Customer Reviews

Slavery and Human Progress

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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.

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'.