Reference no: EM131439830

Morgan’s work is a brilliant piece of scholarship that generally supports his ideas. I am comfortable that he made an adequate case that slavery fostered the development of democratic ideas but the evidence seems weaker that equality fostered slavery. The argument that slavery provided a non-threatening lower class, thereby allowing support for freedom, seems well done but the other side of the coin is not as well documented or discussed. My major objection with the work is that Morgan strays too far and too often from his main points, going into historical narratives that have little to do with his arguments. Rather than chapters on establishing Jamestown and Bacon’s rebellion I think he would have been better served to have used paragraphs that noted their relationship with his study. His diversion into indirectly related events acts only to distract from his rather fascinating ideas while adding little. I believe he could have written a shorter and better book by focusing on original scholarship and leaving textbook work to others.