The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

Starred review from November 18, 2013
This magisterial volume concludes (after The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution) Davis’s three-volume study of the intellectual, cultural, and moral realities of slavery in the West since classical times. The dean of slavery historians and Yale emeritus professor, Davis has always seen the problem of slavery as a “problem of moral perception” requiring “disciplined moral reflection.” Concentrating in this book on Britain and the U.S., he takes readers through the Civil War. His focus here is the central importance of the Haitian Revolution, of free blacks throughout the world, and of failed American efforts to colonize freed people in other lands—subjects too little emphasized in earlier histories. Differentiating himself from most other historians of slavery, Davis stresses the profound complexities of slavery’s existence, the unintended consequences of approaches to ending it, and the contingencies that accompanied its end in the U.S. and elsewhere. In stately prose and with unparalleled command of his subject, he offers a profound historical examination of the termination of servitude in the West—a termination that, however, failed to end slavery’s accompanying racism, whose consequences remain with us still. While requiring much of readers, this is a book of surpassing importance.

Starred review from December 15, 2013
A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion. Throughout a lifetime of scholarship devoted to the subject, Davis (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, 2006, etc.) has more than established his bona fides as a leading authority on slavery. Here, he considers the decades between the 1780s and the 1880s and the moral achievement of the eradication of human bondage. He eschews a survey in favor of a "highly selective" study of aspects of the Age of Emancipation, particularly as manifest in Britain and the United States. As a predicate, Davis discusses the dehumanizing of slaves (and the scientific racism that perfected this notion), a sordid piece of work that impeded any thought of immediate emancipation, and the Haitian revolution, an example of self-emancipation that horrified whites and was a source of unending pride and hope to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. The author's treatment of Britain's abolition of the slave trade and its emancipation act and America's grappling with the problem of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War and the 13th Amendment rests on the impeccable scholarship we've come to expect, but the triumph here is the sympathetic imagination he brings to the topic. For example, his thorough and intriguing discussion of the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement, a phenomenon derided by many modern historians, helps us understand how the notion arose, how it attracted right-thinking individuals from Jefferson to Lincoln, and how it became discredited, in no small part due to the efforts of free blacks. In a memorable passage, Davis places himself in the minds of a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North to articulate attitudes and illustrate the tensions, even among allies, in a noble struggle. Deeply researched, ingeniously argued.

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Starred review from December 1, 2013
The dehumanizing of enslaved Africans is the problem of slavery on which Davis focuses in the conclusion of his trilogy on slavery in Western culture, analyzing the psychology and immorality of slavery from antiquity to modern times. Davis explores the period from the Haitian Revolution, when enslaved Africans liberated themselves (triumphing over the mighty British and French militaries), to the Thirteenth Amendment and the end of American slavery, if not American racism. Haiti's slave rebellion inspired American freedmen and slaves and horrified whites with the prospect of a population determined to be free and possibly vengeful for their dehumanization. In between, the abolition movements in the U.S. and elsewhere challenged the very concept of slavery in free and democratic societies even as the growth of scientific racism and the colonization movement highlighted the complexity of liberating a people not exactly welcome as free on American shores. Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, explores the underappreciated role of former slaves in the push for abolition and the influence of religion in the debate about the morality of enslavement. This is a well-researched and broad historical and global analysis of the complex motives and actions on all fronts, highlighting the transcontinental tension between efforts by white society to dehumanize and the fight by freedmen and slaves for freedom, full humanity, and citizenship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2013

Here is the final volume in a grand, groundbreaking trilogy by Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, on the history of slavery in Western culture. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture won the Pulitzer Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award, while The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution won the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize.

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Starred review from February 15, 2014

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Davis (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale Univ.) here completes his trilogy begun with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975). Intellectual history again marks Davis's focus on the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s that saw the outlawing of slavery in the Americas from Canada and New England to Chile and Brazil. Beginning with understandings of what it meant to be human in light of a developing culture of dehumanization, with its principles and practices of treating slaves as though they were domesticated animals, Davis unravels the moral and physical struggle--the debates, the rebellions, the wars--that produced what he considers "probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history." Free blacks were key in that progress, he argues, as he shows how slavery, because it was never destined to die a natural death, had to be forcibly extinguished by the pressure of a fundamental change in Western moral perception. VERDICT Another must read from Davis for any generally informed reader interested in the development of the modern Atlantic world or of the Western concept of humanity. Serious students will necessarily pore over this volume for decades to come. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/13.]--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Davis (Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale Univ.) here completes his trilogy begun with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975). Intellectual history again marks Davis's focus on the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s that saw the outlawing of slavery in the Americas from Canada and New England to Chile and Brazil. Beginning with understandings of what it meant to be human in light of a developing culture of dehumanization, with its principles and practices of treating slaves as though they were domesticated animals, Davis unravels the moral and physical struggle--the debates, the rebellions, the wars--that produced what he considers "probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history." Free blacks were key in that progress, he argues, as he shows how slavery, because it was never destined to die a natural death, had to be forcibly extinguished by the pressure of a fundamental change in Western moral perception. VERDICT Another must read from Davis for any generally informed reader interested in the development of the modern Atlantic world or of the Western concept of humanity. Serious students will necessarily pore over this volume for decades to come. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/13.]--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.