David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966)

I think my interest in this book was inspired by the so-called "racial reckoning" of recent years - Black Lives Matter, the Times's 1619 Project, anti-racism, etc. - and my sense that many of the claims that these movements and projects made about the American past were of dubious merit. I was looking for a book that would help me understand slavery as a global phenomenon, so that both the common and uncommon elements of slavery in the New World would become clearer. And I wanted to understand how and why anti-slavery movements developed, for the first time ever in human history, in 18th century Britain, North America, and France. This book only tangentially addresses the first question, as it focuses, true to its title, on slavery in western culture (I might have to read Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death for a more global view of the topic); it devotes more time to the second, though I would have to read the second book in Davis's trilogy to take the full measure of the origins of the abolitionist movements. Davis, who died in the last couple of years, was the preeminent historian of American slavery, and this book is a tour-de-force of intellectual history. With great patience and care, he uncovers the assumptions and arguments - often drawing on Biblical notions of man as a fallen being and sin as (some) men's penance - that justified the "paradox" of regarding "a man as a thing." All along there were debates and even isolated doubts, though nothing that resembled a principled stance against slavery itself - until the 18th century.