Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"A tour de force.... Could not be more welcome....An invaluable guide to explaining what has made slavery's consequences so much a part of contemporary American culture and politics." Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Davis masterfully navigates the long history of slavery from ancient times to its abolition in the 19th century.... Succeeds heroically in wrestling a vast amount of material from diverse cultures. The result is a sinewy book that combines erudition and everyday detail into a gripping, often surprising, narrative." Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal
Review
"...Inhuman Bondage is the glorious culmination of the definitive series of studies on slavery by one of America's greatest living historians." Orlando Patterson, author of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
Synopsis
From preeminent, award-winning historian, this is the definitive history of the rise and fall of the New World slavery for our time.
Synopsis
As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men who lacked better economic options. The economically successful if socially monstrous plantation required racial division to exist, but Trevor Burnard shows here that its success was measured in gold, not skin or blood. In light of the strength and centrality of the plantation system, Burnard builds the case that pre-Revolutionary British America was centered not on the fractious and relatively poor North American colonies but on its booming commercial hub: Jamaica. The British Caribbean was economically successful, and the institutions that developed thereand#151;chief among them the large integrated plantationand#151;did what they were intended to do and more. That these institutions eventually collapsed was not because of their amorality but because of changes in their economic and political contexts.
About the Author
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. Best known for his highly acclaimed books The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Slavery and Human Progress, and most recently, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, Davis has won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, the Albert J. Beveridge Award, and the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement, among other honors.
Table of Contents
Maps A Selective Calendar of Events
Prologue
1. The Amistad Test of Law and Justice
2. The Ancient Foundations of Modern Slavery
3. The Origins of Anti-Black Racism in the New World
4. How Africans Became Integral to New World History
5. The Atlantic Slave System: Brazil and the Caribbean
6. Slavery in Colonial North America
7. The Problem of Slavery in the American Revolution
8. The Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions
9. Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South, I: From Contradiction to Defense
10. Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South, II: From Slaveholder Treatment and the Nature of Labor to Slave Culture, Sex and Religion, and Free Blacks
11. Some Nineteenth-Century Slave Conspiracies and Revolts
12. Explanations of British Abolitionism
13. Abolitionism in America
14. The Politics of Slavery in the United States
15. The Civil War and Slave Emancipation
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index