The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery

Searing, unsettling, and strikingly original, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery is the most ambitious account of slavery’s founding in the New World since the work of David Brion Davis half a century ago. With unflinching acuity and relying on breathtaking research, Harpham recounts the terrible story of how the English in America convinced themselves of the rightness of human bondage. -- Jill Lepore, author of <i>We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution</i> Compelled by the desire to understand how human beings come to defend the indefensible, John Harpham turns to the early modern roots of Atlantic slavery in this perceptive intellectual history. The depth of his research and the boldness of his insights are certain to command attention. -- Drew Gilpin Faust, author of <i>This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War</i> This is the most extensive and compelling account of how the English came to persuade themselves that slavery could be both unnatural and yet legitimate, that some peoples had a right to freedom and others did not. No previous book has told this unsettling story in such depth and detail, or so clearly succeeded in demonstrating how it shaped both defenses of and struggles against slavery. -- Anthony Pagden, author of <i>Beyond States: Power, Peoples and Global Order</i> An outstanding accomplishment in intellectual history. With bracing clarity and moral force, John Harpham recovers a forgotten landscape of thought that rendered slavery not only conceivable but also morally permissible in the English-speaking world. Like David Brion Davis before him, Harpham writes with both scholarly precision and humanistic urgency. Luminous and unsettling, this is a foundational text for anyone who seeks to understand the origins of Anglo-American slavery. -- Orlando Patterson, author of <i>Enslavement: Past and Present</i>