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Home > Features > Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives
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Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives
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by David Brion Davis
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
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The Importance of the Big Picture
Even in 2003, after more than three decades of voluminous scholarly research and publication, the average American, upon hearing the words "African American slavery," will almost certainly think of the South and the Civil War. Yet much recent scholarship has underscored the importance of the Big Picture -- the interrelationships that constituted an Atlantic Slave System as well as the place of such racial slavery in the evolution of the Western and modern worlds.
This is a promising time for making New World slavery and abolition a unified, multinational subject for college curricula. I can think of no better window on the issues of power and exploitation, on outsiders and insiders, on the construction of race, on the expansion of the Euro-American West, on the early stages of consumer-driven economies, and on the promise and limitations of social reform, initiated by abolitionist movements.
There is now much support for the view that the history of the United States -- indeed, the history of the entire New World -- is dominated by the theme of slavery and freedom. In the 320 years from 1500 to 1820, every European immigrant who arrived in the New World was matched by at least two African slaves. It was African slaves and their descendants who furnished the basic labor power that created dynamic New World economies and the first international mass markets for such consumer goods as sugar, rice, tobacco, dyestuffs, and cotton. Yet from the outset the New World was seen by many, like the biblical Promised Land, as a space for new beginnings, for possibilities that would break free from the coercive bondage to the past. Paradoxically, the debasement of millions of workers to a supposedly bestial condition of repetitive time appeared to liberate other human beings to take control of their destiny, to "remake" themselves. This profound contradiction lay close to the core of the self-presentation of the new United States, which was "conceived in liberty" but based on slave labor; dedicated to certain "propositions" or principles, such as "all men are created equal," but no less committed to compromises that protected the autonomy and political power of men who owned human property.
Shifting the Problem
America's bloodiest and most destructive war was perceived as an "apocalypse" and as a divine retribution precisely because it dealt with the consequences of what James Madison and other Founders had called "the original sin" of the African slave trade. The war emancipated the largest population of slaves in the New World and exerted an indirect influence on the fate of slaves in Cuba and Brazil as well. Yet the Age of Emancipation, beginning with the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 and ending with Brazilian emancipation in 1888, simply shifted the problem of slavery and freedom to a new level. As the Western Hemisphere moves onward in the twenty-first century, the legacy of its founding paradox is still apparent from Canada to Chile. The descendants of its 11 or 12 million involuntary African immigrants still carry both remnants of the rich and potentially rebellious culture that defied oppression and also a stigma of slavishness kept alive by racism, poverty, and constricted opportunities.
The heritage of bondage seems as impervious to simple answers as was slavery itself. As the eminent scientist Freeman Dyson has pointed out, "the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole.... The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole."1 Though I've never considered history a science, I am convinced that the Big Picture is indispensable as a first step toward coming to terms with the nature and workings of historical evil, while avoiding the pitfalls of demonizing special groups or dividing history into paranoid struggles between the children of light and the children of darkness -- struggles like those between medieval Christians and Muslims that shaped the first foundations for ethnic slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Viewing Unsuspected Interrelationships
These were the premises that led me to develop a new lecture course at Yale, analogous in some ways to a survey of world history, on what the titles of Robin Blackburn's recent books describe as The Making of New World Slavery and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery.2 Necessarily, such a course must be highly selective, and I should add that my course for Yale undergraduates was the outgrowth of an earlier and even briefer summer course for New York City teachers, which I continued to give for six years. This approach obviously runs against the increasing pressures for temporal and geographic specialization. The historian or teacher who scans multiple centuries and several continents, even with selective post-hole digging, risks almost inevitable errors as well as superficiality. But even apart from the possibility of team teaching, individual teachers throughout the country have long been required to teach surveys of world history, Western Civilization, or American history from pre-Columbian times to the present. The rich outpouring of monographic literature during the past 40 years, illustrated and made accessible by such reference works as the American Historical Association's most recent two-volume Guide to Historical Literature,3 provides firm grounding for various experiments in synthesis. And as most of us learned in our earliest apprenticeship years, colleagues and reference librarians, now reinforced by the Internet, can be essential in guiding us to the information we need. Above all, inquiries into the distant origins and significance of New World slavery can teach us new ways of viewing the end of European serfdom, the ways in which the Dutch Protestant struggle for independence transformed the Caribbean and Brazil, the emergence of European market economies, or the spread of Islam in Africa -- in short, allowing us to view unsuspected interrelationships that transform our sense of the past.
Such an immense field of study must have flexible and changing boundaries, but some coherence is provided, I would argue, by focusing on the most extreme and systematic form of personal domination, dishonor, dehumanization, and economic exploitation, a form of domination and exploitation that became a model, in the eyes of successive generations of liberationists, for all Western and white male imperialism.
1Freeman Dyson, "The Scientist As Rebel," The New York Review of Books, (May 25, 1995): 32.
2Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: 1997); The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: 1988).
3Third edition (New York: 1995).
This article is based on "Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives," American Historical Review 105:2 (April 2000): 452-66. David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of several major works on the history of slavery, including The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975), and co-author of The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War (1998).
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