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. ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2015-04.html#dbd ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )