CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 460Colonialism, slavery, and tradeRace, History, and American SocietyHistory of Colonial Brazil

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

Davis, David Brion·2006
DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195140736.001.0001
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award--and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come." 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 of 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 anti-black 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 with 3 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. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/oso/9780195140736.001.0001

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 101–200 of 445

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Davis, D. B.
Corresponding author
Davis, David Brion
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York, NY
Published
2006-04-01
DOI
10.1093/oso/9780195140736.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4388392605
Cited by
460
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 23 · 2025: 51 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 43 · 2019: 63 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 36 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 25 · 2012: 30
FWCI
23.25
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Colonialism, slavery, and trade
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › History of Colonial Brazil
Keywords
slavery in the United States, transatlantic slave trade, abolitionism, Southern United States, cotton kingdom, slave life, African American culture, anti-Black racism, slave revolts, slave conspiracies, David Hume, Immanuel Kant

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review