Reviews for Survival: black/white

The average rating for Survival: black/white based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-29 00:00:00 Andrew Dobos This seminal work attempted to apply the insights of modern sociology, psychology, and intellectual history to the study of African-American slavery, a field of inquiry which by 1959 had already, according to Elkins, reached a historiographical dead-end. Kenneth Stampp had several years earlier (in THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION) resolved the old argument with U.B. Phillips about whether slavery was a benevolent social institution or an exploitative labor system, but had not suggested new avenues of inquiry for scholars to follow, which Prof. Elkins here proposed to do. First, Elkins recommended comparison of North American slavery with its Latin American counterparts, arguing that North American slavery's origin as a capitalistic institution gave paramount rights to slave owners, and barred slaves from appealing to institutions, like the church or the state, which in Spanish America might protect them from some forms of exploitation. Second, Elkins re-opened the question of why, if North American slavery was so cruel, slave revolts were so uncommon, and suggested that the brutality of capture, the Middle Passage, and plantation discipline, combined with the absolute legal power of the master, resulted in the creation of an infantilized “Sambo” personality similar to those of “German concentration camp” inmates (87). Third, Elkins asked why the United States never developed a powerful abolitionist movement akin to that of Great Britain, and argued that the nineteenth-century U.S. lacked the kind of strong, mutually supporting national institutions – an established church, national universities, a hereditary ruling class – that gave British abolitionists the socio-political infrastructure for their movement. Lacking such a national “cultural matrix” (198), American abolitionists remained atomized, their attacks on slavery limited to peripheral issues like “free soil” or the right to petition, or to small-scale campaigns like colonization. Elkins's book is still quite readable today, thanks to the author's clear writing style and intellectual fearlessness, and while its conclusions now seem dated SLAVERY had quite an impact on the historical profession at the time of publication. In the 1960s and '70s historians applied the term “Elkins thesis” to the author's assertion that slavery essentially destroyed slaves' personalities and turned them into Sambos, and scholars like Stampp, Blasingame, and Genovese crafted learned replies to that controversial second part of Elkins's book, arguing that slaves developed numerous ways to resist the dehumanizing effects of the institution short of armed rebellion. Elkins lost this particular interpretive battle, but clearly succeeded in his larger goal of inspiring debate and stirring up controversy.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-15 00:00:00 Barbara Popke Hopelessly outdated, this book is valuable as a historiographical snapshot of a turbulent time in research on slavery, but it could misinform readers who are not familiar with more recent work. The book has four fairly disconnected sections. The first is a discussion of the historiography of slavery up to the time of publication and does a good job presenting and contrasting Stampp and Phillips. The second part discusses the institutional development of slavery, often contrasting it with Latin America. This section is largely based on Frank Tannenbaum’s work, which has been largely undercut, and it inherits the problems of the source material. Degler’s “Neither Black now White” is better on this comparison. In particular, I think Elkins dramatically overstated the role of the Catholic Church. The third section is the most famous and controversial, the “Sambo thesis.” While provocative, it is not true - Blassingame and Gutman have good work pushing back on this framing. The fourth section discusses the intellectual history of the abolition movement. It is not particularly novel or interesting. Elkins is a great writer, and the book is, along with Stampp’s “Peculiar Institution,” critical for understanding the state of research on slavery between Phillips’ “American Negro Slavery” and Fogel and Engerman’s “Time on the Cross.” However, it should be read more as a historical document, than as a work of history.