David Brion Davis - Study of Slavery

Study of Slavery

The historian Ira Berlin, of the University of Maryland, has written that “no scholar has played a larger role in expanding contemporary understanding of how slavery shaped the history of the United States, the Americas, and the world than David Brion Davis.” In a series of landmark books, articles, and lectures, Davis has moved beyond a view of slavery that focuses on the institution in individual nations to look at the “big picture,” the multinational view of the origins, development, and abolition of New World slavery. He demonstrates slavery's centrality to the making of the modern world, the construction of modern conceptions of race, and the creation of dynamic New World economies. He saw it as part of the rise of the world's first system of multinational production for what emerged as a mass market—a market for sugar, tobacco, coffee, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton, all of which were produced by slave labor. In addition, he depicts slavery as a central theme in American history, shaping the meaning and outcome of the American Revolution, the creation of the U.S. Constitution, the growth of competing political parties, and the escalating sectional conflicts that resulted in civil war.