David Brion DavisRecensioni

Great overview of US history.

This was a good read. I can’t really say that it was “fun” due to it’s topic, but it was certainly interesting. Davis brought up points in the book that I hadn’t thought of, although I don’t necessarily agree with each major point he made. Although all of the points he made were valid, backed up, and understandable. I do recommend this as a read, but my copy is another dated publication, and it may be hard to get your hands on it.

Hardback, First, 1998

Essential Reading

If you want to know the history of chattel slavery, and its eventual destruction in the Caribbean and the US, Inhuman Bondage is the book for you. Insightful, detailed, and comprehensive, the book covers slavery from ancient times, to its focus on Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, through its destruction in the British Empire and the US, with brief coverage of the end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil.

A great work of history. My real takeaway from this book is that African Americans shaped the abolitionist movement. It interacted very well with Simon Schma's Rough Crossings and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I read around the same time.

5303. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, by David Brion Davis (read 16 Aug 2015) (National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction award for 2014) This is the third book of the author's trilogy on slavery's history leading to emancipation. I read the first volume of that trilogy, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, on 5 April 2001, because it won the Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in 1967. I have never read the second volume but this volume, entitled The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, won the National Book Critics Circle prize in 2014 and so I read it. It is only the 14th such winner I've read (out of 39 winners), The author spends a lot of time discussing the question of what shoudl be the situation if the slaves in the U.S. were free, with some who were against slavery saying the freed should be sent to Africa--the racist mindset of such colonists being clear taht they did not wan the freed slaves in this countrty even though though they were born here. While some were sent to Liberia that was never the preference of the slaves themselves and gradually the abolitionists came to see that colonization was the preference of the racist-mined. The closing chapters of the book were of greater interest to me, since they culminate of course in emancipation--which the author says would not have happened without war because slavery was profitable for the slaveholders. This is a carefully-researched book full of evidence of the results of long years of study.

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.

My reactions to reading this book in 1992.

This book had a little bit to say of value about the so-called “paranoid style in American politics.” Davis makes the valid point that images of the conspiratorial enemy and its methods tend to stay the same no matter the identity of that alleged enemy. I’m not sure that really proves anything more than that people know (or at least it seems rational to them) what methods of subversion a real conspiracy (and several have been brought to light throughout history) would probably use.

His other point, also stated by Richard Hofstader, is that conspiracy mongering is not an activity undertaken by the stupid, unlearned, or ignorant. Often the conspiracy mongerer has done a great deal of research, knows his stuff, collected an impressive array of facts (even if he manufactures the occasional one or ignores facts that mitigate his contradict his conclusion). Consistently through these selections, the alleger of conspiracy sees the mainstream (usually the two major political parties of the time) as either part of the conspiracy or unknowing dupes. And constantly, as Davis points out, the cry to fight the conspiracy is linked to a admonishment to reform, to renew the spirit of the country. However, there are several excerpts in here which really are cries against conspiracy but warnings of the consequences of certain beliefs.

The conspiracy mongerers here show the typical shortcomings of the type: the presumed ultra-competence of the conspiracy. A particularly strking example is the American Protective League. About the time they were zealously and futiley looking for Communist agents, the Soviets set up a real, subtle, and effective spy network in America. The grand conspiracy didn’t exist. The subtle, small staffed one did. Another shortcoming is confusing members of a formal conspiracy with people and simply sharing a similar idealogy. One could define some ideologies as self-organizing conspiracies. Followers of the idealogy don’t necessarily have to phone and write each other to achieve their ends. Working independently towards the same end could – though probably less efficiently – acheive the goal. Another bit of flawed thinking is the temptation to see the grand conspiracy spanning large chunks of time and space.

One can see why some of those conspiracies were alleged. The Masons do seem to have killed some people in New York state. The Mormons did massacre a wagon train. The Wobblies did collaborate with foreign powers in WWI. One can see why Davis throws anti-commnism in the same heap (especially given the seventies publication date, the beginning of détente). Joseph McCarthy bizarrely accusses George Marshall of being a Communist agent. Revilo P. Oliver even more bizarrely says John F. Kennedy (the man who accussed Richard Nixon of being soft on the missile gap with the Commies) was murdered because he wasn't making American Communist fast enough. Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, takes the classic conspiracy mongerer approach of linking similar ideas into a vast, continuous conspiracy over millenea when he traces a conspiracy from the collectivist, homosexual Spartans to the Bavarian illuminati to the Communist party.

Yet Davis, and others who mock the anti-communists, miss some crucial facts. Stalin’s Comintern did run foreign communist parties. The American Communist Party did get money from Moscow. There were communist agents in the State Department. The American Communist Party did ally itself with the civil rights movement as J. Edgar Hoover stated and Angela Davis was a communist and was only recently kicked out of the American Communist Party. Yet, the issue of civil rights and Communist conspiracy brings up a couple of subtle points missed by the conspiracy mongerers and their opponents. Those who dismiss allegations of conspiracy sometimes miss the point that a foreign idealogy or power may support a movement just to cause trouble or embarrassment. Indeed, as Robert Conquest pointed out, terrorists and agitators supported by Moscow often were the first to be killed and/or imprisoned when the Commies took over ther countries. Conspiracy mongerers miss this same point and one other: that people involved in a movement, believers in an idealogy may not subscribe to the same suite of ideas (e.g. American, anti-Communist liberals supported the civil rights like communists), guilt can not determined just by association. I liked reading about he allegations of Money Power conspiracies, the Slave Power plot (which fueled by the fact that Southern plantations did try to suppress anti-slavery speech in the South and economically took advantage of the poor whites), the Mormon scare, and the insinuation, even in 1964, that Lyndon Baines Johnson had Kennedy killed (he’s not specifically named, just a cabal of rich oil men.). Charles Beard’s attack on the usurpation by Franklin Roosevelt of several extra-constitutional powers is another example of assertions and arguments that are not really conspiracy-mongering.

This book is better as a history in its own words source rather than a editorial argument about conspiracies.

A great work of history and essential to anyone wishing to understand slavery in the New World and its effects on world history.

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 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.

This is a great collection of primary sources providing perspectives from both agenda setters and everyday folk. I'd recommend it highly to teachers of US History or American Literature.½

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 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.½

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 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.½

3428. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, by David Brion Davis (read Apr 5, 2001) This won the 1967 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction and I picked it up for a quarter or less and thought I should read it. Of the 40 winners up to Apr 5, 2001, I have now read 16 . I did not get enthused by this book, which spends much time grubbing thru pre-1776 writing.