more interested and responsive to a more inclusive brand of politics, a dynamicthat is nowhere captured by Friedman’s analysis.

Friedman’s limited understanding of the New Deal’s substantial impact onAmerican society is reflected in his very limited agenda for government actiontoday. While arguing against a strict neoliberal viewpoint in which governmentneeds to simply get out of the way and let free markets work their magic,Friedman does not offer much in the way of an activist agenda. In fact, hisprescriptions for “limiting government spending, undoing tax cuts, [raising] theSocial Security retirement age, reshaping Medicare,” and providing more aid foreducation seem a tame version of what might come out of the centrist Demo-cratic Leadership Council (p. 434). Nothing very controversial here in policyterms because in the end, Friedman remains every bit the neoliberal, unable toreally see and challenge the unaccountable power that has accumulated withinthe private empires of corporate America. In the end, Friedman cannot bringhimself to recognize the contradictions and problems that emerge when, as KarlPolanyi put it long ago, society is run “as an adjunct to the market.”

Brian Waddell is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University ofConnecticut. His forthcoming books are What American Government Does (coau-thored) and Transforming National Security: Civil-Military Relations during WorldWar II. Address correspondence to Dr. Brian Waddell at the University ofConnecticut at Stamford, One University Press, Stamford, CT 06901. Tele-phone: (203) 251-8248. E-mail: brian.waddell@uconn.edu.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York:Oxford University Press, 2006. 440 pp. $30.00 (hardcover).

How does one explain the elimination of slavery virtually everywhere in theNew World in the 118 years between 1770, when it was legal and unquestioned,and the slave trade was thriving, and 1888, when Brazil finally emancipated itsslaves? Moreover, why is slave trade abolition being celebrated in the U.K. buthardly mentioned in the U.S. on its bicentennial in both countries?

David Brion Davis remarks that when he began teaching, the topic of slaverywas not considered worthy of a whole semester’s course in college and that muchof the public was ignorant of its history. While that has begun to change, thisbook is intended to acquaint the general public with much of the most recentscholarship on the subject.

Davis begins to explain these questions by noting that contemporary glo-balization “has expanded our comprehension of earlier international connec-tions and dependencies” so that slavery in the U.S. can no longer be seen in theparochial terms of the “peculiar institution” of the South (p. 6). Rather, the WestAfrican people sold into slavery by all the maritime powers of Western Europeto all the colonies of the New World were instrumental “. . . in the creation of

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the world’s first system of multinational production for what emerged as a massmarket—a market for slave-produced sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton” (p. 2).

Although many consider slave labor as economically retarded, the slaveregimes of the New World “resembled factories in the field, with [their] carefullystructured gang labor . . . that anticipated in many ways the assembly lines andagribusinesses of the future.” Yet in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), EricWilliams argued that the slave trade and ultimately slavery itself were abolishedonly when they had become economically useless. Recent research shows thatslave-produced commodities, especially sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cottonhelped create a mass consumer market in the metropolitan countries andremained by far the most competitive in the world market. Therefore, how doesone explain the success of the social movement demanding the abolition of theslave trade and then of slavery itself?

Davis is no crude economic determinist. The work of David Eltis, SeymourDrescher, and others has shown that slavery was economically viable at the timeof its abolition in the British Caribbean colonies in 1833. Slave-produced com-modities from Cuba and Brazil, for example, captured a market dominated byBritish and French products before the Saint-Domingue revolution and Britishabolition. The decision to abolish, first the slave trade, and then slavery itself,was based on other, less cynical motives, Davis argues. Thus, British abolition-ism in particular “raises profound and universal questions about the nature andpossibility of collective moral actions in human history.” How does he explainthe apparent contradiction between economic self-interest and idealism?

Davis exposes the moral rot that is at the heart of the slave system. Hequotes the American fugitive slave James W. C. Pennington, “Talk not aboutkind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The systemis master of them” (p. 193). It was a system, Davis explains, in which “Theslave was an inviting target for the hidden anger, passion, frustration, andrevenge from which no human is exempt.” Or, as the Quaker John Woolmansaid in the 1700s, “no human is saintly enough to be entrusted with totalpower over another” (p. 198). Therefore, American “freedom” depended onchattel slavery; an enormous irony (“ironically” is the most common adverb inthis volume).

The abolitionists themselves, however, mostly adherents of free labor andfree trade ideology, believed that slavery would die out in its own right once theslave trade was ended. Free labor would be as productive as slave, they reasoned,but that belief was not borne out by the experience of the British colonies, whereproduction collapsed and the value of freeholds withered after abolition.

In today’s neoliberal discourse, workers are seen as “human capital,” a viewthat recalls the proslavery ideologues of the American antebellum period andeerily resembles their arguments that slavery compared favorably with the “wageslavery” of early industrial capitalism. How much does the defense of slavery thatJames Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh spewed resonate with today’slabor conditions?

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They might well feel vindicated, Davis suggests, by research that shows that“in our allegedly free world many millions of contract and indebted laborers in theso-called developing nations are physically forced like slaves to do the dirtiestwork, often by labor contractors for multinational corporations” (pp. 190–1).

Suppression of the slave trade stemmed from conflicting motives. Therevival of anti slave-trade agitation was due to Napoleon’s restoration of slaveryin the French colonies in 1804, for example, but followed a period of intensereaction against his earlier radicalism. As a result, abolition suddenly became anexample of patriotic hostility to the French. When abolitionists scored theirmajor parliamentary triumph in 1806, “they concealed all humanitarian motivesand pushed hard for a Foreign Slave Trade Bill in terms of national and militaryself-interest” (Italics in original, p. 236).

Such tactical moves advanced the cause of abolition and that was whatmattered. Davis (ironically?) approvingly recalls John Stuart Mill’s argumentthat “the spread of moral convictions could sometimes take precedence overmaterial interests” (p. 238). While he rejects the sanguine notion of the inevi-table progress of human society, Davis does say that for many, the history ofBritish antislavery “served as a paradigm of how enlightened liberals and reform-ers struggled in one stage after another to overcome the forces of greed, tyranny,and the most unambiguous symbol of man’s inhumanity to man” (p. 239).

Critics of abolitionism, on the other hand, pointed out how the movement’spropaganda diverted attention from “the much closer ravages of industrialism—from the ‘dark Satanic mils’ where workers, including women and small children,were in effect imprisoned in factories and were far more oppressed than the slaveswho worked in the open air and sunny fields” (p. 239). William Wilberforce,abolition’s indefatigable Parliamentary advocate, “was familiar with all that wenton in the hold of a slave ship but ignored what went on at the bottom of amineshaft,” in Eric Williams’ acerbic judgment. “He supported the Corn Laws,was a member of the secret committee which investigated and repressed workingclass discontent in 1817, opposed feminine antislavery associations, and thoughtthat the First Reform Bill was too radical” (Capitalism and Slavery, p. 182).

Wilberforce, a wealthy merchant from Hull in Yorkshire, expressed in equalmeasure a moral repugnance toward slavery and a belief in free trade and freelabor ideology, both consistent with his evangelical Christianity. That Hull hadlost its preeminence as a port city to Liverpool, the major slave-trade port inBritain, would not have dimmed this dual vision of a more divine world order.

As the antislavery movement gained momentum in Britain, its Americancounterpart was perversely constrained by the rise of a virulent racism, oneembraced both by the slave-holding Southern states and by many Northernersas well. In the nineteenth century South, a minority of whites owned slaves anda much smaller proportion owned more than twenty slaves. Davis explains that“The greatest single peril to the Southern slavocracy was the possible disaffec-tion of the nonslaveholding farmers and workers followed by an alliance withblacks, both slave and free. This point underscores the crucial function of racismand racial identity, which succeeded in maintaining much unity among whites”

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(p. 185). This is the prologue to the enduring legacy of racism in the U.S., whichbecame institutionalized following the failure of Reconstruction as a result of“the North’s willingness to give Southern whites a free hand in defining andpresiding over all racial policies—an understanding that prevailed from the late1870s to at least the 1950s” (p. 300).

None of this is to deny the economic dimensions of the struggle to suppressthe trade. Eric Williams, the economic historian and the first prime minister ofTrinidad after independence, argued that slavery became indefensible only withthe transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism and free trade (p. 240). IfWilliams was wrong on the profitability of slave commerce as compared withfree labor, he was right on the ideological imperative of free labor as motive.

Owners of capital had come to see wage labor as an indispensable part of anemergent consumer market. The need for sweetened coffee or tea and cheapcotton textiles, for example, made rising wages imperative. Davis cites theexplanation of David Eltis, that if the metropolitan workers “had no other meansof supporting consumption than through wages, so much the better.” As Davissees it, “Slave-grown commodities were the precursors to the endless number ofproducts, many of them still produced by poverty-stricken, low-paid workers inthe so-called developing world, that are now purchased in the shopping malls ofmodern high-income societies . . .” (p. 247). Moreover, demand for those com-modities, then and now, served as the instrument of labor discipline.

Davis concludes by pointing to the growth of “new forms” of slavery,“. . . the men, women and children who are physically forced to work, oftenunder the guise of meaningless contracts, in sweatshops or in building roads andpipelines for multinational corporations,” alongside the existence of traditionalchattel slavery in parts of Saharan Africa (p. 330). The earlier history of abolitionwas, he says, “a willed achievement, a century’s moral achievement that mayhave no parallel” (p. 331). And so he holds out the prospect of yet anotherabolition movement, one whose embrace is not inevitable but rather urgent inthe face of our generation’s globalized and degraded labor market. Whether wecan be hopeful of its success remains to be seen.

Steve Leberstein is Professor of History at the Centers for Worker Education ofthe City University of New York, Graduate Program. Address correspondence toDr. Stephen Leberstein, CUNY Centers for Worker Education at BrooklynCollege, 25 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10004. Telephone: (212)966-4014 ext. 5015. Fax: (212) 966-4038. E-mail: sleberstein@ccny.cuny.edu.

Dan Zuberi, Dan. Differences that Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States andCanada. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 272 pp. $18.95 (paperback).

The popular media and neoliberal politicians have dominated the discus-sion of poverty and low-wage work for the last twenty years. We are told

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