O Afeganistão derrotou o Império Britânico, a União Soviética e agora o Império Americano - Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy, July 24, 2021 

Leaving Afghanistan    What happens to the country after the forever war ends?   Read More

“America’s greatest strategic disaster,” is how FP’s Michael Hirsh describes the United States’ war in Afghanistan, which after two decades is coming to an end with the withdrawal of US troops by Aug. 31. It didn’t have to be this way, Hirsh writes, quoting some military historians who believe the war was winnable. But as is, and even as Afghan forces regain some ground in a searing summer offensive, the Taliban is winning the propaganda war, affecting the morale of a “fearful population waiting for reassurance,” writes Lynne O’Donnell from Kabul. Now you can find all of FP’s coverage on the war and what comes after—a refugee crisis, a new strategic corridor for China, a broader reshuffling of geopolitical alliances—in one place, with our “Leaving Afghanistan” portal. There you’ll find our latest reporting, as well as thematic analysis around important topics like peace negotiations, Afghanistan’s neighbors, women in Afghanistan and the prospect of a Taliban takeover. There are few stories more complex, and heartbreaking, than this one, and FP is committed to bringing you insights into all aspects of it. Read selected highlights below:

Why Afghanistan Is America’s Greatest Strategic Disaster   Pompeo's plan to make peace with the resurgent Taliban is a sad reminder of all that went wrong in Afghanistan—and how it could have been otherwise.   READ MORE ›

China and the Taliban Begin Their Romance   Beijing has its eyes set on using Afghanistan as a strategic corridor once U.S. troops are out of the way.   READ MORE ›

‘It Will Not Be Just a Civil War’   Afghanistan’s foreign minister on what may await his country after the U.S. withdrawal.   READ MORE ›

Empire of Graveyards   Nineteen years ago, the United States began its war in Afghanistan. What is it leaving behind?   READ MORE ›

Aos cem anos de sua fundação, o que o PCC aprendeu?: paranoia e desconfiança? Como os EUA? - Evan Osnos (The New Yorker)

 Não sei se o autor reparou, mas as posturas que ele indicou para o PCC são as mesmas, mutatis mutandis, que existem na atual liderança americana (ou talvez desde sempre). 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

After a Hundred Years, What Has China’s Communist Party Learned?

Beijing reverts to a belief that paranoia and suspicion are the best policies.

By Evan Osnos

The New Yorker, July 1, 2021

President Xi Jinping appears on a mega-screen at a celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s hundredth anniversary.Photograph by Lintao Zhang / Getty

Not so long ago, the Communist Party of China—which celebrates its hundredth anniversary this week—believed in the power of eclectic influences. In 1980, the Party’s propaganda chiefs approved the first broadcast of an American television series in the People’s Republic of China: “Man from Atlantis,” which featured Patrick Duffy, with webbed hands and feet and clad in yellow swimming trunks, as the lone survivor of an undersea civilization. In the United States, the show had been cancelled after one season—the Washington Post panned it as “thinner than water”—but the Communists in Beijing had embarked on an “open door” policy of experimentation. They knew that the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution had left China impoverished and weak—it was poorer than North Korea—and were acquiring whatever foreign culture they could afford, in order to close the gap with the rest of the world. After “Man from Atlantis,” Chinese television viewers were shown “My Favorite Martian” (though the laugh track was lost in the dubbing process, so there were long, puzzling pauses) and the capitalist soap operas “Falcon Crest,” “Dallas,” and “Dynasty.”

For years, the imports kept coming. The censors cut out references to major political taboos (such as the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989), but the aperture to foreign culture was wide enough that Chinese news broadcasts featured segments from CNN. Yet the appetite for international programming did not last. It peaked around 2008, when Beijing welcomed a surge of attention for the Summer Olympics. In the years after that, the Party moved to protect itself against the challenges posed by dissent and technology, and turned its suspicions again on American influence. When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Party, in 2012, he faced a worrying terrain: social media created in Silicon Valley, and cheered by Washington, had helped bring down authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Libya, and Chinese leaders jockeying for power and money had allowed internal feuds to tumble into public, reviving a congenital fear, deeply rooted in a party born of revolution, that it could all end in collapse. Flamboyant corruption was fuelling overt public resentment of the Party. In a speech, Xi warned that the Soviet Communists had lost control “because everyone could say and do what they wanted.” He warned, “What kind of political party was that? It was just a rabble.”

To build unity, Xi’s government invoked the spectre of the Cold War; state television rebroadcast films of Chinese troops battling Americans in Korea during the nineteen-fifties, a period in which American spies also infiltrated China in efforts to overthrow the Party. John Delury, the author of the forthcoming book “Agents of Subversion,” a history of espionage and suspicion in U.S.-China relations, told me, “Even after ‘normalization’ in the 1970s, the US essentially moved on to a new subversive proposition, the hope that prosperity [in China] would lead to democracy. But contrary to America’s wishes, wealth led to power, not democracy.”

Xi recommitted the Party to “ideological work” and the need to suppress “mistaken opinions.” Popular social-media commentators were arrested; Charles Xue, a Chinese-American blogger based in Beijing, who had more than twelve million followers, was paraded on television in handcuffs, and confessed to making “irresponsible” comments. The Party cited fears of separatism in the Xinjiang region to create a vast network of prisonlike facilities and surveillance, and, in Hong Kong, it moved swiftly to eliminate autonomy and political dissent. Xi adopted a language of existential threat. In 2014, he said that China faced “the most complicated internal and external factors in its history.” Jude Blanchette, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in Foreign Affairs that “although this was clearly hyperbole—war with the United States in Korea and the nationwide famine of the late 1950s were more complicated—Xi’s message to the political system was clear: a new era of risk and uncertainty confronts the party.”

In the machinery of a one-party state, in which the words of a paramount leader amplify as they move through its cogs, Xi’s dark warnings created a thriving cult of paranoia. Around Beijing, posters went up, warning people to watch out for foreign spies, who might try to seduce Chinese women in order to gain access to state secrets. In rural backwaters, the Party warned of Western-backed “color revolutions” and “Christian infiltration.” A university in Beijing planned to display a copy of the Magna Carta, which curbed the powers of an English king in the thirteenth century, until officials got nervous; it was sent to the residence of the British Ambassador. In 2016, the state-media regulators who had once introduced “Dallas” issued new directives with a very different cast of mind; they barred television programs that joked about Chinese traditions or showcased “overt admiration for Western life styles.”

This summer, in preparation for the Party’s hundredth birthday, on July 1st, officials launched a propaganda campaign that would have looked retro were it not resurgent. On television, billboards, and across the Chinese Internet, the Party extolled the wisdom of Xi (“The People’s Leader”), who has liberated himself from term limits; it rallied the public to watch out for shadowy “hostile forces” within and without, as well as for corruption, ideological lassitude, and democratic temptation. In the days leading up to the celebration, primary-school parents at a school in Shandong Province were advised to “conduct a thorough search for religious books, reactionary books, homegrown reprints or photocopies of books published overseas, and for any books or audio and video content not officially printed and distributed by Xinhua Bookstore.” On June 28th, at an outdoor rally held in the Bird’s Nest stadium that was built for the Olympics, the Party offered a congratulatory, and selective, reading of its record: it glorified the Long March of the nineteen-thirties, skipped over the famine and turmoil of the fifties and sixties, and cheered China’s economic and technological advances, culminating in its rapid recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Three days later, in Tiananmen Square, before a crowd of seventy thousand, Xi delivered a blunt warning to the outside world. “The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress, or enslave us,” he said. “Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

A century after the Party was founded by a young Mao Zedong and other students of Marxism-Leninism, it aspires to achieve the ultimate dream of authoritarian politics: an encompassing awareness of everything in its realm; the ability to prevent threats even before they are fully realized, a force of anticipation and control powered by new technology; and economic influence that allows it to rewrite international rules to its liking.

The Party’s authoritarian turn has reverberated far beyond China. As Xi has sought to root out foreign and political challengers, his efforts have sparked mistrust in Washington. Since January, the U.S. has described China’s mass arrests and repression of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang as “genocide and crimes against humanity.” Last month, in Europe, President Biden recruited allies in a joint call for a transparent study of the origins of the pandemic, and for support of an infrastructure push that could compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative in developing countries. “I think we’re in a contest. Not with China per se, but a contest with autocrats,” Biden told reporters. At stake, he said, was “whether or not democracies can compete with them in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.”

Beyond the realms of geostrategy and diplomacy, partisan warfare in Washington has gravitated toward the subject of China, mirroring Beijing’s paranoia and nativism about spies and foreign subversion. In 2018, Donald Trump, while discussing China with a gathering of C.E.O.s, reportedly said, “Almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.” (There were an estimated three hundred and seventy thousand Chinese students in America during the 2018-19 school year.) Among Trump’s supporters, China became a central danger in their pantheon of threats, alongside Sharia law, the deep state, and “caravans” of Mexican migrants. During the 2020 Presidential campaign, flags and T-shirts denounced “Beijing Biden” and accused him of seeking to “Make China Great Again.” After Biden was inaugurated, a popular right-wing meme promoted a racist conspiracy theory that David Cho, a decorated Secret Service agent who is Korean-American, was Biden’s “Chinese handler.” Violent, racially motivated attacks on Asians increased across the U.S., and, in March, a gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, at spas and massage parlors in the Atlanta area.

As China’s Communist Party enters its second century, its mix of confidence and paranoia—pride in its achievements and fear of the outside—reflects the fundamental uncertainty of its project. Chinese Communists have already ruled their country longer than the Soviets ruled theirs, but that’s a distinction that breeds both satisfaction and anxiety. No Communist government has ever made it to its second centennial celebration. During the Trump Administration, the incompetence and infighting of American politics provided a valuable propaganda tool for Xi’s government, which may well endure in the decades ahead. But Americans ended Trump’s Presidency after a single term, thanks to a feature of governance that becomes ever harder to maintain in a one-party state ruled by a strongman: the power of self-correction.

A dívida nacional dos Estados Unidos em 150 anos: 1900-2050: correlação com a situação econômica do país - Visual Capitalist

 Tema fascinante: os fazedores de gráficos, historiadores econômicos trabalhando com séries históricas, poderiam traçar uma imagem semelhante, ou similar, para a dívida pública brasileira ao logo dos últimos 200 anos. 

Interactive: 

Visualizing 150 Years of U.S. National Debt (1900-2050)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/timeline-150-years-of-u-s-national-debt/

Visual Capitalist, June 21, 2021

Marcus Lu

Graphics/Design:

• Christina Kostandi

This interactive visual shows how the U.S. national debt has fluctuated since 1900, as well as projections all the way to 2050.

Looking Back at 150 Years of U.S. Debt

The total U.S. national debt reached an all-time high of $28 trillion* in March 2021, the largest amount ever recorded.

Recent increases to the debt have been fueled by massive fiscal stimulus bills like the CARES Act ($2.2 trillion in March 2020), the Consolidated Appropriations Act ($2.3 trillion in December 2020), and most recently, the American Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion in March 2021). 

To see how America’s debt has gotten to its current point, we’ve created an interactive timeline using data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It’s crucial to note that the data set uses U.S. national debt held by the public, which excludes intergovernmental holdings.

*Editor’s note: This top level figure includes intragovernmental holdings, or the roughly $6 trillion of debt owed within the government to itself.

What Influences U.S. Debt?

It’s worth pointing out that the national debt hasn’t always been this large. 

Looking back 150 years, we can see that its size relative to GDP has fluctuated greatly, hitting multiple peaks and troughs. These movements generally correspond with events such as wars and recessions. 

Decade	Gross debt at start  of decade  (USD billions)	Avg. Debt Held By Public Throughout Decade (% of GDP)	Major Events
1900	-	4.8%	-
1910	-	10.0%	World War I
1920	-	22.9%	The Great Depression
1930	$16	36.4%	President Roosevelt's New Deal
1940	$40	75.1%	World War II
1950	$257	56.8%	Korean War
1960	$286	37.3%	Vietnam War
1970	$371	26.1%	Stagflation (inflation + high unemployment)
1980	$908	33.7%	President Reagan's tax cuts
1990	$3,233	44.7%	Gulf War
2000	$5,674	36.6%	9/11 attacks & Global Financial Crisis
2010	$13,562	72.4%	Debt ceiling is raised by Congress
2020	$27,748	105.6%	COVID-19 pandemic
2030P	-	121.8%	-
2040P	-	164.7%	-
2050P	-	195.2%	-

Source: CBO, The Balance

To gain further insight into the history of the U.S. national debt, let’s review some key economic events in America’s history. 

The Great Depression

After its WWI victory, the U.S. enjoyed a period of post-war prosperity commonly referred to as the Roaring Twenties. 

This led to the creation of a stock market bubble which would eventually burst in 1929, causing massive damage to the U.S. economy. The country’s GDP was cut in half (partially due to deflation), while the unemployment rate rose to 25%. 

Government revenues dipped as a result, pushing debt held by the public as a % of GDP from its low of 15% in 1929, to a high of 44% in 1934. 

World War II

WWII quickly brought the U.S. back to full employment, but it was an incredibly expensive endeavor. The total cost of the war is estimated to be over $4 trillion in today’s dollars. 

To finance its efforts, the U.S. relied heavily on war bonds, a type of bond that is marketed to citizens during armed conflicts. These bonds were sold in various denominations ranging from $25-$10,000 and had a 2.9% interest rate compounded semiannually. 

Over 85 million Americans purchased these bonds, helping the U.S. government to raise $186 billion (not adjusted for inflation). This pushed debt above 100% of GDP for the first time ever, but was also enough to cover 63% of the war’s total cost. 

The Postwar Period

Following World War II, the U.S. experienced robust economic growth. 

Despite involvement in the Korea and Vietnam wars, debt-to-GDP declined to a low of 23% in 1974—largely because these wars were financed by raising taxes rather than borrowing. 

The economy eventually slowed in the early 1980s, prompting President Reagan to slash taxes on corporations and high earning individuals. Income taxes on the top bracket, for example, fell from 70% to 50%. 

2008 Global Financial Crisis

The Global Financial Crisis served as a precursor for today’s debt landscape. 

Interest rates were reduced to near-zero levels to speed up the economic recovery, enabling the government to borrow with relative ease. Rates remained at these suppressed levels from 2008 to 2015, and debt-to-GDP grew from 39% to 73%. 

It’s important to note that even before 2008, the U.S. government had been consistently running annual budget deficits. This means that the government spends more than it earns each year through taxes. 

The National Debt Today

The COVID-19 pandemic damaged many areas of the global economy, forcing governments to drastically increase their spending. At the same time, many central banks once again reduced interest rates to zero. 

This has resulted in a growing snowball of government debt that shows little signs of shrinking, even though the worst of the pandemic is already behind us. 

In the U.S., federal debt has reached or surpassed WWII levels. When excluding intragovernmental holdings, it now sits at 104% of GDP—and including those holdings, it sits at 128% of GDP. But while the debt is expected to grow even further, the cost of servicing this debt has actually decreased in recent years. 

This is because existing government bonds, which were originally issued at higher rates, are now maturing and being refinanced to take advantage of today’s lower borrowing costs.

The key takeaway from this is that the U.S. national debt will remain manageable for the foreseeable future. Longer term, however, interest expenses are expected to grow significantly—especially if interest rates begin to rise again. 

Com Biden, Bolsonaro fica à deriva - Bernardo Mello Franco (Globo)

ELEIÇÕES AMERICANAS

Vitória de Biden deixaria Bolsonaro à deriva

Por Bernardo Mello Franco

O Globo, 01/11/2020 • 01:22

https://blogs.oglobo.globo.com/bernardo-mello-franco/post/vitoria-de-biden-deixaria-bolsonaro-deriva.html

 

Há dez dias, o ministro Ernesto Araújo disse não se importar com a perda de relevância do Brasil no cenário internacional. “É bom ser pária”, desdenhou, em discurso para jovens diplomatas. O isolamento do país já é uma realidade desde a posse de Jair Bolsonaro. Mas pode se agravar a partir de terça-feira, quando os Estados Unidos escolherão seu próximo presidente.

Uma possível vitória de Joe Biden será péssima notícia para o capitão e seu chanceler olavista. Os dois ancoraram a política externa numa relação de vassalagem com Donald Trump. Agora arriscam ficar à deriva se o republicano for derrotado, como indicam as pesquisas.

Quando ainda sonhava em ser embaixador nos EUA, o deputado Eduardo Bolsonaro posou com um boné da campanha de Trump. O pai chegou perto disso. Às vésperas da eleição, ele reafirmou a torcida pelo magnata. “Não preciso esconder isso, é do coração”, declarou-se.

Para bajular o aliado, o bolsonarismo pôs a diplomacia brasileira de joelhos. O Itamaraty abriu mão de protagonismo, deu as costas à América Latina e trocou a defesa do interesse nacional pela subordinação ao interesse americano. Em setembro, permitiu que o secretário Mike Pompeo usasse Roraima como palanque para agredir um país vizinho.

Na pandemia, Bolsonaro imitou a pregação de Trump contra a Organização Mundial da Saúde, o uso de máscaras e as medidas de distanciamento. O negacionismo da dupla abriu caminho para o avanço do vírus. Não por acaso, os EUA e o Brasil lideram o ranking de mortes pela Covid.

O capitão surfou a onda nacional-populista que produziu o Brexit, elegeu Trump e impulsionou partidos de extrema direita na Europa. Uma derrocada do republicano deixará essa tropa sem comandante. Será um alento para quem aposta no diálogo e na cooperação internacional, hoje sufocados pelo discurso do ódio e pela intolerância.

Biden está longe de ser um símbolo do progressismo. Mesmo assim, comprometeu-se com a defesa da democracia, do meio ambiente e dos direitos humanos. Isso significa que sua possível vitória provocará mudanças sensíveis nas relações entre Washington e Brasília.

No primeiro debate presidencial, Biden já avisou que pressionará Bolsonaro a frear o desmatamento da Amazônia. Ele acenou com uma cenoura e um porrete: a criação de um fundo de US$ 20 bilhões para estimular a preservação da floresta ou a imposição de sanções econômicas ao Brasil.

No dia seguinte, o capitão acusou o democrata de tentar suborná-lo. Além de exagerar no tom, conseguiu errar o primeiro nome do adversário de Trump. O bate-boca indicou o que vem por aí se Joseph — e não John — assumir a Casa Branca.

BERNARDO MELLO FRANCO

É colunista de política do GLOBO. Também passou pelo Jornal do Brasil e pela Folha de S.Paulo. Foi correspondente em Londres e repórter no Rio, em SP e Brasília. É autor de "Mil Dias de Tormenta - A crise que derrubou Dilma e deixou Temer por um fio"

Um historiador da escravidao americana - David Brion Davis (Drew Gilpin Faust, NYRBooks)

The Scholar Who Shaped History

Drew Gilpin Faust

MARCH 20, 2014 ISSUE

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00

The Scholar Who Shaped History

Drew Gilpin Faust

The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2014 Issue

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation’s history. And that revolution has taken place largely because of a remarkable generation of historians who, inspired by the changing meanings of freedom and justice in their own time, began to ask new questions about the origins of the racial inequality that continued to permeate our segregated society nearly a century after slavery’s end.

Published in 1956, just two years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Boarddecision called for school integration, Kenneth Stampp’s pathbreaking The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South turned prevailing wisdom on its head. His history, written with a premise of fundamental black and white equality, yielded insights about slavery quite unlike the conclusions of earlier writings based on unquestioned assumptions of black inferiority. The leading early-twentieth-century historian of slavery, Ulrich B. Phillips, had portrayed a benevolent system designed to uplift and protect benighted Africans. Stampp, deeply affected by the emerging civil rights movement, painted a very different picture. With vivid archival detail, he demonstrated that slavery was harsh and exploitative of those who, he explained in words that rather startlingly reveal both the extent and limits of midcentury white liberalism, were after all “white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”

But the outpouring of research and writing about slavery in the years that followed went far beyond simply changing assumptions about race and human equality. It yielded as well an emerging recognition of the centrality of slavery in the American experience—not just in the South, but in northern society too, where it persisted in a number of states well into the nineteenth century. It also fundamentally shaped the national economy, which relied upon cotton as its largest export, and national politics, where slaveholding presidents governed for approximately two thirds of the years between the inaugurations of Washington and Lincoln.

At the same time, the burgeoning study of slavery was revolutionizing the practice of history by significantly expanding the kinds of sources scholars thought to employ in their effort to illuminate the elusive past. In order truly to understand slavery, it seemed imperative in the post–civil rights era to have a far richer understanding of the experience and perspectives of the slaves themselves. Yet by law throughout the South, slaves had been prohibited from reading and writing and thus prevented from leaving the written records on which history traditionally so largely depended.

In order to create the new history of slavery, scholars ventured into unaccustomed fields of research—demography, quantitative analysis, which came to be dubbed “cliometrics,” oral history, folklore, music, material culture, archaeology, and comparative history, to name a few. These modes of inquiry have now become staples in historical fields well beyond the study of America’s peculiar institution. In developing a new history for slavery over the past half-century, scholars have at the same time contributed to fundamentally changing the ways history is done, significantly expanding the kinds of remnants of the past that might be tapped as sources of historical understanding.

The new scholarship that placed slavery at the heart of American history and that recognized race as a central and enduring dimension of the American experience was the creation of prodigiously talented scholars who both argued and collaborated, at once learning from and disputing with one another, at times bringing especially vehement scholarly debates to prominent attention in the national media, to magazine covers and television talk shows. For me, a southern historian, a graduate student and assistant professor in the 1970s, it was a heady time, when history mattered so intensely to contemporary life and when brilliant scholars produced a stream of weighty volumes, each one of which required revised understanding and prompted—even mandated—new directions for research. They included such individuals as Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, John Hope Franklin, Lawrence Levine, Leon Litwack, John Blassingame, Orlando Patterson, Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman. And prominent among them, David Brion Davis. Davis did not focus his primary attention on the experience of slaves or the details of the institution of slavery, but about what he defined in the title of his influential Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (PSWC): slavery as a problem and contradiction in human thought and human morality, not just in American history but across both world history and geography from the Greeks onward.

Davis’s book and his subsequent work would become a major influence in the emergence of a comparative history of slavery and abolition, in essence a global history well avant la lettre. It would, among other achievements, powerfully influence traditional approaches to intellectual history by embedding ideas in social and political action and institutions. This was historical writing with a scope and ambition that would shape scholars and scholarship for decades to come.

Now, in 2014, David Brion Davis, age eighty-six, has published the final volume in the trilogy he inaugurated with PSWC and continued with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (PSAR) in 1975. In the years since, he also has written or edited twelve other books, and he has published in these pages a continuing account of slavery scholarship, contributing some three dozen essays since the 1970s. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, which he began in 1980, completes the trilogy and is, he writes, “the fulfillment of a career.” This career has produced not just extraordinary scholarship and numbers of graduate students who are now leading historians in their own right. Davis has also been dedicated to extending and disseminating a true understanding of the place of slavery in American history by founding and then leading the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale and by offering a course on slavery for high school teachers each summer for nearly a decade.

Davis came somewhat indirectly to slavery studies. An undergraduate philosophy major at Dartmouth and then a graduate student in Harvard’s program in the History of American Civilization, he was interested in how ideas are refracted through real human problems in the everyday world. History, Davis believed, could serve as a “source for disciplined moral reflection.” In his dissertation and first book, the problem he chose to consider was homicide—how a human being can come to deny and obliterate the humanity of others. But his inquiry into the nature of dehumanization soon shifted its focus to the injustices of race and slavery that had been under increasing academic and public discussion in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Davis had himself experienced something of an epiphany on these issues during his military service at the end of World War II. A peripatetic childhood had taken him to five high schools across the North, yet he had never shared a classroom with an African-American. A training camp in Georgia introduced him to the injustices of southern segregation, but an incident on a troop ship carrying him to Germany at the very conclusion of the war made an even more forceful and lasting impression. Ordered to descend into the hold and enforce the prohibition against gambling among those quartered below deck, Davis discovered with dismay hundreds of black soldiers—whom he had not even known were on board—segregated in conditions he believed not unlike those of a slave ship. Davis’s experiences in the army introduced him to the realities of racial prejudice and cruelty that he had never imagined existed in America’s twentieth-century democracy. The shock of recognition rendered these impressions indelible, but it was a chance circumstance of his graduate school years that seems to have transformed them into a scholarly commitment.

In his time at Dartmouth and Harvard, slavery and race occupied almost no place in the curriculum. The work of the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois, for example, Harvard’s first black Ph.D., was not a part of the historical training offered by his own alma mater. But during Davis’s last spring in Cambridge, as he was finishing his dissertation, he encountered Kenneth Stampp, a visiting scholar on the verge of publishing The Peculiar Institution. Davis came to see that slavery and its abolition offered an extraordinary vehicle for examining how humans shape and are shaped by moral dilemmas and how their ideas come to influence the world.

Historians are interested in change, and the history of slavery provided Davis an instance of change in human perception of perhaps unparalleled dimensions and significance. Understanding and explaining that change became his life’s work. Why, he wondered, did slavery evoke essentially “no moral protest in a wide range of cultures for literally thousands of years”? And then, “what contributed to a profound shift in moral vision by the mid- to late eighteenth century, and to powerful Anglo-American abolitionist movements thereafter?”

PSWC launched Davis’s inquiry with a focus on the “problem” at the heart of the institution in all its appearances across time and space: “the essential contradiction in thinking of a man as a thing,” at once property and person, object and yet undeniably an agent capable even of rebelling against his bondage and destroying the master who would deny his agency. Grappling with this contradiction vexed every slave society, but only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did these inconsistencies begin to yield substantial opposition to the institution itself. After tracing the cultural heritage of these ideas from Plato and Aristotle, through the evolution of Christianity, into the thought of the Enlightenment and the seemingly paradoxical strengthening of both rationalist and evangelical impulses in the course of the eighteenth century, the first volume of Davis’s trilogy introduces the origins of modern antislavery thought.

In PSAR, Davis then explores the implications of this intellectual legacy and emerging antislavery consciousness in the social and political milieu that both enabled and circumscribed their impact. The second volume of Davis’s trilogy seeks to demonstrate the “points of intersection between ideals and social action” and succeeds in situating intellectual history in a world of action and consequence. It is hard to think of any scholar who has made a better case for the proposition that ideas matter and can even override power and wealth, as Davis makes clear in his oft-repeated point that emancipation ultimately triumphed even though slavery was in fact flourishing economically in the nineteenth-century world that abolished it.

During the three decades he worked on The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Davis altered its original plan as he took up parts of the story in other books, most notably in a study of the changing relationship of slavery to ideas of human progress and in a volume based on his lectures to high school teachers that chronicles the rise and fall of slavery in the New World. These projects have permitted him to craft PSAE as a “highly selective study” focused on abolitionism in Britain and the United States, while employing what he has characterized elsewhere as “a wide-angle lens” on bondage more broadly. Unlike its predecessor, PSAE does not include dates in its title, but the “Age” Davis discusses reaches from the 1780s and the post-Revolutionary emancipationist impulse in the United States to the 1880s and the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

Davis begins by introducing what he identifies as the “central theme” of the book: “dehumanization and its implications,” a theme that has indeed been central to his work since he was writing about homicide long ago. The debates over slavery in the era of the American Revolution, he had shown in the preceding volume of the trilogy, had left a perception of black “incapacity for freedom” as the fundamental justification for the perpetuation of slavery. These assumptions of black inferiority, variously characterized as innate in a discourse that allocated increasing importance to race, or acquired through the oppressions of the slave system itself, were held not only by whites. They deeply affected blacks as well, Davis writes, in a form of “psychological exploitation” that yielded “some black internalization and even pathology” but also “evoked black resistance.” As escaped slave and black abolitionist Henry H. Garnet described the “oppressors’ aim”: “They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind,” then slavery has “done its perfect work.”

Davis’s emphasis on the centrality of dehumanization and his treatment of the internalizing of these notions of inferiority in a form of “black self-contempt” evoke historians’ bitter battles of the 1960s and 1970s over Stanley Elkins’s highly controversial portrait of “Sambo” as a model slave personality, a docile being whose psychological oppression had emasculated and infantilized him and left him without culture or community.

Objecting to such a characterization, a generation of historians set about to discover—successfully—evidence of black culture, community, family, creativity, and identity thriving within slavery. But Davis reminds us that cruelty and injustice necessarily take a powerful toll on their victims, and he cites numerous statements by nineteenth-century African-Americans—both slave and free—that acknowledge the withering and lingering effects of slavery on the heart and mind. A half-century beyond Elkins’s book and the controversy it generated, Davis asks us to embrace a more nuanced understanding of both the damage slavery inflicted on individuals and communities and the extraordinary resilience marshaled against it.

The force of these conceptions of black incapacity and their salience for the progress of emancipation lead Davis to explore how they were related to three realities that proved of critical importance for the coming of freedom: the influence of the Haitian Revolution, the movements for colonization and emigration, and the leadership and example of free blacks, who represented the “most killing refutation of slavery” and served as “the key to slave emancipation.”

When Davis began his study of the Age of Emancipation, he was struck by how little historical attention had been directed at the Haitian Revolution. His own writings have helped generate a level of scholarly interest in Haiti that has done much to mitigate that neglect. In this volume, Davis builds on that work to consider the ways Haiti influenced emancipationist efforts from the British Parliament’s 1792 consideration of outlawing the slave trade to Brazil’s abolition nearly a century later. Haiti was, in the words of Frederick Douglass, the “pioneer emancipator.” But, as Davis recounts, Haiti’s experience sent contradictory messages about the meanings of black freedom. Certainly the uprising demonstrated that slaves had not been so dehumanized as to lack the initiative and capacity to organize effective military forces and win independence. Yet at the same time, the violence and terror of the revolt reinforced white images of blacks as brutes.

In the short run, the Haitian Revolution “seriously damaged” the worldwide antislavery movement. But in the longer term, Haiti became the symbol of a polity and a society in which blacks could fully claim and exercise their freedom. In the eyes of free blacks, Haiti represented a harbinger of hope for universal emancipation in its demonstration that “bondage was not an inevitable or eternal fate.”

The obstacles that dehumanization of slaves posed for emancipation played out as well in the movements for colonization and migration that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Davis believes that colonization, the effort to free blacks and return them to Africa, has been poorly understood by modern historians, and he seeks to introduce a more complex view of its character and appeal. The founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 was deeply influenced by fears that Haiti aroused about the potential for violence inherent in an oppressed black population, and Davis finds among colonization’s advocates the same preoccupation with the dehumanization of slaves that he identifies in discussions of the meanings of the Haitian Revolution.

Spokesmen for the American Colonization Society argued that removing blacks from the degradations of American slavery would enable them to prove their capacity for civilization and thus combat the prejudices that had grown up in response to slavery’s oppressions. White proponents of colonization, David argues, were genuinely perplexed about how to deal with racism and the conditions that had produced it. But their ideas were greeted with “vehement hostility” by free blacks who perceived the colonizationists’ purposes as racial removal rather than benevolent uplift, a conclusion encouraged by the racist remarks of such prominent advocates of colonization as Henry Clay, who called the free black population “a dangerous and useless part of the community.”

Yet some black leaders, such as Henry H. Garnet, proposed emigration schemes of their own, stressing Africa’s glorious past and envisioning an escape from white oppressions in a kind of proto–black nationalism. Davis underscores the “complex dynamic…between the white desire to expel and the black quest for independence.” But the bitter opposition of African-Americans, conveyed by publications like Samuel Cornish’s Freedom Journal, founded in 1827, and David Walker’s stirring 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, characterized colonization as itself a new form of oppression and thwarted any alliance between the movement and committed antislavery forces.

By the early 1830s a new biracial mobilization for “immediate” emancipation of American slaves emerged with the establishment of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831, with his “all-out attack” on colonization in 1832, and with the founding of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and 1833. Significantly, Davis points out, it was the financial support of free black Philadelphia merchant James Forten and a subscription list of which 75 percent were black readers that kept The Liberatoralive. And significantly, too, it was the accomplishments of the free black community, of men such as Forten, Douglass, and Walker, that best refuted the efforts to dehumanize their race.

The “free colored man’s elevation,” Frederick Douglass remarked, “is essential to the slave colored man’s emancipation.” The “first emancipation,” the wave of manumissions that followed the Revolution, together with the ending of slavery in the North, created a substantial free black community that became the core of the abolition movement. At the same time the lingering anomaly inherent in being at once black and free sharpened the contradiction between the prejudices of race and the new nation’s commitment to citizenship and equality.

In the repudiation of gradualism, Davis sees “a token of a major shift in intellectual history.” Garrison’s voice, as Forten observed, “operated like a trumpet call.” Although Garrison himself remained committed to pacifistic “moral suasion,” there emerged what Davis describes as a “very slow and gradual acceptance of violence,” encouraged by the outrages that followed the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and exemplified by the end of that decade in John Brown’s raid, which pointed the nation toward the violent end of slavery in the Civil War.

Davis, however, underscores the contingency of ultimate emancipation. The North could have decided not to fight; the South could have won—in which case, Davis believes, slavery would in all likelihood have continued into the twentieth century. Instead, the Emancipation Proclamation and, especially, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments established freedom and citizenship as the “culmination of the Age of Emancipation.”

Although the American Civil War ultimately proved the most significant instrument of liberation, Britain served throughout the Age of Emancipation as a “model” and “global leader,” combating the oceanic slave trade and freeing 800,000 slaves in its colonies. Its powerful abolition movement emerged in a different setting from that in the United States, however, and Davis uses the contrasts between them to illuminate each. With no slave population at home, British opposition to slavery did not stir up the kinds of fears of racial “amalgamation” and violence that challenged the American antislavery movement. The persistence of class hierarchies in Britain and its colonies made race seem a somewhat less necessary form of social division and order. Gradations of power and status contrasted with the starker American dichotomy of slave and free sustained by the boundaries of racism and legal bondage.

In both Britain and the United States, however, antislavery forces helped create the conditions for an emancipation that was, as Davis describes it, “astonishing…. Astonishing in view of the institution’s antiquity…, resilience, and importance.” Hailing this example of human beings acting so decisively against both habit and self-interest, Davis proclaims abolition to be “the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.”

David Brion Davis has spent a lifetime contemplating the worst of humanity and the best of humanity—the terrible cruelty and injustice of slavery, perpetuated over centuries and across borders and oceans, overturned at last because of ideas and ideals given substance through human action and human agency. He concludes his trilogy by contemplating whether the abolition of slavery might serve as precedent or model for other acts of moral grandeur. His optimism is guarded. “Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate.” Davis does, after all, describe the narrative of emancipation to which he has devoted his professional life as “astonishing.” But even in his amazement, he has written an inspiring story of possibility. “An astonishing historical achievement really matters.” And so does its history.

Letters

Thackeray & American Slavery May 8, 2014