The Slave Trade

The most important thing to note about the title of this brilliant book is that it is about the slave TRADE, not slavery per se. For descendants of slaves, this distinction may be pretty meaningless, but to the eighteenth century abolitionists it was critical. As Thomas explains, opponents of slavery such as Lord Wilberforce premised their campaign on the theory that the trade in slaves - with its horrendous "middle passage" in which African men, women and children were piled into rotting hulks for weeks on end - was far more deserving of abolition of than the practice of slavery itself. As Thomas points out, the logic of this position now seems extremely dubious, for even after the British and other European navies had suppressed the cross-Atlantic trade, many countries retained their slave plantations, most notably the Southern United States, Brazil and Cuba. When one tallies up those who traded in slaves, one finds a scandalously large and non-exclusive club - virtually all the nations of Europe, and all the colonial and "liberated" powers of North America, starting with Henry the Navigator of Portugal and ending with the newly formed states of c. 19th Latin America. In 900 pages, Thomas chronicles a trade that covered four continents and four centuries. This is THE work on the slave trade.

A good book on a horrifying subject. On which I learned that, from the about 11 million slaves carried across the Atlantic between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, no less than 4.5 million was by Portuguese (and Brasilian) traders, about the double of the next larger carrier, Britain. In a country where everybody is so justly proud of the overseas discoveries of the 15th and 16th Centuries maybe we should pay a little more attention to the dark side of the enterprise.

Fascinating, and will recalibrate all you think you know about slavery in America. You will learn:-Fewer than 5 per cent of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to this country.-Slaves were sold to European merchants by other Africans who had enslaved them in the first place. -Several of Africa's proudest empires were built on the sale of slaves. For centuries Africa's chief export was human beings. Slavery was an African institution long before it spread to the South, and there was no abolition movement to trouble it. When Europe banned the slave trade, African economies reeled.-Slavery still exists there, in Sudan and Mauritania and probably elsewhere.-In the Arab world African slaves were highly prized as eunuchs, and many young African men died in the process. The prevalence of eunuchs probably explains why African slavery didn't leave the Arab world with a "race problem." Given this history, it's ironic that so many American blacks adopt Arab names to spite the white man and to achieve a supposedly independent "identity." Recommended

Arghhhh! This book took me nine months to get through! Still, this super-detailed, eye-opening account of the slave trade should be required reading for every high school senior in the world. I was suprised not only by the culpability of the Africans themselves but by that of Hume, Swift, Voltaire...the greatest champions of liberty our civilization has known! I can't believe I didn't know this stuff! I hope there will be a second edition that takes us up to the slavery currently going on in Mauritania and the Sudan.