Reviews

• How Did We Get Here?

  It is not true to say that almost all premodern societies had slavery. What is true is that premodern societies with slavery were likely to think (and build) on a larger scale (see my review of "The Dawn of Everything" from last year). In fact the end of slavery might be the most important transition that western Europe went through between the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages. Deciding that only one race of men among all are FIT to be slaves, however, is particularly evil and creates enmity between the civilization so deciding and that race of men that can never be fully extinguished. And this is where the New World found itself as a result of Portugal inventing the African slave trade in the 15th century and the Vatican outlawing the making of Indians into slaves in the 16th. Of course you can sort of blame the Vatican for the African slave trade too because of a papal bull about that time laying out what has become known as "The Doctrine of Discovery," that pagans could ALWAYS be enslaved or massacred. Up until the 19th century pagans in Africa and Asia had some ability to resist massacre but Europeans sadly had not learned by that time. . . The immortal David Brion Davis regardless demonstrates that Englishmen in particular were beginning to question slavery on grounds of both religion and the offense the suffering of those subjected to slavery gives to all nobler sentiments by the late 18th century. Indeed, Quakers in British North America seem to have decided their own early prophets against slavery (not the founding generation of that faith, but a couple of guys at the turn of the 18th century) were right as a result of British victory in the French and Indian War, which Quakers opposed as they did all wars. Quakers were probably the biggest anti-slavery force in the British Empire before 1776 but not far behind were the sentimentalists (who evolved into our modern humanists, a movement that takes in both Quakers and my own Unitarian Universalists), who simply held that people shouldn't make each other miserable because life is meant to be lived. If this book has a flaw it is that not enough attention is paid to the development of Western thought on slavery in antiquity and medieval times, but then there were a lot fewer slaves in those days. In fact the number of slaves was decreasing throughout the Middle Ages as reflected by the fact that those societies built much smaller than those before or after. So that is not enough to deduct a star and this book gets the full five.

• An important book that should be considered a classic

  The subject matter of this book is difficult and sometimes quite deep in philosophical and theological concepts. Yet the author writes in a way that very readable without the slightest dumbing down. This is no trivial skill. From the earliest written records in of western culture and earlier still slavery was acknowledged and accepted as a normal part of the social and economic structure. That is a span of around 5,000 years. The first serious but faint questionings began less than 500 years ago. Another 200 years passed before there were any organized political move to abolish slavery. For nearly all human history the was noting peculiar about the “peculiar institution”; few gave it much thought except perhaps how to avoid it for themselves. If you were to take a time machine back to the period just before 1500 and ask and seek to discuss the evils of slavery with an educated European, chances are they wouldn’t understand what you were talking about. You would not understand their lack of understanding. This book explains the acceptance of slavery was a consequence of radically different understandings of nature and society and religion. In short, we and our ancestors of 500+ years back might as well be aliens from different planets. This book, then, is not a history of slavery but a history of how the western world thought about it. I found this a slow read but not from boredom. Rather every few pages I had to stop and try to get my head around the ideas that are under discussion. Ancient philosophy not to mention theology are not really “my thing” so it took some effort. I suggest you read this book with your IPad nearby in order to access the Wikipedia and other sources. The author provides numerous footnotes and citations which temp diversions and excursions. The book ends in the decade just before the American Revolution. Although the author doesn’t say as much, it is fairly obvious that the forces leading to the founding of the abolitionist movement, (the French Enlightenment, the Great Awakening and the outcome of the Seven Years War) were also the forces leading to the outbreak of the American Revolution.

• A Powerful Book

  Even though this is a scholarly book, it is very readable. What I learned about slavery is that the thinking that perpetuated it for many thousands of years is still with us. Slavery flourished long before Classical Greece. Then Aristotle "reasoned" that some people were meant to be slaves. It became the norm in Western Culture. Most people believed this was just the way the world worked. This view was never seriously challenged until the mid eighteenth century. The book taught me that just because something is a tradition, be it religious or otherwise, does not make it right. It also taught me that the we as a culture have not yet overcome slavery.

• one of the full works I would not hesitate to recommend to someone

  The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis, first published in 1967, is a masterpiece; one of the full works I would not hesitate to recommend to someone. A study not only of slavery, but of religion and philosophy.

• Unprecedented ideals

  Wonderfully informative, and seems to be written as intended: to provide a foundation for understanding slavery in the United States. In this book Davis reveals that the modern notion that American slavery was sui generis can only be maintained by an ignorance of history. Because Davis is not just a historian, but a moral philosopher as well, he examines attitudes toward slavery down through history. Though he does not say so, one can conclude that presence of emancipation and equality as widespread social ideals are unprecedented in history. I look forward to reading the next volume in Davis's trilogy on the problem of slavery.

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