Extract

Almost fifty years after the first book, David Brion Davis has completed the trilogy inaugurated by his Pulitzer Prize-winning Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and continued in the Bancroft Prize-winning Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975). His fertile career of research and publishing has stimulated a sub-field of national or comparative ‘slavery studies’. A victim of his own success, confronting such a vast historiography, Davis nimbly incorporates the latest scholarship alongside his long-gathered evidence and novel interpretation in this new work. The anticipation fuelled by his reputation and the trilogy’s gestation is not disappointed in the slightest. This new volume is not a survey of the destruction of new world slavery (offered by his Inhuman Bondage [2004], a published lecture series); rather, Davis offers a globally informed history of (Anglo-) American emancipation, ‘a highly selective study of significant and often neglected aspects of this broad subject’ (p. xiii).

You do not currently have access to this article.