The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture

xiv, 505 pp. Although slavery in Western culture has been justified from the earliest times by religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction, it has always been a source of social and psychological tension. This monumental study offers a panoramic survey of the contradictory ideas and practices that led to the great slavery controversies in Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Professor Davis analyzes the ambivalent attitudes toward slavery in the Greek, Roman and early Christian periods.