That accumulation of wealth was increasingly driven by international trade. As Professor Davis later wrote in The New York Review of Books, “There is now impressive evidence that the economic importance of slavery increased in the 19th century along with the soaring global demand for such consumer goods as sugar, coffee, tobacco and cotton textiles.”

The second volume was particularly noteworthy for its nuanced discussion of the relationship between emerging antislavery sentiment and a new commercial and industrial class. Some abolitionists in England and the United States were motivated by capitalist interests, he wrote, seeing slavery as stagnating the South economically in an increasingly mechanized world.

“The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation” examined the rise of abolitionist sentiment in England and the United States more fully. It included a surprising four chapters about the colonization movement, which aimed to resettle free black people and emancipated slaves on the west coast of Africa. Professor Davis located the reasons for its appeal, to both black and white people, in the movement’s evocation of the Exodus narrative.

Professor Davis also argued for the centrality of free blacks like James Forten, Samuel Cornish and Frederick Douglass to the development of radical abolitionism in the United States. They were “the key to slave emancipation,” he wrote, not only in their contributions to the movement but also because their lives demonstrated that the “dehumanization” of slavery had not made blacks unfit for freedom.

In these books Professor Davis “captured as no other scholar has the sweep of what he has called inhuman bondage and its abiding legacy,” the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, one of Dr. Davis’s students, wrote in an email.

Dr. Foner called Professor Davis “one of the most influential historians of his generation.”

“No one,” he wrote, also in an email, “did more to inspire the revolution in historical understanding that places slavery at the center of American history and indeed the history of the West.”