 The most important of his books is his trilogy on the history of slavery in the Western world, which revealed the centrality of slavery in American and Atlantic history.The trilogy consisted of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture" (1966), "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823" (1975), and "The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation," (2014).He was committed to a conception of culture as process—-a process involving conflict, resistance, invention, accommodation, appropriation, and, above all, power, including the power of ideas.