The Slave Trade - The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870

The Slave Trade - The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870

by Hugh Thomas

Phonix $272

Civilised society in the 19th century took for granted 'rights of oppression and compulsion', the Daily Telegraph's Max Harris says, and the traffic in slaves from Africa was merely an extreme manifestation of this belief. Hugh Thomas, former professor of history at the University of Reading, hails from the 'broad sweep of history' school. In the course of an exhaustively researched 800 pages (and 125 pages for appendices, notes, bibliography and index), The Slave Trade probes the commerce of slavery that began in the 15th century, when Portugal found not gold on the west coast of Africa but men and women. Spain opened up the market and the French, Dutch and British soon muscled in (Britain notable for its methodical use of slaves to build plantation economies in the Caribbean and North America). Thomas pulls no punches about Africa's complicity in the trade. Abolitionists ended Britain's involvement in slavery in the early 19th century, although it took civil war to halt it in America.