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

The average rating for Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-15 00:00:00 Laurie Schlichter What people like to do is justify their terrible atrocities and try to sleep at night, and they can be quite successful at this. European Christians busily enslaving Africans liked to quote the Curse of Ham from Genesis 9:18-27. This is a weird story about Noah and his sons after the flood. Noah got drunk "and uncovered himself within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside". Shem and Japheth took up a cloth and walked backwards (!) into the tent and covered up Noah's nakedness without looking at him. Now, for this crime Noah issued the following statement : Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers Over the centuries there was a blurring of meanings and Ham and his son were mysteriously associated with blackness (no mention of that in the Bible) and the story was cited a million times to give Biblical authority for the slave trade. Likewise when the idea of abolition of slavery was raised in the USA the slavers never tired of saying what great lives the slaves had down on the plantation and how they would have a terrible time if they were free, nowhere to go and no one to look after them. (No one to whip them and sell their children either, but they didn't mention that.) (Before that Southern slave owners used to like to say that slave owning was a great burden inherited from Britain and entirely not their fault.) Interesting fact : Slaveholding Southern presidents governed the nation for roughly fifty of the seventy-two years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In this sorry story of slavery in America there are a few inspiring moments, and one of them is the unlikely story of the British abolition of the slave trade. After being the principal organisers and profiteers from African slavery for a couple of centuries, within a few decades (1780 to 1820) the British made a complete U turn and abolished the whole thing and spent a considerable amount of money and resources making sure nobody else could carry on slave trading. Many cynical historians then wrote that it wasn't anything to do with a sudden onrush of altruism but just a way of ensuring existing West Indian economies were protected, but DBD carefully dismantles these arguments and says no, it was entirely altruistic, and you can see how the West Indian colonies suffered as a direct result. And plus, the British freed all their slaves too. One excellent section in this jam-packed book deals with the way racism and slavery has been remembered in the USA since the Civil War. Or should we say, how it's been airbrushed away. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and this pride in knowing where and when general Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia. As the early 20th century progressed, the Civil War came to resemble in many minds the nation's greatest athletic contest, a kind of mid-nineteenth century Super Bowl between all-American heroes. Professor Davis takes on a huge subject here, and deals with its dizzying complications and entanglements as well as anyone could, I think. There is a lot of detail here, at times a bit too much for my poor brain. But still, highly recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-27 00:00:00 James Peterson NEW WORLD SLAVERY Describing the rise and fall of slavery in the New World in a mere 320 pages is a demanding project for a historian, and one that David Brion Davis largely (with a few caveats) accomplishes with no small amount of skill in his book "Inhuman Bondage". The books begins with the Amistad case from the late 1830's which is somewhat at odds with the Spielberg version, though far more interesting and revealing for being so. Davis then makes room to contemplate the roots of slavery in the Near East, the Greek and Roman Empires, and on through history until it erupted into the New World with the "discoveries" of the late fifteenth century. This, for me, was the highlight of the book, and also includes reflections on the interaction between slavery and racism (and the accompanying arguments between cause and effect) as well as examining the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Ancient World and Enlightenment views of race and slavery. As regards the main subject of the book, slavery in the New World, Davis focuses on the North American experience, followed by that of the Caribbean, with Brazilian slavery in the rear. Spanish slavery, except in so far as it applied to the Caribbean, is largely absent. Other subjects that receive attention are Slave revolts in the various colonies, the role of the Haitian revolt in the demise of Slavery, British and other European emancipation, the debates about the role slavery played in the industrial revolution, the American Civil War and emancipation, as well as the astonishing case of the Brazilian slave revolt that brought about emancipation in that country, the last in the Western hemisphere to do so. Paradoxically the actual day-to-day realities of the slaves and slavery remain relatively untouched by the text. I didn't agree with all of Davis's analysis, but to his credit he makes the reader aware of other historical views even if his dismissal of the connections between slavery and industrialisation is more than a little heavy handed. The book only truly irked with regard to Davis's opinion on the Turner rebellion; his remark that the massacres of whites was brutal and counterproductive is reasonable, but to then go on an claim that this was little different psychologically from the mental state that leads to the genocide of Jews, is to put it politely, a grotesque overstatement. For a start the Nazis were not treated by the Jewish people in the way that White Americans treated Black slaves. If Davis himself applied this assertion systematically his account of the Haitian revolt would have been very different, and less enlightening for that. He certainly doesn't apply it to the putting down of Slave revolts, including those in the British Caribbean where hundreds of blacks died, many cold bloodedly executed in response to wide spread insurrections that resulted in less than a handful of white deaths. In short, "Inhuman Bondage" is a thoroughly interesting exploration of New World slavery. As a book its fascinating and enlightened scholarship easily out-weigh its occasional defects. The accounts of the roots of slavery in the old world are easily, and somewhat perversely given the books title, the highlight of the book. Readers interested in reading further into the subject can do no worse than Robin Blackburn's dense but comprehensive "The Making of New World Slavery"; for the Haitian revolt C.L.R. James "The Black Jacobins" is still a remarkable account; those interested in the experience of the North American mainland will find that Peter Kolchin's "American Slavery (1619-1877)" will supply the details that are largely absent from Davis's account, and Eric Foner's "Reconstruction" is an immensely detailed account of the post-emancipation experience of American blacks.