The Slave Trade

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.

Hugh Thomas is the author of The Spanish Civil War, Conquest, and many other books. A former Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (U.K.), he was made Lord Thomas of Swinnerton in 1981. He is currently a University Professor at Boston University. He lives in London.

CONTENTS List of Maps Introduction Book One: GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS 1 What Heart Could Be So Hard? 2 Humanity Is Divided into Two 3 The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black 4 The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game 5 I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle 6 The Best and Strongest Slaves Available 7 For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women 8 The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings Book Two: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE TRADE 9 A Good Correspondence with the Blacks 10 The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda 11 Lawful to Set to Sea 12 He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth Book Three: APOGEE 13 No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt As Great Britain 14 By the Grace of God Book Four: THE CROSSING 15 A Filthy Voyage 16 Great Pleasure from Our Wine 17 Slave Harbors I 18 Slave Harbors II 19 A Great Strait for Slaves 20 The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair 21 If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea 22 God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain Book Five: ABOLITION 23 Above All a Good Soul 24 The Loudest Yelps for Liberty 25 The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down 26 Men in Africa of As Fine Feeling As Ourselves 27 Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade? Book Six: THE ILLEGAL ERA 28 I See We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age 29 The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin 30 Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade 31 Active Exertions 32 Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century 33 Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships 34 Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not 35 They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It 36 Cuba, the Forward Sentinel Epilogue The Slave Trade: A Reflection Appendix 1. Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale Appendix 2. The Trial of Pedro Jose de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves Appendix 3. Estimated Statistics Appendix 4. Selected Prices of Slaves 1440-1870 Appendix 5. The Voyage of the Enterprize Sources and Notes Index Illustration Credits LIST OF MAPS The Atlantic Slave Trade Medieval Trans-Saharan Caravan Routes Portuguese Discoveries in the Late 15th Century The Caribbean in the 18th Century The Kingdom of Congo in the 16th Century Slave Harbors of North America in the 18th Century Brazil in the 18th Century Slave Harbors of the 18th Century The Naval Patrol Slave Harbors of the 19th Century