Slavery and Human Progress [Hardcover]

David Brion Davis (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195034392 | ISBN-13: 978-0195034394 | Publication Date: October 4, 1984 | Edition: 1St Edition

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 centuries that views of slavery as a retrograde institution gained far-reaching acceptance. Davis illuminates this momentous historical shift from "progressive" enslavement to "progressive" emancipation, ranging over an array of important developments--from the slave trade of early Muslims and Jews to twentieth-century debates over slavery in the League of Nations and the United Nations. In probing the intricate connections among slavery, emancipation, and the idea of progress, Davis sheds new light on two crucial issues: the human capacity for dignifying acts of oppression and the problem of implementing social change.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A work of breath-taking erudition that is also a model of clarity and good sense. [Davis] surveys more than a thousand years of slavery and antislavery in a way that is fresh and revealing even for those who are familiar with...the subject."--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University.

"[Davis's] superior literary ability enables him to cover a great deal of ground in tight smooth prose...the best introduction we have to the extent and significance of slavery in the history of the Western world."--The Atlantic.

"A work of awesome intellectual depth and range. Provocative, probing, and powerful...ranks among the most important studies of slavery."--Library Journal.

About the Author

David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 374 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1St Edition edition (October 4, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195034392
• ISBN-13: 978-0195034394
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,643,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the casual reader, August 5, 2010

By 

Neal J. Burns (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slavery and Human Progress (Galaxy Books) (Paperback)

I picked up this book because of its compelling thesis about the shifting meaning of slavery in history. Unfortunately, I got about 1/6th of the way through it and I realized that it is a bit more scholarly than what I had imagined. I would not recommend it unless you either already have a fairly solid foundation in European and world history, or you are willing to put in the effort to acquire it while plodding through this book. The audience for this book is obviously other academic historians and advanced students thereof, not the general public.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Enigma of Abolition, September 26, 2002

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slavery and Human Progress (Galaxy Books) (Paperback)

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'.