The Atlantic Slave Trade

By Herbert S. Klein and Jacob Klein

Book Overview

This survey is a synthesis of the economic, social, cultural, and political history of the Atlantic slave trade, providing the general reader with a basic understanding of the current state of scholarly knowledge of forced African migration and compares this knowledge to popular beliefs. The Atlantic Slave Trade examines the four hundred years of Atlantic slave trade, covering the West and East African experiences, as well as all the American colonies and republics that obtained slaves from Africa. It outlines both the common features of this trade and the local differences that developed. It discusses the slave trade's economics, politics, demographic impact, and cultural implications in relationship to Africa as well as America. Finally, it places the slave trade in the context of world trade and examines the role it played in the growing relationship between Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. This new edition incorporates the latest findings of the last decade in slave trade studies carried out in Europe and America. It also includes new data on the slave trade voyages which have just recently been made available to the public.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521182506
• ISBN13: 9780521182508
• Release Date: June 2010
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Short but insightful

The Atlantic Slave Trade is an important part of history of several nations: great part of Africa of course, the nations in America who were immmersed in this trade as buyers and those European countries who had control of the trade to its colonies. One important question that I had in my mind before reading this book was "why Africans were enslaved", curiously the first words of chapter 1, and why in this New World, the American Indians were not used as workers? Seems that everything conspired for this trading to flourish, in particular the decline of native population and because those native became new Christians. But seems there is another reason, not named in this book, and is that those native american were not that productive than Africans or Chinese. This is a short book and the author provide an insightful introduction, focusing especially in the economic side of this trade and its organization, showing a great deal of statistical information. There is not much of the people side of events -- I am referring to the sufferings stories of the Africans, but it does name the story of Igbo Equiano, an African slave that wrote a book about his experiences and I'm eager to know more about it.