On Inhuman Bondage

This is the gold standard for historical writing on slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1800. While the book theoretically ends with 1888—the abolition of slavery in Brazil—the period after 1800 is almost entirely about the United States, with only a short epilogue given to the case of Cuba and Brazil.

The book starts with what we might call the “pre-history” of slavery, with some basic historical points as slavery as a human institution—anecdotes about Babylon, pre-Columbian Brazil, Rome, and the Arab slave trade before diving in to the foundations of slavery in the Americas, its development, and eventual collapse in the North Atlantic. The main takeaway from the early chapters is that slavery in the Americas (not only the United States) was a uniquely brutal institution—while no words would be enough to criticize how dehumanizing earlier forms of slavery were, they still did not reach that scale of New World slavery.

The middle chapters take a nearly comparative look at the institution of black, racial slavery and its effects on the Atlantic economy. I found this interesting, because it problematizes some of the other works that I find so significant. For instance, Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom and T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes’s Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 both point to Bacon’s Rebellion as the starting point of racial slavery in the United States, and Davis makes the point that they’re right that black people in North America were indeed treated as equal subjects of the British crown, but the racialization of slavery was not exclusive to North America, and different factors must be understood in order to account for these disparities. These factors include:

• Support for slavery in Christian and classical literature

• The preference for black slaves by medieval Arabs, who found Africans to be “suited for the most degrading forms of work”

• Racial interpretations of the “Curse of Ham,” which was transmitted by Moors in Iberia to Christians there (often associated with Jews but also Africans)

• Extension of the classical European “great chain of being” to “races” of humans as well as the rest of the natural world.

The remainder of the book reads like many other studies of African slavery in the United States, of which I tend to favor Ira Berlin’s work (as he shows slavery in motion), see Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

The greatest strength of this book is contextualizing the history of North American framework, especially geographically within the Western Hemisphere, but there is some great historicization as well. This is a must-read.