The Slave Trade

The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870

Author: Hugh Thomas
ISBN: 9780684810638

No great historical subject is so laden with modern controversy or so obscured by myth and legend as the slave trade. Who were tbe slavers? How profitable was the business? Why did many African rulers and peoples collaborate? The strength of Hugh Thomas's book is that it begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation. His narrative is vividly alive with villains and heroes, and illuminated by eyewitness accounts, many of which are published here for the first time. Hugh Thomas gives the reader the facts about the slave trade - shows us how whole towns, like Bristol and Liverpool in England, Nantes in France, or Newport in Rhode Island, grew and prospered on slavery; how each new discovery and colonization spurred the demand for slave labor. He confronts the thorny subject of

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publish Date: 1997

Subjects: Social Science / Sociology / General

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Black/African American (BLCK))