New World Slavery is a broad but still somehow under-covered theme in the scholarly literature. Works on slavery tend to be either very general or very focused. How does one consider such an expansive subject, both geographically and historically, in one volume without leaving out important themes? David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, and Directory Emeritus of the Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, delivers a solid attempt to cover all the major themes in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Davis helps the reader appreciate the major concepts of slavery in the New World without leading the reader to think that slavery was a monolithic experience. Inhuman Bondage is not an encyclopedia on New World Slavery. Davis’s purpose is to place American slavery within the context of the Atlantic slave system and to help us develop a better understanding of American slavery.

The Amistad test of law and justice --The ancient foundations of modern slavery -- The origins of antiblack racism in the new world -- How Africans became integral to new world history -- The Atlantic slave system : Brazil and the Caribbean -- Slavery in colonial North America -- The problem of slavery in the American Revolution -- The impact of the French and Haitian revolutions -- Slavery in the nineteenth-century South I : from contradiction to defense -- Slavery in the nineteenth-century south II : from slaveholder treatment and the nature of labor to slave culture, sex and religion, and free Blacks -- Some nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts -- Explanations of British abolitionism -- Abolitionism in America -- The politics of slavery in the United States -- The Civil War and slave emancipation.