is to put it politely, a grotesque overstatement. For a start the Nazis were not treated by the Jewish people in the way that White Americans treated Black slaves. If Davis himself applied this assertion systematically his account of the Haitian revolt would have been very different, and less enlightening for that. He certainly doesn't apply it to the putting down of Slave revolts, including those in the British Caribbean where hundreds of blacks died, many cold bloodedly executed in response to wide spread insurrections that resulted in less than a handful of white deaths.
In short, "Inhuman Bondage" is a thoroughly interesting exploration of New World slavery. As a book its fascinating and enlightened scholarship easily out-weigh its occasional defects. The accounts of the roots of slavery in the old world are easily, and somewhat perversely given the books title, the highlight of the book. Readers interested in reading further into the subject can do no worse than Robin Blackburn's dense but comprehensive "The Making of New World Slavery"; for the Haitian revolt C.L.R. James "The Black Jacobins" is still a remarkable account; those interested in the experience of the North American mainland will find that Peter Kolchin's "American Slavery (1619-1877)" will supply the details that are largely absent from Davis's account, and Eric Foner's "Reconstruction" is an immensely detailed account of the post-emancipation experience of American blacks.
January 1, 2016
I'm pretty sure after reading this book that slavery is probably the most atrocious thing thing a human can do to another human.
This book is hard to take in a lot places, and will probably cause you to loose sleep.
Probably the worst part of the whole thing is reading that in the late 1800's, Western culture took a fairly barbaric practice that was close to falling out of practice and made it EVEN MORE barbaric as they spread well beyond it's origins of using POW's as slaves.
This book is hard to take in a lot places, and will probably cause you to loose sleep.
Probably the worst part of the whole thing is reading that in the late 1800's, Western culture took a fairly barbaric practice that was close to falling out of practice and made it EVEN MORE barbaric as they spread well beyond it's origins of using POW's as slaves.
October 2, 2024
This is among the finest works of history I have ever read. It is fair, well researched, superbly written, and broad-minded. For those in 2020 who think slavery is a uniquely American or western experience, this work will deflate you. The barbarousness of slavery is clear enough, but so is its pervasiveness in history, and sadly its continuance today. Yet, there is hope here. A system that was pervasive and profitable in 1750, was within 150 years gone in the Western Hemisphere. Britain in particular led the way, even as its politics were reactionary in nearly every other regard, in the early 1800s.
I cannot gush enough about this book.
I cannot gush enough about this book.
July 17, 2021
This book is a very admirable, holistic look at slavery in the Americas. Davis begins with the story of the Amistad Case and the uprising of enslaved Africans being transported to Cuba in 1839. He then moves back in time to begin a discussion on the history of the institution of slavery starting in ancient times moving up through the transatlantic slave system, slavery in colonial times, and the relevance of slavery to the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Davis devotes a couple of chapters to slavery in nineteenth-century America, detailing aspects of slavery such as religion, sex, free blacks, and culture. The last two chapters are devoted to abolitionism in Britain and the Americas ending with emancipation in the US.
Although this is a relatively short book it is quite detailed and extensive without seeming dense.
Although this is a relatively short book it is quite detailed and extensive without seeming dense.
May 17, 2019
This work is simply one of a handful of important books I think most people ought to read. Professor Davis realized the inherent horror of human bondage and the clear failure of human enterprise and imagination to accept, establish, and maintain this primary evil. I am not capable of praising it acutely.
August 5, 2011
The first three paragraphs are really notes to myself about the paradox that slavery presents in a spiritual sense and are kind of a preface. Many slave owners considered themselves Christian and enlightened. Thomas Jefferson, while not an orthodox Christian, considered himself Christian and certainly was a child of the Enlightenment and saw the problem of slavery quite clearly as evil and as the original sin of the new country. But he blamed England for introducing slavery to the colonies, but appeared to be incapable of doing anything about it. He knew slaves were created in God's image and had certain unalienable rights and yearned for and deserved freedom and that it was a crime against God to deny any man these Divine gifts. But he did nothing to free his own slaves and (according to Mr. Davis) fathered a child on one of his own helpless female slaves (Sally Hemming). In other words, he knew what was the right thing to do, but refused to do it on economic grounds. Which are the worst possible reasons. He would have lost money if he did it. He may have been brilliant in his public life and I thank him for the Declaration of Independence, but he was venal and pathetic in his private life.
I am reading Pulitzer Prize winner David Brion Davis’s book Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. In it he describes slave owners who were professing Christians, but who also beat their human chattel, or had someone else beat them, who were themselves born again or, at least, claimed to be. It gives a new and sinister meaning to being your brother’s keeper. (Memo to Mr. Obama. Being your brother’s keeper was a slave owner’s argument and was literally true in their case). If the slave master was truly born-again, and the slave was also and all those who are in Christ are perfect in Christ in a spiritual sense, then would the slave be justified in using force (even deadly force) in an attempt to emancipate himself? Isn’t he supposed to view his oppressor as perfect in Christ and better than himself? The slave owner was supposed to do the same thing, of course, but obviously defaulted on doing his duty. Would the Christian slave then be justified in killing his owner thus freeing himself and his friends and families? Why was there no black William Wallace and if there was, then why is he not celebrated as a freedom fighter? (Actually, there was, kind of.)
The partial answer is that most slave insurrections were suicidal and most slaves knew it. The British slave revolts were practically bloodless as far as the rebelling slaves were concerned. They were extraordinarily careful in attacking and destroying property only and preserving the lives of their oppressors. Most of these slaves were evangelical Christians. These revolts always fizzled out in the end because the slave owners had the laws and the government and thus the army and the guns on their side and retribution was swift and terrible. The slave insurrectionists may have respected human life, but the so-called enlightened English slave power had no such qualms and slaughtered the rebels with impunity, killing hundreds and hanging more. Their heads were set on stakes along the road as a prophylactic against the infectious idea of freedom. Slavery can only be imposed by force and terror no matter how paternalistic and humane the slave masters think themselves.
Nonetheless, if so-called Christian slave holders were indeed truly born again, then, according to the New Testament, they were perfect in Christ Jesus, but not in their unjust actions and should have been opposed, resisted and overcome even to death. As they were opposed by the British Abolitionists (some of whom did oppose slavery and slave holders to the death; their own, unfortunately, not the slave holders. British abolitionists were pacifists for the most part). But they did sway public opinion so that the British abolished the slave trade and eventually emancipated almost a million slaves in their empire and lost billions if not trillions (in today’s currency) of pounds as a result. In the United States slavery was seen as an economic necessity and was not resolved until the Civil War. It was not until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s that the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights was completely reflected in law.
“The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.” Ecclesiastes 9:3.
This is one of those rare books that I think should be required reading for everybody above the age of fifteen. Practically every page is an eye opener and Mr. Davis’s writing style makes it a page-turner as well. There is not a dull sentence in it.
Mr.Davis ingeniously and masterfully chronicles the cruel history of slavery from ancient times to the present day where classic chattel slavery is still widespread in Saharan nations such as Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Sudan and “sex slavery” is big business around the world.
The nub of the book to me is his treatment of slavery in the United States from colonial America to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. Contrary to popular myth, slavery was seen as essential to the economic growth and prosperity of the nation. It was very profitable. Most slaves were the property of owners of huge plantations. These plantations can be best be compared to the huge agri-businesses of today and the slaves were used in an assembly line fashion doing the work that machines do now.
Only four percent of all the black African slaves shipped to the New World were shipped to North America. In 1808 Christian abolitionists led by William Wilberforce and others like him shamed Britain into outlawing the Atlantic slave trade. The United States followed suit that same year. Finally on August 1, 1834 Britain emancipated close to a million slaves paying twenty million pounds sterling to owners and creditors. Abolitionists “strongly objected to the further provision that forced the ‘freed’ slaves to undergo a period of uncompensated ‘apprenticeship’, which, in effect, gave their former owners…more compensation in the form of unpaid, slavelike labor.” (p.238). But they negotiated it down to only four years unpaid apprenticeship from twelve years.
In 1843 Lord Aberdeen, the Tory foreign secretary, risked damage to the ever fragile relationship with the United States by saying, “Great Britain desires and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” (p.232) By 1843 Britain’s experiment in emancipation was seen by the world and many Britons as being a dismal failure. The compensation to owners for the loss of their "property" and the cost of lost labor (most of the slaves left the cane fields and became subsistence farmers in Jamaica, Barbados etc...and Britain had been the world’s leader in sugar production and took a huge economic hit) as a percentage of GDP means that Britain lost trillions in today’s dollars as result of ending the slave trade and emancipating the largest number of slaves in world history up till Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment.
From the beginning of the founding of this country the idea of freedom as set forth in the Declaration of Independence that “all Men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness-“ was at odds with the obvious contradiction of slavery. Both cannot and could not be true and nobody could really be wholly free while some were wholly slaves.
To make a longer and fascinating story shorter, due to the influence of the first Great Awakening and the Second Great awakening and the further influence of the British Abolitionists and because we started out as a colony of British subjects with the concept of freedom and individual rights that come from God embedded in our political DNA we could not survive as any type of “free” country part free and part slave. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other.” In the rest of the speech he expresses the hope that opponents of slavery would be able to stop its spread, to contain it, and that it would eventually wither on the vine and die a peaceful death.
The peculiar institution did not die an easy death and in its death throes it claimed over 620,000 (estimates vary) Americans lives including that of the Great Emancipator himself. More people died in the Civil War than in all the American wars and conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the Korean War. Eighteen to twenty percent of the white male population of the Confederate States were swallowed up by the first truly modern total war (about the same percentage as German military deaths in WWII). One fifth of Mississippi’s postwar state budget was paid to supply prosthetic limbs to surviving but maimed soldiers. It was a war of deep-seated hatred, symbolized in the extreme by Confederate women who wore necklaces made from the teeth of dead Yankee soldiers. It was a war where the Confederate government called for the execution of all black Union soldiers taken prisoner. Like a good soldier who "was just following orders" (pre-echoing the excuse given by Nazi officers at Nuremberg) the future first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, also became one of the first to commit war crimes by massacring hundreds of captured black Union soldiers.
Curiously many historians in the early to mid 20th century tried to obfuscate the facts and taught that the Civil War was not about slavery, but economics, states rights, anything but the true revolutionary paradigm shifter that it was, as did Jefferson Davis. (Side note: Jefferson Davis was the name of Grant’s mule. I don’t think it survived the war either.) But as Lincoln said (he was the Commander in Chief after all) in his message to congress on December 1st, 1862: “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.” (p.305). The Christian passion aroused by the vision of slavery as the essence of sin can be seen in the famous lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” (p.9). Yes, I think it is safe to say that the Civil War was about slavery
David Brion Davis ends his remarkable and remarkably readable book on this note: “It is surely certain-as certain as one can be about any historical events-that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements. We can thus end on a positive note of willed achievement that may have no parallel. It is an achievement, despite its many limitations, that should help inspire some confidence in other movements for social change, for not being condemned to fully accept the world into which we are born. But since we have devoted special attention to the origins and damage of antiblack racism, it is also crucial to add that we still face heavy legacies of historical slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere, as well as in the still devastated continent of Africa.” (p. 331)
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. His books include The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823; Slavery and Human Progress; and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.
I am reading Pulitzer Prize winner David Brion Davis’s book Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. In it he describes slave owners who were professing Christians, but who also beat their human chattel, or had someone else beat them, who were themselves born again or, at least, claimed to be. It gives a new and sinister meaning to being your brother’s keeper. (Memo to Mr. Obama. Being your brother’s keeper was a slave owner’s argument and was literally true in their case). If the slave master was truly born-again, and the slave was also and all those who are in Christ are perfect in Christ in a spiritual sense, then would the slave be justified in using force (even deadly force) in an attempt to emancipate himself? Isn’t he supposed to view his oppressor as perfect in Christ and better than himself? The slave owner was supposed to do the same thing, of course, but obviously defaulted on doing his duty. Would the Christian slave then be justified in killing his owner thus freeing himself and his friends and families? Why was there no black William Wallace and if there was, then why is he not celebrated as a freedom fighter? (Actually, there was, kind of.)
The partial answer is that most slave insurrections were suicidal and most slaves knew it. The British slave revolts were practically bloodless as far as the rebelling slaves were concerned. They were extraordinarily careful in attacking and destroying property only and preserving the lives of their oppressors. Most of these slaves were evangelical Christians. These revolts always fizzled out in the end because the slave owners had the laws and the government and thus the army and the guns on their side and retribution was swift and terrible. The slave insurrectionists may have respected human life, but the so-called enlightened English slave power had no such qualms and slaughtered the rebels with impunity, killing hundreds and hanging more. Their heads were set on stakes along the road as a prophylactic against the infectious idea of freedom. Slavery can only be imposed by force and terror no matter how paternalistic and humane the slave masters think themselves.
Nonetheless, if so-called Christian slave holders were indeed truly born again, then, according to the New Testament, they were perfect in Christ Jesus, but not in their unjust actions and should have been opposed, resisted and overcome even to death. As they were opposed by the British Abolitionists (some of whom did oppose slavery and slave holders to the death; their own, unfortunately, not the slave holders. British abolitionists were pacifists for the most part). But they did sway public opinion so that the British abolished the slave trade and eventually emancipated almost a million slaves in their empire and lost billions if not trillions (in today’s currency) of pounds as a result. In the United States slavery was seen as an economic necessity and was not resolved until the Civil War. It was not until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s that the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights was completely reflected in law.
“The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.” Ecclesiastes 9:3.
This is one of those rare books that I think should be required reading for everybody above the age of fifteen. Practically every page is an eye opener and Mr. Davis’s writing style makes it a page-turner as well. There is not a dull sentence in it.
Mr.Davis ingeniously and masterfully chronicles the cruel history of slavery from ancient times to the present day where classic chattel slavery is still widespread in Saharan nations such as Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Sudan and “sex slavery” is big business around the world.
The nub of the book to me is his treatment of slavery in the United States from colonial America to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. Contrary to popular myth, slavery was seen as essential to the economic growth and prosperity of the nation. It was very profitable. Most slaves were the property of owners of huge plantations. These plantations can be best be compared to the huge agri-businesses of today and the slaves were used in an assembly line fashion doing the work that machines do now.
Only four percent of all the black African slaves shipped to the New World were shipped to North America. In 1808 Christian abolitionists led by William Wilberforce and others like him shamed Britain into outlawing the Atlantic slave trade. The United States followed suit that same year. Finally on August 1, 1834 Britain emancipated close to a million slaves paying twenty million pounds sterling to owners and creditors. Abolitionists “strongly objected to the further provision that forced the ‘freed’ slaves to undergo a period of uncompensated ‘apprenticeship’, which, in effect, gave their former owners…more compensation in the form of unpaid, slavelike labor.” (p.238). But they negotiated it down to only four years unpaid apprenticeship from twelve years.
In 1843 Lord Aberdeen, the Tory foreign secretary, risked damage to the ever fragile relationship with the United States by saying, “Great Britain desires and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” (p.232) By 1843 Britain’s experiment in emancipation was seen by the world and many Britons as being a dismal failure. The compensation to owners for the loss of their "property" and the cost of lost labor (most of the slaves left the cane fields and became subsistence farmers in Jamaica, Barbados etc...and Britain had been the world’s leader in sugar production and took a huge economic hit) as a percentage of GDP means that Britain lost trillions in today’s dollars as result of ending the slave trade and emancipating the largest number of slaves in world history up till Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment.
From the beginning of the founding of this country the idea of freedom as set forth in the Declaration of Independence that “all Men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness-“ was at odds with the obvious contradiction of slavery. Both cannot and could not be true and nobody could really be wholly free while some were wholly slaves.
To make a longer and fascinating story shorter, due to the influence of the first Great Awakening and the Second Great awakening and the further influence of the British Abolitionists and because we started out as a colony of British subjects with the concept of freedom and individual rights that come from God embedded in our political DNA we could not survive as any type of “free” country part free and part slave. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other.” In the rest of the speech he expresses the hope that opponents of slavery would be able to stop its spread, to contain it, and that it would eventually wither on the vine and die a peaceful death.
The peculiar institution did not die an easy death and in its death throes it claimed over 620,000 (estimates vary) Americans lives including that of the Great Emancipator himself. More people died in the Civil War than in all the American wars and conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the Korean War. Eighteen to twenty percent of the white male population of the Confederate States were swallowed up by the first truly modern total war (about the same percentage as German military deaths in WWII). One fifth of Mississippi’s postwar state budget was paid to supply prosthetic limbs to surviving but maimed soldiers. It was a war of deep-seated hatred, symbolized in the extreme by Confederate women who wore necklaces made from the teeth of dead Yankee soldiers. It was a war where the Confederate government called for the execution of all black Union soldiers taken prisoner. Like a good soldier who "was just following orders" (pre-echoing the excuse given by Nazi officers at Nuremberg) the future first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, also became one of the first to commit war crimes by massacring hundreds of captured black Union soldiers.
Curiously many historians in the early to mid 20th century tried to obfuscate the facts and taught that the Civil War was not about slavery, but economics, states rights, anything but the true revolutionary paradigm shifter that it was, as did Jefferson Davis. (Side note: Jefferson Davis was the name of Grant’s mule. I don’t think it survived the war either.) But as Lincoln said (he was the Commander in Chief after all) in his message to congress on December 1st, 1862: “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.” (p.305). The Christian passion aroused by the vision of slavery as the essence of sin can be seen in the famous lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” (p.9). Yes, I think it is safe to say that the Civil War was about slavery
David Brion Davis ends his remarkable and remarkably readable book on this note: “It is surely certain-as certain as one can be about any historical events-that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements. We can thus end on a positive note of willed achievement that may have no parallel. It is an achievement, despite its many limitations, that should help inspire some confidence in other movements for social change, for not being condemned to fully accept the world into which we are born. But since we have devoted special attention to the origins and damage of antiblack racism, it is also crucial to add that we still face heavy legacies of historical slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere, as well as in the still devastated continent of Africa.” (p. 331)
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. His books include The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823; Slavery and Human Progress; and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.
July 13, 2020
July 13, 2020 Second Reading
In this volume, Davis clearly and concisely reviews and explains the developments in historical scholarship pertaining to racial slavery in the new world. Easily accessible for the average reader, this would be a perfect book for a teacher trying to understand the colonial Atlantic world. The author's review of the roots of racial slavery in the first few chapters is one of the most helpful aspects of this book. Davis does not mention this, but I couldn't help but notice how slavery became the backbone to rising globalism in this era.
March 17, 2014 Review
One of the most disturbing elements of early American history is the existence of race based slavery. Even after the American Revolution, and it's resulting explosion of liberty and equality changed the social landscape, the institution prospered. Why is this? Davis does a marvelous job of answering many questions I've had about it's existence and ideology. He discusses the role of slavery in the ancient empires and crusades as well as Aristotle's philosophy of a laboring class, which is important for understanding the later defense of slavery in the antebellum South.
Of special interest was how Christianity dealt with the institution. Christianity's role in slavery (one of the themes of this book) is one of contradictions. On one hand, the Bible taught that all men came from Adam and Eve and were responsible for their sins. Yet others believed that the Africans were cursed to be slaves based upon the dubious (yet popular) interpretation of Noah's curse on Ham. On one hand, Christian theology provided the energy behind the abolition movement, on the other it's defense.
An incredible an important book written by one of the foremost scholars on American slavery. Written for a broad audience, it is not difficult to read, and should be.
In this volume, Davis clearly and concisely reviews and explains the developments in historical scholarship pertaining to racial slavery in the new world. Easily accessible for the average reader, this would be a perfect book for a teacher trying to understand the colonial Atlantic world. The author's review of the roots of racial slavery in the first few chapters is one of the most helpful aspects of this book. Davis does not mention this, but I couldn't help but notice how slavery became the backbone to rising globalism in this era.
March 17, 2014 Review
One of the most disturbing elements of early American history is the existence of race based slavery. Even after the American Revolution, and it's resulting explosion of liberty and equality changed the social landscape, the institution prospered. Why is this? Davis does a marvelous job of answering many questions I've had about it's existence and ideology. He discusses the role of slavery in the ancient empires and crusades as well as Aristotle's philosophy of a laboring class, which is important for understanding the later defense of slavery in the antebellum South.
Of special interest was how Christianity dealt with the institution. Christianity's role in slavery (one of the themes of this book) is one of contradictions. On one hand, the Bible taught that all men came from Adam and Eve and were responsible for their sins. Yet others believed that the Africans were cursed to be slaves based upon the dubious (yet popular) interpretation of Noah's curse on Ham. On one hand, Christian theology provided the energy behind the abolition movement, on the other it's defense.
An incredible an important book written by one of the foremost scholars on American slavery. Written for a broad audience, it is not difficult to read, and should be.
January 20, 2016
This was an interesting book and certainly covered the history of slavery in a way I had never before considered. There are many foot notes, even for a work as detailed as this one.
I didn't find this quick reading - it had a style and pace that required some real focus so it is not a quick and easy read. It also organizes the information a bit differently than you might have expected but it covers the enslavement of Africans for labor in the Western hemisphere very thoroughly.
My rating is as low as it is because I found it hard to stay engaged and to read very much at a time, nor did I have a sense of wanting to get back to it every day. However, it is incredibly informative and makes you realize all over just how different a place the past really was.
I didn't find this quick reading - it had a style and pace that required some real focus so it is not a quick and easy read. It also organizes the information a bit differently than you might have expected but it covers the enslavement of Africans for labor in the Western hemisphere very thoroughly.
My rating is as low as it is because I found it hard to stay engaged and to read very much at a time, nor did I have a sense of wanting to get back to it every day. However, it is incredibly informative and makes you realize all over just how different a place the past really was.
May 2, 2008
David Brion Davis unravels the history of slavery with keen insights that pay special attention to the development of racial, black slavery. He provides a thorough, yet tightly written narrative that presents the background and conditions that allowed slavery to develop into what most people think of when the word “slavery” is used, which is black slavery in the 19th century U.S. South. He then explains how emancipation was achieved throughout the Western Hemisphere, and how the abolitionist and emancipation movements differed. This book is a good starting point for understanding slavery.
September 10, 2023
This is a very interesting and important overview on slavery in the Americas, not only in the United States, but also in the Caribbean and the rest of the hemisphere, with a particular focus on Haiti, Cuba and Brazil. Davis combines a vast library of research and does not hesitate to give other, often younger authors the recognition they deserve. Moreover, Davis makes clear that this is a young history field and that new facts and insights can be expected in the future. The author is not really a story teller, but his book is anything but dry, and Davis keeps a keen eye on the core of his argument, never sinking into too many details, or the trap of wanting to be complete.
What makes 'Inhuman Bondage' particularly interesting is its focus on cultural aspects of both slavery and abolition. Chapters 3 to 5 are comparable to the background chapters of Hannah Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' in this respect. In these chapters Davis convincingly argues that slavery was not always racist, that slave stereotypes are older than racist stereotypes, that racism against black people was non-existent in Europe before the 16th century, and that it is probably imported from the Arab world, that there's a strong connection between Spanish antisemitism from the 15-16th century and racism, and finally, that the bible story of "the curse of Ham" has played an important role in the justification of slavery in the Christian world. He also describes how the European slave trade transformed into a trans-atlantic one, and on page 81 he even lists some arguments that pro-slavery advocates used to propose the bizarre idea that slavery was even beneficial to the enslaved people themselves!
Other interesting factors Davis reveals are the importance of sugar in the rise of slavery (in which he admittedly borrows a lot from the book 'Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History), and how the capitalism around it can be seen as the earliest form of modern consumerism. He also shows that 19th century slavery in the United States was anything but static, and certainly not an economic disaster, as some authors argue, on the contrary. The South certainly had a lot to lose economically in the process of abolition.
The chapters on American politics and the Civil War are harder to read, as they require some knowledge of 19th century American history, but in these Davis convincingly argues that the pro-slavery movement successfully tied anti-abolition to anti-British sentiments, thus blocking any progress in this field in the early 19th century; that the current state of American two-party politics has its roots in slavery (and particularly in the Missouri compromise); and that the civil war was fought over liberation of slaves, contrary to what some people want to believe.
Davis is no optimist, and he paints a bleak picture of racism in the post-slavery American world, but he singles out the abolition and liberation movements of the late 18th and 19th century as real examples of real humanistic and human progress, and he finds hope in the fact that although slavery has never vanished from the world, and although e.g. two world wars have shown that humans can sort to slavery-like cruelty any time, nowadays humankind as a whole has much, much less tolerance towards violence and the idea that people can be regarded and sold as cattle than it had two hundred years ago.
In all, 'Inhuman Bondage' is an important book on an important topic and certainly belongs to the best historical books I've ever read on any topic.
What makes 'Inhuman Bondage' particularly interesting is its focus on cultural aspects of both slavery and abolition. Chapters 3 to 5 are comparable to the background chapters of Hannah Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' in this respect. In these chapters Davis convincingly argues that slavery was not always racist, that slave stereotypes are older than racist stereotypes, that racism against black people was non-existent in Europe before the 16th century, and that it is probably imported from the Arab world, that there's a strong connection between Spanish antisemitism from the 15-16th century and racism, and finally, that the bible story of "the curse of Ham" has played an important role in the justification of slavery in the Christian world. He also describes how the European slave trade transformed into a trans-atlantic one, and on page 81 he even lists some arguments that pro-slavery advocates used to propose the bizarre idea that slavery was even beneficial to the enslaved people themselves!
Other interesting factors Davis reveals are the importance of sugar in the rise of slavery (in which he admittedly borrows a lot from the book 'Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History), and how the capitalism around it can be seen as the earliest form of modern consumerism. He also shows that 19th century slavery in the United States was anything but static, and certainly not an economic disaster, as some authors argue, on the contrary. The South certainly had a lot to lose economically in the process of abolition.
The chapters on American politics and the Civil War are harder to read, as they require some knowledge of 19th century American history, but in these Davis convincingly argues that the pro-slavery movement successfully tied anti-abolition to anti-British sentiments, thus blocking any progress in this field in the early 19th century; that the current state of American two-party politics has its roots in slavery (and particularly in the Missouri compromise); and that the civil war was fought over liberation of slaves, contrary to what some people want to believe.
Davis is no optimist, and he paints a bleak picture of racism in the post-slavery American world, but he singles out the abolition and liberation movements of the late 18th and 19th century as real examples of real humanistic and human progress, and he finds hope in the fact that although slavery has never vanished from the world, and although e.g. two world wars have shown that humans can sort to slavery-like cruelty any time, nowadays humankind as a whole has much, much less tolerance towards violence and the idea that people can be regarded and sold as cattle than it had two hundred years ago.
In all, 'Inhuman Bondage' is an important book on an important topic and certainly belongs to the best historical books I've ever read on any topic.
January 30, 2021
The subtitle--The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World--suggests that the book will offer a comprehensible and linear narrative of the story of slavery in America. Maybe it's because I have so many gaps in my education where slavery is concerned, but I was not able to find the narrative thread I was looking for. The text jumps around from century to century, continent to continent, and historical figure to historical figure way too quickly and way too often for me to come away with a better understanding than I had prior to reading. What's more, the prose is a bit lofty and abstract for the casual reader looking for layman's treatment of the topic.
Consider this passage:
"As spectacular religious revivals established enclaves of piety in the midst of a so-called unregenerate society, the question arose how to translate an individual's momentary repentance and religious commitment into a just and righteous society. While this Second Great Awakening was partially a reaction to the dramatic and unsettling economic and social changes of the 1820s...."
If that passage resonates with you, then read on. Good reading for a college course, perhaps, but not if you're simply looking for the plain telling of the story of slavery in the United States.
(One caveat to this review: I listened to this as an audiobook, so maybe that I wasn't pouring over it with pen and search engine in hand had something to do with its failure to land on me.)
Consider this passage:
"As spectacular religious revivals established enclaves of piety in the midst of a so-called unregenerate society, the question arose how to translate an individual's momentary repentance and religious commitment into a just and righteous society. While this Second Great Awakening was partially a reaction to the dramatic and unsettling economic and social changes of the 1820s...."
If that passage resonates with you, then read on. Good reading for a college course, perhaps, but not if you're simply looking for the plain telling of the story of slavery in the United States.
(One caveat to this review: I listened to this as an audiobook, so maybe that I wasn't pouring over it with pen and search engine in hand had something to do with its failure to land on me.)
July 1, 2025
This is an extraordinary book. It covers the history of slavery I the Western Hemisphere, with that, North America and the Caribbean are emphasized. On the other had, this book does look at slavery globally as North American slavery is put in perspective of the rest of the world.
The book is full of both details and insights. Davis digs into lots of issues that are currently controversial and being debated, such as the worldwide ubiquity of slavery, slavery’s relationship to racism, the profitability of slavery and abolition and plans to set up colonies of freed slaves in various places on Earth, etc. The author does reach conclusions and shares opinions, but he argues his points and usually backs them up with evidence. Davis also sometimes presents counter arguments that he ultimately disagrees with.
This is also very well written. The prose is straightforward and clear. This work always stays interesting.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the subject and anyone interested in modern day issues and controversies related to past slavery.
The book is full of both details and insights. Davis digs into lots of issues that are currently controversial and being debated, such as the worldwide ubiquity of slavery, slavery’s relationship to racism, the profitability of slavery and abolition and plans to set up colonies of freed slaves in various places on Earth, etc. The author does reach conclusions and shares opinions, but he argues his points and usually backs them up with evidence. Davis also sometimes presents counter arguments that he ultimately disagrees with.
This is also very well written. The prose is straightforward and clear. This work always stays interesting.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the subject and anyone interested in modern day issues and controversies related to past slavery.
July 19, 2017
Extremely good read. Taking time to outlining all the different aspects of (In)human bondage, from religious excuse making to the socioeconomic aspects that allowed slavery to thrive as an institution. The sad part is that even today we still see the system perpetuated through the mass incarnation policies in place.
September 29, 2016
Slavery is as old as civilization; it was practiced in ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome. The vast majority of slaves have always been agricultural laborers, but the same was true of the vast majority of all humans prior to 1900. Below the field hands were miners; above them were the house servants, craftsmen, and members of surprisingly high-status occupations. In the antebellum Southern United States, a slave could be the captain of a Mississippi riverboat, paying wages to a mixed-race crew, or a doctor treating upper-class patients; in the Ottoman Empire, a slave could be a counselor of state or a military officer. Yet he was still a slave; on a master's whim he could be stripped of his occupation and transferred to the fields or the mines, sold away from his family, branded, tortured, raped or even murdered, and the slave went through the day with the awareness of this. Davis compares a slave's condition with that of a domesticated animal, which complacently and loyally toils for the benefit of its master, who provides it with fodder.
After the New World was colonized and the native population died off, the colonial powers started importing African slaves to work on plantations, starting around 1500, as Spain and Portugal did in the 1400s in their Atlantic island possessions. Slavery was an absolutely essential part of the economies of several New World societies - Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean islands, Brazil, and the Southern United States. Although the Northern United States did not themselves have plantations, much of their exports went to the sugar and coffee monoculture islands and to the cotton states in the Union. New World slavery was not an archaic but a progressive institution; sugar, cotton and coffee plantations had much more to do with modern American agribusiness than with traditional European agriculture; in their quest for efficiency, owners of slave-labor factories anticipated Taylorism. Although they preferred to be seen as cavaliers, the plantation owners of the Southern United States were nothing if not capitalists. Some Southern intellectuals argued that slavery was a paternalistic institution beneficial to the slaves, who are cared for throughout their lives, unlike the supposedly free Northern workers. The horrible thing was that most slaves would have agreed. Although only about 5% of all African slaves transported across the Atlantic went to North America, the birth rate was so much higher there than in the Caribbean and Brazil and the death rate so much lower that the population multiplied rapidly, to 4 million slaves, most of whom have never known freedom, and a half million free blacks in 1860. There were big slave uprisings in Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados in the early 1800s, and Haiti knew the only successful slave revolution in world history, but not in the Southern United States. Other than an uprising in newly acquired Louisiana in 1811, the only unbetrayed slave revolt in the United States in the 19th century was Nat Turner's 1831 massacre of 57 whites, 2 1/2 times more than the number of whites killed in the much larger uprisings in Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados combined. In 1937, an elderly black man from Mississippi, who was a slave when a child, was interviewed about his life; among other things, he told the interviewer than in 1861 a black man from another plantation went to his folks and agitated them to kill the Old Master and join other slaves in a march on Natchez in advance of the Union armies; they refused: what would they kill the Old Master for?
Although in 1944 a Trinidadian economist claimed that Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1834-1838 for economic reasons, modern scholars have discredited his thesis. The abolition came for moral rather than economic reasons; by liberating slaves, Britain destroyed a profitable part of its economy in an act of "econocide". The abolitionist movement was a forerunner of today's NGOs with subscribers and a paid staff; like them, British abolitionists were criticized for caring about faraway slaves and not nearby workers in the satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. The United States was, and is, both a capitalist country that protects private property and a liberal democracy that guarantees human rights. Slaves were both humans and property. What reconciled their dual status was the deadliest and most destructive war in the history of this country. All nineteenth-century instances of abolition of slavery except one recognized that the slaves were property taken from its owners, who had to be compensated; the one exception was the United States. The total market value of slaves was about 80% of the GDP of the United States, which would be about $10 trillion nowadays. Yet the revolutionary character of the Civil War lay in its recognition that some forms of property are immoral and should be invalidated without compensation.
After the New World was colonized and the native population died off, the colonial powers started importing African slaves to work on plantations, starting around 1500, as Spain and Portugal did in the 1400s in their Atlantic island possessions. Slavery was an absolutely essential part of the economies of several New World societies - Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean islands, Brazil, and the Southern United States. Although the Northern United States did not themselves have plantations, much of their exports went to the sugar and coffee monoculture islands and to the cotton states in the Union. New World slavery was not an archaic but a progressive institution; sugar, cotton and coffee plantations had much more to do with modern American agribusiness than with traditional European agriculture; in their quest for efficiency, owners of slave-labor factories anticipated Taylorism. Although they preferred to be seen as cavaliers, the plantation owners of the Southern United States were nothing if not capitalists. Some Southern intellectuals argued that slavery was a paternalistic institution beneficial to the slaves, who are cared for throughout their lives, unlike the supposedly free Northern workers. The horrible thing was that most slaves would have agreed. Although only about 5% of all African slaves transported across the Atlantic went to North America, the birth rate was so much higher there than in the Caribbean and Brazil and the death rate so much lower that the population multiplied rapidly, to 4 million slaves, most of whom have never known freedom, and a half million free blacks in 1860. There were big slave uprisings in Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados in the early 1800s, and Haiti knew the only successful slave revolution in world history, but not in the Southern United States. Other than an uprising in newly acquired Louisiana in 1811, the only unbetrayed slave revolt in the United States in the 19th century was Nat Turner's 1831 massacre of 57 whites, 2 1/2 times more than the number of whites killed in the much larger uprisings in Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados combined. In 1937, an elderly black man from Mississippi, who was a slave when a child, was interviewed about his life; among other things, he told the interviewer than in 1861 a black man from another plantation went to his folks and agitated them to kill the Old Master and join other slaves in a march on Natchez in advance of the Union armies; they refused: what would they kill the Old Master for?
Although in 1944 a Trinidadian economist claimed that Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1834-1838 for economic reasons, modern scholars have discredited his thesis. The abolition came for moral rather than economic reasons; by liberating slaves, Britain destroyed a profitable part of its economy in an act of "econocide". The abolitionist movement was a forerunner of today's NGOs with subscribers and a paid staff; like them, British abolitionists were criticized for caring about faraway slaves and not nearby workers in the satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. The United States was, and is, both a capitalist country that protects private property and a liberal democracy that guarantees human rights. Slaves were both humans and property. What reconciled their dual status was the deadliest and most destructive war in the history of this country. All nineteenth-century instances of abolition of slavery except one recognized that the slaves were property taken from its owners, who had to be compensated; the one exception was the United States. The total market value of slaves was about 80% of the GDP of the United States, which would be about $10 trillion nowadays. Yet the revolutionary character of the Civil War lay in its recognition that some forms of property are immoral and should be invalidated without compensation.
July 2, 2022
This book represents a provocative read, in which, no doubt, took loads of research, along with plenty of brainstorming, to prioritize what information needed to be included, and what findings could be left out. In addition to learning more about slavery in the United States, I learned more about the British role, and the huge place they played in the rise, and fall of Slavery. Also, I garnered more data on when other countries rose, and later abolished, slavery.
June 25, 2016
"Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World" by David Brion Davis is an excellent overview of Post-Columbian slavery in the Western Hemisphere.
The focus of this book is the slavery of Sub-Saharan Africans (and their descendants) by Europeans (and their descendants) in the Western Hemisphere between 1492 (the year of Columbus' first voyage to the hemisphere) and 1888 (the year Brazil became the last country in the hemisphere to outlaw slavery). Although this is a relatively short book about a massive topic, I think Davis does a good job covering the major aspects.
Early in the book Davis provides a brief overview of slavery in the ancient world and of European slavery prior to 1492. Prior to the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, European slaves were primarily "slavs" taken from the Black Sea region. After 1453's loss of Constantinople, Europeans turned their focus onto Sub-Saharan Africans for slavery. So, as Europeans were "ramping up" their slavery of Sub-Saharan Africans, they were also invading and occupying the lands of the Western Hemisphere.
This book can serve as a good starting point for a reader who wants to delve deeper into some aspect of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Although it has a somewhat dry, academic style, its sentences are densely packed with information. Many times this book caused me to think about other, related questions and further investigations I want to make. There are not many wasted sentences in this book.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about slavery in the Western Hemisphere.
Note: I listened to the unabridged audio book, Release Date: 03-30-2007, Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc., Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins.
The focus of this book is the slavery of Sub-Saharan Africans (and their descendants) by Europeans (and their descendants) in the Western Hemisphere between 1492 (the year of Columbus' first voyage to the hemisphere) and 1888 (the year Brazil became the last country in the hemisphere to outlaw slavery). Although this is a relatively short book about a massive topic, I think Davis does a good job covering the major aspects.
Early in the book Davis provides a brief overview of slavery in the ancient world and of European slavery prior to 1492. Prior to the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, European slaves were primarily "slavs" taken from the Black Sea region. After 1453's loss of Constantinople, Europeans turned their focus onto Sub-Saharan Africans for slavery. So, as Europeans were "ramping up" their slavery of Sub-Saharan Africans, they were also invading and occupying the lands of the Western Hemisphere.
This book can serve as a good starting point for a reader who wants to delve deeper into some aspect of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Although it has a somewhat dry, academic style, its sentences are densely packed with information. Many times this book caused me to think about other, related questions and further investigations I want to make. There are not many wasted sentences in this book.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about slavery in the Western Hemisphere.
Note: I listened to the unabridged audio book, Release Date: 03-30-2007, Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc., Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins.
October 29, 2011
I’m giving this book four stars even though it did not satisfy me in a manner that I usually expect from a history book. I think this book excels in its scope, the entire history of slavery, and quality of research. However, this also makes the book into a textbook. Some historical issues are reduced to just the facts, while others are given detailed analysis. I feel that the author chooses the right issues on which to elaborate. The chapter about the Curse of Ham is incredibly comprehensive, tracing the theory through its various misreadings according to the demands of the day, examining the biblical text in depth, and discussing the concept of race and slavery during the Moorish expansion. The second half of the book is concerned with slavery in the New World, particularly in the Caribbean and southern United States. What I missed was a point of view. I had very little sense of the author’s voice. The author rarely expresses opinions outside of the conventional wisdom, such as disappointment that the most successful slavery uprising ended up becoming the horribly unsuccessful Haiti due to other nations’ failure to develop supportive ties. He does, however, make a few editorial comments on the abolition movements in the U.S. and the U.K., questioning motives and pointing out contradictions. This history is very broad and tends to not focus on individuals. Regardless of these quibbles, I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about the history of slavery or needs a handy reference book. The author collects a wealth of information and does a great service for the interested public. The book has pointed me in a few directions for further study.
September 18, 2011
Probably should give this 5 stars. I'm just stingy. This is an absolutely wonderful book, though of course the subject matter makes it a sober read. I appreciated Davis' treatment of slavery across history and cultures. The book is focused on European and American slavery, though discusses slavery in the Arab world enough to help readers understand its significance.
The discussion of British and American abolition is excellent. Wish there was more analysis of the wider elements of evangelical influence on British abolition. How did a larger effort to spread virtue through tract societies impact abolition's chances? Even so, this isn't so much a complaint as an acknowledgement Davis couldn't fit everything in this volume.
The notes are amazing.
The discussion of British and American abolition is excellent. Wish there was more analysis of the wider elements of evangelical influence on British abolition. How did a larger effort to spread virtue through tract societies impact abolition's chances? Even so, this isn't so much a complaint as an acknowledgement Davis couldn't fit everything in this volume.
The notes are amazing.
January 2, 2020
A very good survey of slavery, and particularly the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in the Caribbean and US slavery. Inevitably, with such a wide topic, it feels a little like "selected essays" from each subject, shining a light on one particular aspect or story, but a worthwhile read. The parts on slave rebellions are particularly memorable, as are some of his comments on the historiographic debates. He particularly runs up multiple times against Eric Williams' thesis that slavery fell because it became unprofitable, and explains why he and many other historians disagree.
Read
January 3, 2012I am not reading this book, I am listening to the Audiable version. I really enjoy listening to good books as I knit/crochet. This one is nice and meaty and I'm only half way through, learned alot already. The most enlightening was how scriptures have been used to support mans cruelty to other men over the ages. Look forward to listening to the rest and may enven invest in a printed copy.
October 2, 2015
This book (or some similarly comprehensive history of slavery) should be required reading to be a member of US society. Davis surveys the slave system in its entirety - its historical origins, ties to the development of racism, its role colonialism and the creation of the global economy. The Western world as we know it is implicated as a whole in this system and its continuing effects on society.
January 31, 2011
Well written history of slavery in the United States and the rest of the Americas. Michelle Bachman could learn something (anything!) from this book.
July 13, 2011
Due to visual problems, I am using Audible books on my Kindle 3 or my I phone! I am loving it.
September 27, 2011
An incredibly insightful, well-written, & well-researched book. I learned way too much to enumerate here.
November 28, 2011
Decided not to finish this one. I've been reading a lot about race relations and the history of slavery, and I need a break from it for now. Very bleak...
February 7, 2016
Plenty of historical and geographical information, but reads like a gargantuan college essay. No blood and guts. I wanted more human situations, less reading a map.
October 22, 2014
David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World traces the development, apex, and collapse of race-based slavery in the Atlantic World. Although Davis treats North American slavery extensively in this volume, he fits the United States South into an Atlantic, if not broadly western, context that stretches back to the legacies of Greco-Roman antiquity. Throughout the volume, Davis rejects economic determinism and subordinates material forces to the conceptual. It was ideas and philosophies about human nature and symbolic associations with “darkness” and evil in Jewish and Christian, European and Middle-Eastern thought that shaped the contours of New World slavery, and subsequent reinterpretations that provoked its rise and fall. For example, abolitionism circulated the Atlantic littoral and mutually reinforced movements in England, the U.S. North, and ratcheted up resistance in the U.S. South. Hence, he argues for the central connection of abolitionist thought to the collapse of trans-Atlantic slavery during the late nineteenth century.
A Professor Emeritus of Yale University, Davis synthesizes three decades of international scholarship on Atlantic World slavery and continues his work on slavery that began with his seminal two-volume Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1966, 1975). Davis organizes the volume into three thematic parts. First, he explores the motley factors emanating from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that predisposed New World slavery to racial systems and brute dehumanization—the root causes being common interpretations of the Biblical “Curse of Ham,” Islamic and Iberian associations of “blackness” with slavery or “other,” and the Aristotelian concept that slaves were “merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner’s physical nature” (p. 33). These long-term intellectual trends in European history coalesced during the sixteenth century to produce a form of chattel slavery inseparable from Africans.
The middle portion of Inhuman Bondage explains why early abolitionism failed to take hold in the eighteenth century United States, and argues that the American and Haitian Revolutions provided important conceptual frameworks for the continuation and retardation of abolition in the New World. Davis’ final portion analyzes intellectual exchanges between British and American abolitionists, asserting that Great Britain’s emancipation of Caribbean slaves reinforced Southern paranoia and obstinacy on slavery, especially given their suspicion that the British had designs for Texas and the western United States. This final section showcases how the American Civil War was inextricable from its Atlantic context.
Throughout, Davis moves fluidly between textured local examples of African-American resistance on the plantation and abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. He captures how slaves, ranging from the illustrious Toussaint L’Oueveture to the nameless contraband that fled the war-torn U.S. South, challenged a system that treated slaves as chattel and extensions of their master’s will. No amount of Biblical justification or legal gymnastics could erase the unconquerable humanity of slaves—the inherent flaw in the system that confounded Aristotle and centuries of secular and Christian philosophers and provided an opening for abolitionists to challenge the moral consensus. British and American abolitionists were motors for change, but their work was also dependent on the individual actions of countless slaves and freed people.
Davis’ assumption that ideas are more powerful than material forces becomes clear, and persuasive, when he interprets the British emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1944, scholars have debated Eric Williams’s thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that poor economic growth, the American Revolution, and the transition from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism prompted emancipation in the British Caribbean. Williams concluded that British emancipation was done out of economic self-preservation, and not concern for human progress. Davis reformulates Williams’ “linkage of capitalism and antislavery,” suggesting that it was the rise of free labor ideology— the “pressing need” to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” that precipitated British emancipation (p. 248). Pragmatic British abolitionists forged a bond between labor, capital, and parliament by connecting emancipation to the rhetoric of free labor. Not only did coerced labor impede competition in a capitalist society, but also the mental and physical images of “seminaked laborers being driven by the whip” on New World plantations reinforced the abolitionist argument that slavery degraded the value of wage labor (p. 248-249). British abolition vindicated the power of social movements to effect social progress, and for nation-states to transcend economic self-interest to ameliorate the conditions of oppressed people.
At times Davis’ commitment to idealism does become muddied, especially when he considers whether race-based slavery arose from conceptual or material origins. When discussing the origins of race-based thought in the Middle East and Europe, Davis offers a materialist argument: “if Jews or Christians had been in the Arabs’ place, actively enslaving, purchasing, and transporting sub-Saharan Africans, they would surely have generated their own justifying ideology” that linked slavery with blackness (p. 69). To the contrary, he emphasizes the primacy of ideology by arguing that Africans came “ready made” to plug into a Euro-Middle Eastern social hierarchy that for centuries associated general stereotypes and degrading symbolism with slaves, enforced chattel slavery with brutal, dehumanizing force, and actively grasped for a “universal” signifier to distinguish slaves from free citizens (p. 53). In the end, this reviewer was left uncertain about whether the “origins of antiblack racism” (p. 48) were rooted in conceptual or material forces—although granted it’s a classic conundrum of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Davis admits in the prologue that Inhuman Bondage originated during a two-week summer seminar for high school teachers, and was subsequently honed through undergraduate lectures (p. 3-4). Because Davis markets the book to the general public and scholars—especially public educators—his prose emulates lecture prose with sometimes jarring pauses to draw comparisons between the past and present. Nevertheless, the end result is a cogently argued, historiographically grounded work on slavery from which lay readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike can glean important insights into the culturally constructed nature of trans-Atlantic slavery.
A Professor Emeritus of Yale University, Davis synthesizes three decades of international scholarship on Atlantic World slavery and continues his work on slavery that began with his seminal two-volume Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1966, 1975). Davis organizes the volume into three thematic parts. First, he explores the motley factors emanating from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that predisposed New World slavery to racial systems and brute dehumanization—the root causes being common interpretations of the Biblical “Curse of Ham,” Islamic and Iberian associations of “blackness” with slavery or “other,” and the Aristotelian concept that slaves were “merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner’s physical nature” (p. 33). These long-term intellectual trends in European history coalesced during the sixteenth century to produce a form of chattel slavery inseparable from Africans.
The middle portion of Inhuman Bondage explains why early abolitionism failed to take hold in the eighteenth century United States, and argues that the American and Haitian Revolutions provided important conceptual frameworks for the continuation and retardation of abolition in the New World. Davis’ final portion analyzes intellectual exchanges between British and American abolitionists, asserting that Great Britain’s emancipation of Caribbean slaves reinforced Southern paranoia and obstinacy on slavery, especially given their suspicion that the British had designs for Texas and the western United States. This final section showcases how the American Civil War was inextricable from its Atlantic context.
Throughout, Davis moves fluidly between textured local examples of African-American resistance on the plantation and abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. He captures how slaves, ranging from the illustrious Toussaint L’Oueveture to the nameless contraband that fled the war-torn U.S. South, challenged a system that treated slaves as chattel and extensions of their master’s will. No amount of Biblical justification or legal gymnastics could erase the unconquerable humanity of slaves—the inherent flaw in the system that confounded Aristotle and centuries of secular and Christian philosophers and provided an opening for abolitionists to challenge the moral consensus. British and American abolitionists were motors for change, but their work was also dependent on the individual actions of countless slaves and freed people.
Davis’ assumption that ideas are more powerful than material forces becomes clear, and persuasive, when he interprets the British emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1944, scholars have debated Eric Williams’s thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that poor economic growth, the American Revolution, and the transition from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism prompted emancipation in the British Caribbean. Williams concluded that British emancipation was done out of economic self-preservation, and not concern for human progress. Davis reformulates Williams’ “linkage of capitalism and antislavery,” suggesting that it was the rise of free labor ideology— the “pressing need” to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” that precipitated British emancipation (p. 248). Pragmatic British abolitionists forged a bond between labor, capital, and parliament by connecting emancipation to the rhetoric of free labor. Not only did coerced labor impede competition in a capitalist society, but also the mental and physical images of “seminaked laborers being driven by the whip” on New World plantations reinforced the abolitionist argument that slavery degraded the value of wage labor (p. 248-249). British abolition vindicated the power of social movements to effect social progress, and for nation-states to transcend economic self-interest to ameliorate the conditions of oppressed people.
At times Davis’ commitment to idealism does become muddied, especially when he considers whether race-based slavery arose from conceptual or material origins. When discussing the origins of race-based thought in the Middle East and Europe, Davis offers a materialist argument: “if Jews or Christians had been in the Arabs’ place, actively enslaving, purchasing, and transporting sub-Saharan Africans, they would surely have generated their own justifying ideology” that linked slavery with blackness (p. 69). To the contrary, he emphasizes the primacy of ideology by arguing that Africans came “ready made” to plug into a Euro-Middle Eastern social hierarchy that for centuries associated general stereotypes and degrading symbolism with slaves, enforced chattel slavery with brutal, dehumanizing force, and actively grasped for a “universal” signifier to distinguish slaves from free citizens (p. 53). In the end, this reviewer was left uncertain about whether the “origins of antiblack racism” (p. 48) were rooted in conceptual or material forces—although granted it’s a classic conundrum of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Davis admits in the prologue that Inhuman Bondage originated during a two-week summer seminar for high school teachers, and was subsequently honed through undergraduate lectures (p. 3-4). Because Davis markets the book to the general public and scholars—especially public educators—his prose emulates lecture prose with sometimes jarring pauses to draw comparisons between the past and present. Nevertheless, the end result is a cogently argued, historiographically grounded work on slavery from which lay readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike can glean important insights into the culturally constructed nature of trans-Atlantic slavery.
December 9, 2021
A very interesting and thoughtful exploration of what the author calls the Atlantic Slave System. It delivers a hemispheric perspective on a brutal economic apparatus that flourished for four centuries and wasn’t extinguished until 1888 in Brazil. The author gives substantial credit to abolitionist movements and less credit to slave resistance, which he deems suicidal. He sees the system’s destruction as a singular moral achievement which teaches us that social movements can succeed.
Many readers will be familiar with the basic contours of slavery and abolitionism in the US. Fewer will go into the book knowing much about New World slavery and abolitionism outside the US. To put things in perspective, a map on page 106 shows that a total of 12.4 million people were deported from Africa. Of these, only 2% were transported to the United States. By contrast, 35% were taken to Brazil, 22% to the Greater Antilles (e.g. Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico) 13% to the Lesser Antilles (e.g. Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados), and 5% to Spanish South America. The map doesn’t account for the arrival of 2.8 million deportees. I assume they died in transit. While the slave population grew rapidly in the US, eventually reaching 4 million, slaves in the rest of the hemisphere had much shorter life spans (due to disease and the exigencies of sugar production) and had to be replaced through continual imports.
The book is loaded with fascinating information about slave revolts, abolitionist movements, the economic and political impacts of slavery, the treatment of slaves, and the ancient foundations of slavery. It greatly expanded my understanding of racial slavery as foundational to the economic development of not just North America, but the European colonial powers, too.
Many readers will be familiar with the basic contours of slavery and abolitionism in the US. Fewer will go into the book knowing much about New World slavery and abolitionism outside the US. To put things in perspective, a map on page 106 shows that a total of 12.4 million people were deported from Africa. Of these, only 2% were transported to the United States. By contrast, 35% were taken to Brazil, 22% to the Greater Antilles (e.g. Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico) 13% to the Lesser Antilles (e.g. Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados), and 5% to Spanish South America. The map doesn’t account for the arrival of 2.8 million deportees. I assume they died in transit. While the slave population grew rapidly in the US, eventually reaching 4 million, slaves in the rest of the hemisphere had much shorter life spans (due to disease and the exigencies of sugar production) and had to be replaced through continual imports.
The book is loaded with fascinating information about slave revolts, abolitionist movements, the economic and political impacts of slavery, the treatment of slaves, and the ancient foundations of slavery. It greatly expanded my understanding of racial slavery as foundational to the economic development of not just North America, but the European colonial powers, too.
January 3, 2019
I am reading about slavery in order to understand how its effects continue to reverberate and shape our national life in the US and our ongoing racial issues today. David Brion Davis is an eminent historian who, over his long career, has won virtually every award available in his field: his look at not only US but more broadly Western Hemisphere slavery is the most comprehensive overview of the subject that I’ve so far read. It encompasses economic and political history and is presented with eloquence and economy, as well as with an almost impossibly broad grasp of the relevant scholarship over many decades. I am by no means a professional historian but still found fascinating the discussion of the shifting controversies among those who are in regard to the Western history of slavery: that is, the book works for a general reader like me even though it is very clearly the product of deep and serious scholarly understanding, developed over decades and expressed in the author’s many, esteemed earlier works. Davis’ discussion of an underlying rationale behind Britain’s abolition of slavery in the 1830s - that a newly important recognition of consumerism as the key basis for economic growth necessitated the ennobling of labor - gave me a new perspective on the development of the labor movement and its relationship to antislavery efforts. The book’s descriptions of attitudes in the American South in the decades leading up to the Civil War made them appear to me consonant with attitudes that continue today among some of our most radical (may I say reactionary?) conservatives, regardless of the section from which they come.
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