★ 11/18/2013
This magisterial volume concludes (after The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution) Davis’s three-volume study of the intellectual, cultural, and moral realities of slavery in the West since classical times. The dean of slavery historians and Yale emeritus professor, Davis has always seen the problem of slavery as a “problem of moral perception” requiring “disciplined moral reflection.” Concentrating in this book on Britain and the U.S., he takes readers through the Civil War. His focus here is the central importance of the Haitian Revolution, of free blacks throughout the world, and of failed American efforts to colonize freed people in other lands—subjects too little emphasized in earlier histories. Differentiating himself from most other historians of slavery, Davis stresses the profound complexities of slavery’s existence, the unintended consequences of approaches to ending it, and the contingencies that accompanied its end in the U.S. and elsewhere. In stately prose and with unparalleled command of his subject, he offers a profound historical examination of the termination of servitude in the West—a termination that, however, failed to end slavery’s accompanying racism, whose consequences remain with us still. While requiring much of readers, this is a book of surpassing importance. (Feb.)
★ 2013-12-04
A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion. Throughout a lifetime of scholarship devoted to the subject, Davis (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, 2006, etc.) has more than established his bona fides as a leading authority on slavery. Here, he considers the decades between the 1780s and the 1880s and the moral achievement of the eradication of human bondage. He eschews a survey in favor of a "highly selective" study of aspects of the Age of Emancipation, particularly as manifest in Britain and the United States. As a predicate, Davis discusses the dehumanizing of slaves (and the scientific racism that perfected this notion), a sordid piece of work that impeded any thought of immediate emancipation, and the Haitian revolution, an example of self-emancipation that horrified whites and was a source of unending pride and hope to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. The author's treatment of Britain's abolition of the slave trade and its emancipation act and America's grappling with the problem of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War and the 13th Amendment rests on the impeccable scholarship we've come to expect, but the triumph here is the sympathetic imagination he brings to the topic. For example, his thorough and intriguing discussion of the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement, a phenomenon derided by many modern historians, helps us understand how the notion arose, how it attracted right-thinking individuals from Jefferson to Lincoln, and how it became discredited, in no small part due to the efforts of free blacks. In a memorable passage, Davis places himself in the minds of a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North to articulate attitudes and illustrate the tensions, even among allies, in a noble struggle. Deeply researched, ingeniously argued.
Praise for David Brion Davis and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation:
“Less a political historian than a moral philosopher . . . his analysis . . . is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious . . . Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn’t inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past.” —Brenda Wineapple, The New York Times Book Review
“With this book, David Brion Davis brings to a conclusion one of the towering achievements of historical scholarship of the past half-century. . . . Davis is fully aware of the moral ambiguities involved in the crusade against slavery, the process of abolition and the long afterlife of racism. Nonetheless, in a rebuke to those historians today who belittle the entire project of emancipation, he insists that the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was one of the profoundest achievements in human history, ‘a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.’ His monumental three-volume study helps to ensure that it will always be remembered.” —Eric Foner, The Nation
“Davis has spent a lifetime contemplating the worst of humanity and the best of humanity—the terrible cruelty and injustice of slavery, perpetuated over centuries and across borders and oceans, overturned at last because of ideas and ideals given substance through human action and human agency. He concludes his trilogy by contemplating whether the abolition of slavery might serve as precedent or model for other acts of moral grandeur. His optimism is guarded. ‘Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate.’ Davis does, after all, describe the narrative of emancipation to which he has devoted his professional life as ‘astonishing.’ But even in his amazement, he has written an inspiring story of possibility. ‘An astonishing historical achievement really matters.’ And so does its history.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, The New York Review of Books
“In the years since The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Mr. Davis has published nine books, including Inhuman Bondage (2006), a synthesis of the rise and fall of New World slavery. . . . His former students can be found at virtually every major research institution in America, in disciplines ranging from law and literature to history, political science and public health. Now, almost 50 years after the first volume appeared, Mr. Davis concludes his trilogy with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. A brilliant capstone, the book extends Mr. Davis’s story still further—to encompass the growing anti-slavery agitation in 19th-century America and the efforts of free blacks to urge forward the cause of abolition and equality even as the forces of reaction sought to protect the status quo. Like its predecessors, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is deeply researched and possesses great narrative power.” —John Stauffer, Wall Street Journal
“Davis’s slavery investigation grows from a question: Why, at a certain moment in time, did people begin to recognize a great moral evil to which they had been blind for millennia? To understand the antislavery story, Davis traces a confluence of forces: religious dissent, coming especially with the Quakers; a shift in economic relations, with the Industrial Revolution; political revolutions, which rearticulated the meaning of freedom. In a discipline often constrained by geography and epoch, Davis’s books cross both. . . A feat of intellectual tenacity. . . a book that feels more personal and essayistic than its predecessors.” —Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“This book is the capstone of a remarkable scholarly project, the fruit of an equally remarkable career. . . . David Brion Davis has taught his readers to see how rich, perplexing, and morally challenging the historical study of slavery ought to be. His work and that of the scholars whom he has inspired to take up the subject have transformed the understanding of slavery and the desperate effort of men and women spanning over a century to do away with slavery and to vindicate the humanity of those who were enslaved.” —R. B. Bernstein, Law and History Review
“Remarkable erudition . . . the continuing engagement with Davis’s most important insight—that the emergence of an abolitionist movement in the 18th century amounted to one of the most astonishing moral transformations in human history. . . . Rather than drift with the scholarly tide, he swam against it. . . . Unfailingly subtle and insightful . . . The shimmering achievement of Davis’s great trilogy.” —James Oakes, The Washington Post
“Nowhere are Davis’s gifts as an intellectual historian better displayed . . . Davis's body of work has shown repeatedly that ideas and individuals matter in the struggle to transform morals. . . a timely reminder that the legacies of slavery require ongoing discussion and engagement.” —Louis P. Masur, The American Scholar
"Davis's work will continue to resonate with an audience far beyond his field.” —Scott Spillman, The Point Magazine
“Beginning with understandings of what it meant to be human in light of a developing culture of dehumanization, with its principals and practices of treating slaves as though they were domesticated animals, Davis unravels the moral and physical struggle—the debates, the rebellions, the wars—that produced what he considers ‘probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history’ . . . Another must read from Davis for any generally informed reader interested in the development of the modern Atlantic world or of the Western concept of humanity. Serious students will necessarily pore over this volume for decades to come.” —Library Journal
“Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, explores the underappreciated role of former slaves in the push for abolition and the influence of religion in the debate about the morality of enslavement. This is a well-researched and broad historical and global analysis of the complex motives and actions on all fronts, highlighting the transcontinental tension between efforts by white society to dehumanize and the fight by freedmen and slaves for freedom, full humanity, and citizenship.” —Booklist (starred)
“A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion . . . the triumph here is the sympathetic imagination he brings to the topic. . . . Deeply researched, ingeniously argued.” —Kirkus Review
“This magisterial volume concludes. . . . Davis’s three-volume study of the intellectual, cultural, and moral realities of slavery in the West since classical times. . . . In stately prose and with unparalleled command of his subject, he offers a profound historical examination of the termination of servitude in the West . . . this is a book of surpassing importance.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Concluding his magisterial trilogy on slavery, David Brion Davis discovers, questions, and provokes, with the philosophical as well as historical acuity that has made him one of America’s few truly great historians.” —Sean Wilentz
“David Brion Davis has completed his distinguished trilogy on the problem of slavery in Western culture with a powerful and provocative analysis of the process of emancipation in societies as dissimilar as Haiti, the British West Indies, and the United States. His chapters on colonization projects and on the Anglo-American antislavery movements are full of fresh insights and richly textured interpretations.” —James M. McPherson
“This third and concluding volume on slavery and abolition continues the monumental work of scholarship that Davis began more than one-half century ago. As always, the author’s interpretations of the historical events and his insights into them are superb and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is truly pathbreaking in its extensive discussions of the important role played by free blacks and by slaves.” —Stanley L. Engerman
“No scholar has played a larger role in expanding contemporary understanding of how slavery shaped the history of the United States, the Americas and the world than David Brion Davis.” —Ira Berlin
★ 02/15/2014
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Davis (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale Univ.) here completes his trilogy begun with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975). Intellectual history again marks Davis's focus on the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s that saw the outlawing of slavery in the Americas from Canada and New England to Chile and Brazil. Beginning with understandings of what it meant to be human in light of a developing culture of dehumanization, with its principles and practices of treating slaves as though they were domesticated animals, Davis unravels the moral and physical struggle—the debates, the rebellions, the wars—that produced what he considers "probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history." Free blacks were key in that progress, he argues, as he shows how slavery, because it was never destined to die a natural death, had to be forcibly extinguished by the pressure of a fundamental change in Western moral perception. VERDICT Another must read from Davis for any generally informed reader interested in the development of the modern Atlantic world or of the Western concept of humanity. Serious students will necessarily pore over this volume for decades to come. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/13.]—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
