Description
Book SynopsisBetween 1500 and 1870, millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic by European traders to work as slaves in the Americas. They were shipped in conditions of great cruelty to lead lives of hard, unremitting labour, subject to degradation and violence. The products of their labour – primarily sugar, coffee and tobacco – were sent back to Europe and the profits derived from slavery helped fuel European economic development in the 18th and 19th centuries. The cost in lives and human suffering was enormous. First published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, this reissue of Transatlantic Slavery with new material documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.
Trade Review…very readable collection of articles from leading experts in the field of slavery studies. Walvin’s account of the move towards abolition makes particularly pertinent reading as we approach the 2007 bicentenary of the ending of the slave trade in Britain, but perhaps most relevant are the essays on how, and why, we should commemorate this difficult aspect of our history.
David Musgrove, BBC History magazine
The essays consistently challenge the lay reader to reconsider received wisdom about slavery and its consequences, and cause the specialist to rethink approaches to primary sources, the categories we use, and the meaning of our research… a good introduction to the questions and themes that drive scholarship about the waxing and waning of the international enslavement of Africans.
Anna S. Agbe-Davies, Department of Anthropology, DePaul University
Table of Contents
- Contents
- Foreword – Reverend Jesse Jackson
- What is slavery?
- A history of transatlantic slavery
- African pasts
- Why Africans?
- Why slavery?
- Operation of the slave trade
- Liverpool: Capital of the transatlantic slave trade
- Reasons for Liverpool’s success
- Economic benefits of slavery
- Tropical goods and the rise of the consumer society
- Enslavement and the Middle Passage
- The Middle Passage: voyage through death
- Impact on Africa
- Life and death in the Americas
- Sale and ‘seasoning’
- Chattel slavery
- Plantation life
- Pioneers of the Americas
- Resistance
- Maroons
- Pro-slavery arguments
- The end of slavery
- Abolition of the British slave trade
- Freedom in the Americas
- The legacy of slavery
- Racism
- The fight for civil rights
- Global inequalities
- Since colonisation
- Reparations
- Cultural transformations
- ‘The sun never sets on the children of Africa’
- An unquenchable spirit
- The International Slavery Musuem
- Further Reading
- Museums and websites to visit
- Acknowledgements
