Slavery and Human Progress

by David Brion Davis

Book Overview

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Brion Davis here provides a penetrating survey of slavery and emancipation from ancient times to the twentieth century. His trenchant analysis puts the most recent international debates about freedom and human rights into much-needed perspective. Davis shows that slavery was once regarded as a form of human progress, playing a critical role in the expansion of the western world. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195037332
• ISBN13: 9780195037333
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The Enigma of Abolition

This work could be taken as a reflection on and/or conclusion to the author's previous two well-known classic works on slavery and poses the paradox lurking in all ideas of progress applied to historical analysis. The book shows history's answer, one that historians perhaps fail to see. The place of the slavery is human history is so endemic that we are left with the question of why toward the end of the eighteenth century forces for its abolition appeared and within several generations more or less succeeded in its overcoming. It is not a question we should leave to the Hegels of this world, come on Historians. This book cogently addrresses the core issue and orbits around it, and would make a good ending to a perusal of the author's lead-up texts, along with some of the literature cited on the slavery debate, which the book reviews, to some extent. The idea of progress is out of fashion, which makes the issue seem less significant to postmodern indifference, yet the ambiguity here lingers as a challenge to our notions of 'what drives history'. In part, the paradoxes of historical progress springs from the inadequacy of our historiography which is either some teleological historicism or some derivative of the anti-progressivism of Darwinian evolution. In that context, the puzzle of slavery and abolition remains stubbornly mysterious. This work gives us a 'good question' whose answer would constitute a true 'universal history'.