David Brion Davis (1927–2019)

David Brion Davis’s sprawling tome Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World makes a bold and successful attempt at fulfilling the grandiose intentions of its title. Davis, one of the most well-respected slave historians of the latter half of the twentieth century, adapted this book from a series of lectures given during an “intensive” two week seminar on slavery for high school teachers, but the text clearly benefits from a lifetime of scholarly work in the field show more of slavery. As a wide-ranging book, there is no unifying thesis but instead an important central focus, his “attempt to synthesize and translate the findings of historians and economists regarding American slavery, viewed from a global perspective” (p. 5). The themes that Davis returns to again and again are geared to proving that slavery was the central aspect of the history of the New World, drawing in not just the Americas but countries all along the Atlantic Basin (and, with references to the East, beyond).

Davis’s work is extremely well-researched, resting primarily, but not exclusively, on the voluminous corpus of secondary literature written about Atlantic slavery in particular, and slavery in general from ancient times to the present. Though lacking a bibliography, which would have been helpful, the expansive endnotes occupy ninety pages: citing his numerous sources, offering informational asides, and pointing the reader to a plethora of useful works. Considering the book’s beginnings, as well as its broad scope and its masterful synthesis of a number of historical works, Inhuman Bondage could serve as a textbook for a course on Atlantic slavery. Davis considers slavery from a number of chronological, geographical, and thematic starting points, taking care to never be too parochial in any subject, mindful that slavery was an ever-fluid and evolving institution.

After an explanatory prologue, Inhuman Bondage begins with a chapter on the Amistad case, which serves as a vignette to introduce the international character of the slave trade and its attendant moral conundrums. Davis then turns to analyzing various historical modes of slavery, beginning with the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and working his way to Roman slavery. The point he makes is that slavery in ancient times, which was not based on racial divisions, always “dehumanizes” the slave to a certain extent. Davis notes that Europeans had numerous examples of “inhuman bondage” to draw inspiration from as they encountered Africa and America beginning in the fifteenth century. This chapter segues easily with his third chapter, a discussion of the origins of “antiblack racism” (even before the label “racism” was used). Here Davis draws on numerous sources, ranging from Arab accounts to philosophers like Kant and Voltaire, to illustrate that “black” as a color, and skin color, long had negative connotations in Western society, often associated with inferiority or servitude. Slaves were Otherized and Africans, when they began to be used by Europeans as slaves, were already Other enough to quickly connect the notions of slavery and “blackness.” Davis makes the Curse of Ham (actually Canaan) the most important and enduring tradition used to justify African racial slavery. Building on work by Winthrop Jordan and others, he convincingly argues that neither racism nor slavery “caused” one another, but they grew together.

In Davis’s fourth chapter, “How Africans Became Integral to New World History,” he argues that African slavery is at the core of the New World’s history and can only be ignored when discussing other matters at the historian’s own peril. Black slavery touched every facet of life in the Americas and even served as a catalyst for American (both North and South) stress on liberty. “It was the larger Atlantic Slave System,” Davis writes, “including North America’s trade with the West Indies and the export of Southern rice, tobacco, indigo, and finally cotton, that prepared the way for everything America was to become” (p. 102). For Davis, all aspects of American history are necessarily linked to slavery, from its profitability spurring settlement to its eventual demise which is treated in the latter chapters of the book. His fifth and sixth chapters discuss slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. Throughout these chapters, in his discussion of the institution’s antecedents, rise, flourishing, and demise in these areas, he makes several useful comparisons between regions and times.

The next several chapters discuss slavery in North America, the problem of reconciling the paradox between recognizing slave humanity and slavery itself, and the impact on the institution under the attack of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Tying these revolutions, which struck at the very paradox between liberty and slavery, to his later chapter on nineteenth century slave revolutions was instructive. Slaves heard of these revolutions and imbibed their lessons, even to the point of petitioning for freedom using the natural rights language of white Americans and Frenchmen. Davis writes of a group of New England slaves appealing to “the divine spirit of freedom [that] seems to fire every human breast on the continent” (p. 147). Davis remarks on the various interconnections between these societies, these revolutions and rebellions never occurred in a vacuum, and rebellions like Turner’s and Vessey’s were influenced by the high-minded ideals of the revolutions and rebellions that convulsed slavery.

In a chapter on British abolitionism, Davis takes on the thesis of Eric Williams that capitalism demanded the abolition of slavery because it was feudal and unproductive. Davis points out that slavery was profitable, and England suffered financially from its “great experiment.” Davis does not deny the heartfelt convictions of the British abolitionists, but he points out that there was a concurrent shift in Western views of labor. Physical toil was viewed less as a stigma and as skilled workers and their employers (the capitalists) sought to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” (p. 248). The abolition of British slavery only served to strengthen it in the U.S. South, Brazil, and Cuba, making it all the more profitable (and perhaps miserable) in those regions. Again, this serves to stress the connections between all parts of the Atlantic world.

Inhuman Bondage serves as a primer to American slavery in all of its aspects, beginning with ancient forms of slavery and prejudice, and extending to slavery’s extinction in the Americas. Davis treats the subject in a grand perspective, never slipping into a provincial mode, remembering that Atlantic slavery was a piece of a world system. He also stresses, to magnificent effect, that slavery was a central and formative aspect of life in the Americas, and had a profound impact on the continent’s freedoms and the rise of capitalism, all the while detailing the life and sufferings of the slaves. show less

An important book, even a great one. Anyone with any interest in this subject (and that should include anyone who lives in the United States) should read this book. This book has as its kernel a series of lectures Brion Davis gave to high school teachers, but it is in actuality a synthesis of a lifetime of scholarship and thinking on the subject, and that shows. Although focused on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the new world, its breadth extends from ancient times to today, where show more racism lingers as slavery's ugly child. Writing a book that deals with both the horror of slavery and still remains accurate and authoritative is an achievement in itself. Brion Davis manages to explain what makes slavery so abhorrent, while avoiding sensationalism. That he also manages to demonstrate convincingly the direct link between slavery and racism is even more praiseworthy. show less

A history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, from the African and Mediterranean antecedents, including Biblical arguments, to abolition, including the Haitian revolution (the only successful slave revolt) and the American Civil War. Davis covers a lot of ground, including the fear of slave rebellions in the US and the simultaneous denigration of African-Americans because they didn’t, largely, engage in armed insurrection, thus suggesting to even many antislavery whites that they were show more just not as brave as whites, because those whites couldn’t see the structural barriers in place (slave:free ratios, among other things, were very different in Haiti) or the other accommodations and rebellions in which slaves engaged. He emphasizes that abolition was always, except in the Civil War, accompanied by compensation for slaveowners (not for slaves)—even Haiti ultimately agreed to ruinous compensation for dispossessed owners in order to restore international trade. Meanwhile, the shift from production of valuable sugarcane to the non-money-generating food crops that accompanied the transition to freedom convinced many contemporary whites that freedom had been a disaster in Haiti. The emphasis on the overall Atlantic context was very informative for me. show less

My favorite arguments were near the end--the first a thoughtful analysis on whether Britain's early abolition of the slave trade was an example of a society 'doing the right thing' even if it is against its own best interest, and the second a meditation on Lincoln's radical thought transformation about slavery, which gave me renewed understanding of just how radical the Emancipation Proclamation was. I'm glad to have read this book.