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.
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