ABSTRACT
There are two key secondary themes in David Brion Davis’s book The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. The first is the tension between natural rights and private property and how this is expressed in political philosophy; natural rights are those rights that, according to the eighteenth-century political philosopher Thomas Paine, belong to all of us by virtue of the fact that we exist. The second key theme concerns the different ways in which antislavery and abolition developed in America and Britain. America boasted one of the first active antislavery societies, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded by the Quakers in 1775—yet the antislavery movement seemed to flounder in that country during this period, while it made great strides in Britain. Davis also looks at the relationship between slavery, antislavery, and abolition in the light of the rise of capitalism.
