The Slave Trade

By Hugh Thomas

Book Overview

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684810638
• ISBN13: 9780684810638
• Release Date: November 1997
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 928 Pages
• Weight: 2.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 2.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A History of the Middle Passage

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.

An heavy book, worth reading.

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.

Nine Months

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.