"A magnificent work done in the finest tradition of historical scholarship."--C. Vann Woodward, Yale University "The most eloquent and scholarly book on slavery we now have in English....Here is cross-cultural history at its best."--Virginia Quarterly Review "A magnificent history of ideas....It will remain a magnificent contribution to intellectual and social history...[and] will be studied for decades to come."--Eugene D. Genovese, Journal of Southern History "A helpful survey of the origins of the institution and its developments down to the end of the eighteenth century."--The Atlantic "A large, immensely learned, readable, exciting, disturbing...volume, one of the most important to have been published on the subject of slavery in modern times."--M.I. Finley, The New York Review of Books

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and President of the Organization of American Historians. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award, and the Beveridge Award of the A.H.A., he is the author of several books, including Slavery and Human Progress and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.