Most historians and biologists have come to Darwin through his book, On the Origin of Species. They have been curious about his biological life before this ground-breaking book and how he developed his ideas. They have had rich pickings; Darwin was an affluent middle-class Englishman with powerful connections and he was an enthusiastic correspondent. Adrian Desmond and James Moore have publishe...

Many ordinary' persons of Anglo-European stock participated, without qualm, in systems of slavery and apartheid. James M. McPherson, on examining the letters and diaries of 374 Confederate soldiers, finds that only twenty percent expressed pro-slavery sentiment. 2 "They took slavery for granted as part of the southern way of life for which they fought, and did not feel compelled to discuss it."...

The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the ...

Adam Smith made two positive claims about slavery in the context of developing economies. First, Smith explains that slavery is in general highly inefficient. By his account, the net product under freedom is 12 times larger than under slavery. Second, he observes that, despite its inefficiencies, slavery persists in most of the world. Taken together, these claims create a fundamental puzzle: Wh...

morrison’s song of solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which...

The fundamental problem raised by reparations, and particularly reparations litigation, is the question of how to apportion responsibility for historical wrongs. The most controversial harm targeted by reparations litigation is the enslavement of Africans and African Americans and the injuries consequent to that enslavement. The task faced by such litigation, therefore, is to construct persuasi...

Given the volume of recent works produced on the anti-slavery movement of the 19th–century Atlantic world, it was time for someone to create a new synthesis. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. It provides a catalogue of antislavery figures, organizati...

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the BNaïve Conception,^ and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of mora...

In addition to supervision costs, the labor cost of an enterprise (plantation) in the system of slavery consists of the cost of acquiring the slaves and the subsistence compensation given out to the slaves. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of supervision costs previously taken up in the theoretical literature on slavery, and focus on these two peculiar components of labor costs. We analy...