The Slave Trade

The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870

Hugh Thomas

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476737454
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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, Hugh Thomas describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history.

Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts.

Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time, but to answer controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated.

Table of contents

• Cover
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Book One: Green Sea of Darkness
• Book Two: The Internationalization of the Trade
• Book Three: Apogee
• Book Four: The Crossing
• Book Five: Abolition
• Book Six: The Illegal Era
• Epilogue
• Illustrations
• The Slave Trade: A Reflection
• Appendix 1: Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale
• Appendix 2: The Trial of Pedro José de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves
• Appendix 3: Estimated Statistics
• Appendix 4: Selected Prices of Slaves
• Appendix 5: The Voyage of the Enterprize
• Sources and Notes
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright