Inhuman Bondage : The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World traces the development, apex, and collapse of race-based slavery in the Atlantic World. Although Davis treats North American slavery extensively in this volume, he fits the United States South into an Atlantic, if not broadly western, context that stretches back to the legacies of Greco-Roman antiquity. Throughout the volume, Davis rejects economic determinism and subordinates material forces to the conceptual. It was ideas and philosophies about human nature and symbolic associations with “darkness” and evil in Jewish and Christian, European and Middle-Eastern thought that shaped the contours of New World slavery, and subsequent reinterpretations that provoked its rise and fall. For example, abolitionism circulated the Atlantic littoral and mutually reinforced movements in England, the U.S. North, and ratcheted up resistance in the U.S. South. Hence, he argues for the central connection of abolitionist thought to the collapse of trans-Atlantic slavery during the late nineteenth century.
A Professor Emeritus of Yale University, Davis synthesizes three decades of international scholarship on Atlantic World slavery and continues his work on slavery that began with his seminal two-volume Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1966, 1975). Davis organizes the volume into three thematic parts. First, he explores the motley factors emanating from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that predisposed New World slavery to racial systems and brute dehumanization—the root causes being common interpretations of the Biblical “Curse of Ham,” Islamic and Iberian associations of “blackness” with slavery or “other,” and the Aristotelian concept that slaves were “merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner’s physical nature” (p. 33). These long-term intellectual trends in European history coalesced during the sixteenth century to produce a form of chattel slavery inseparable from Africans.
The middle portion of Inhuman Bondage explains why early abolitionism failed to take hold in the eighteenth century United States, and argues that the American and Haitian Revolutions provided important conceptual frameworks for the continuation and retardation of abolition in the New World. Davis’ final portion analyzes intellectual exchanges between British and American abolitionists, asserting that Great Britain’s emancipation of Caribbean slaves reinforced Southern paranoia and obstinacy on slavery, especially given their suspicion that the British had designs for Texas and the western United States. This final section showcases how the American Civil War was inextricable from its Atlantic context.
Throughout, Davis moves fluidly between textured local examples of African-American resistance on the plantation and abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. He captures how slaves, ranging from the illustrious Toussaint L’Oueveture to the nameless contraband that fled the war-torn U.S. South, challenged a system that treated slaves as chattel and extensions of their master’s will. No amount of Biblical justification or legal gymnastics could erase the unconquerable humanity of slaves—the inherent flaw in the system that confounded Aristotle and centuries of secular and Christian philosophers and provided an opening for abolitionists to challenge the moral consensus. British and American abolitionists were motors for change, but their work was also dependent on the individual actions of countless slaves and freed people.
Davis’ assumption that ideas are more powerful than material forces becomes clear, and persuasive, when he interprets the British emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1944, scholars have debated Eric Williams’s thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that poor economic growth, the American Revolution, and the transition from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism prompted emancipation in the British Caribbean. Williams concluded that British emancipation was done out of economic self-preservation, and not concern for human progress. Davis reformulates Williams’ “linkage of capitalism and antislavery,” suggesting that it was the rise of free labor ideology— the “pressing need” to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” that precipitated British emancipation (p. 248). Pragmatic British abolitionists forged a bond between labor, capital, and parliament by connecting emancipation to the rhetoric of free labor. Not only did coerced labor impede competition in a capitalist society, but also the mental and physical images of “seminaked laborers being driven by the whip” on New World plantations reinforced the abolitionist argument that slavery degraded the value of wage labor (p. 248-249). British abolition vindicated the power of social movements to effect social progress, and for nation-states to transcend economic self-interest to ameliorate the conditions of oppressed people.
At times Davis’ commitment to idealism does become muddied, especially when he considers whether race-based slavery arose from conceptual or material origins. When discussing the origins of race-based thought in the Middle East and Europe, Davis offers a materialist argument: “if Jews or Christians had been in the Arabs’ place, actively enslaving, purchasing, and transporting sub-Saharan Africans, they would surely have generated their own justifying ideology” that linked slavery with blackness (p. 69). To the contrary, he emphasizes the primacy of ideology by arguing that Africans came “ready made” to plug into a Euro-Middle Eastern social hierarchy that for centuries associated general stereotypes and degrading symbolism with slaves, enforced chattel slavery with brutal, dehumanizing force, and actively grasped for a “universal” signifier to distinguish slaves from free citizens (p. 53). In the end, this reviewer was left uncertain about whether the “origins of antiblack racism” (p. 48) were rooted in conceptual or material forces—although granted it’s a classic conundrum of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Davis admits in the prologue that Inhuman Bondage originated during a two-week summer seminar for high school teachers, and was subsequently honed through undergraduate lectures (p. 3-4). Because Davis markets the book to the general public and scholars—especially public educators—his prose emulates lecture prose with sometimes jarring pauses to draw comparisons between the past and present. Nevertheless, the end result is a cogently argued, historiographically grounded work on slavery from which lay readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike can glean important insights into the culturally constructed nature of trans-Atlantic slavery.