Front cover image for Inhuman bondage : the rise and fall of slavery in the New World

Inhuman bondage : the rise and fall of slavery in the New World

"Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of ordinary slaves; the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations, discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage, and also traces the long evolution of antiblack racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison of three major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation, not a marginal enterprise."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2006
Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2006
History
xvi, 440 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 25 cm
9780195140736, 9780195339444, 9780199726653, 9786610531141, 0195140737, 0195339444, 0199726655, 6610531145
62281901
The Amistad test of law and justice
The ancient foundations of modern slavery
The origins of antiblack racism in the New World
How Africans became integral to New World history
The Atlantic slave system : Brazil and the Caribbean
Slavery in colonial North America
The problem of slavery in the American Revolution
The impact of the French and Haitian revolutions
Slavery in the nineteenth-century South, I : from contradiction to defense
Slavery in the nineteenth-century south, II : from slaveholder treatment and the nature of labor to slave culture, sex and religion, and free Blacks
Some nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts
Explanations of British abolitionism
Abolitionism in America
The politics of slavery in the United States
The Civil War and slave emancipation