Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 912 pages
- Published by: Simon & Schuster February 3, 1999
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0684835657
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0684835655
-
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
- Weighs: 2 pounds
Product Review
The Slave Trade is a massive (900-page) book that attempts to document the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, a sordid business that somehow prospered for more than four centuries. As the sheer heft of the book might indicate, the story is complicated. Much of the extensive research conducted by Hugh Thomas relates to rivalries both in Europe and Africa. Those who wonder how
Slavery could have existed in the United States may find revelatory the moral ambiguity of how the business of transporting slaves was conducted.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
YA-Thomas concentrates on the economics, social acceptance, and politics of the slave trade. The scope of the book is amazingly broad as the author covers virtually every aspect of the subject from the early days of the 16th century when great commercial houses were set up throughout Europe to the 1713 Peace Treaty of Utrecht, which gave the British the right to import slaves into the Spanish Indies. The account includes the anti-slavery patrols of the 19th century and the final decline and termination in the early 20th century. Through the skillful weaving of numerous official reports, financial documents, and firsthand accounts, Thomas explains how
Slavery was socially acceptable and shows that people and governments everywhere were involved in itAfrom African kings and Arab slave traders to the Europeans and Americans who bought and transported them to the New World. Despite the volatility of the subject, the author remains emotionally detached in his writing, yet produces a highly readable, informative book. A superb addition to YA collections.
Robert Burnham, R. E. Lee High School, Springfield, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader ReviewsThe 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.
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