Volume 30, Number 2 · February 17, 1983
Of Human Bondage
By David Brion Davis
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
by Orlando Patterson
Harvard University Press, 511 pp., $30.00
The founders of social science expressed a continuing interest in the origins and workings of human bondage. This interest can be traced from Montesquieu and John Millar in the eighteenth century to Tocqueville, Comte, Marx, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, Spencer, E.B. Tylor, Edward Westermarck, William Graham Sumner, and Max Weber. The ideology of moral and material progress, coupled with debates over the 'anomaly' of chattel slavery in the New World, also led by the 1840s to the first systematic histories of Greco-Roman slavery and to theories explaining the institution's decline and disappearance from Western Europe. In the major European languages scholars and popularizers produced thick volumes on the history of slavery from antiquity to modern times. However superficial or filled with Christian moralizing, this nineteenth-century literature recognized the importance and puzzling variations of an institution that has appeared from the time of the first written and ethnographic records and in virtually every part of the world.
Review, 3920 words
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