A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery (I.B.Tauris Short Histories)

New
Illustrated
2014
$20.59

From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean - the infamous Middle Passage - to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions - and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations - Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade's systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.

Synopsis

From 1501, when the first slaves arrived in Hispaniola, until the nineteenth century, some twelve million people were abducted from west Africa and shipped across thousands of miles of ocean - the infamous Middle Passage - to work in the colonies of the New World. Perhaps two million Africans died at sea. Why was slavery so widely condoned, during most of this period, by leading lawyers, religious leaders, politicians and philosophers? How was it that the educated classes of the western world were prepared for so long to accept and promote an institution that would later ages be condemned as barbaric? Exploring these and other questions - and the slave experience on the sugar, rice, coffee and cotton plantations - Kenneth Morgan discusses the rise of a distinctively Creole culture; slave revolts, including the successful revolution in Haiti (1791-1804); and the rise of abolitionism, when the ideas of Montesquieu, Wilberforce, Quakers and others led to the slave trade's systemic demise. At a time when the menace of human trafficking is of increasing concern worldwide, this timely book reflects on the deeper motivations of slavery as both ideology and merchant institution.

$20.59

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2 in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 264
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 30 Sep 2014
ISBN 10: 1780763875
ISBN 13: 9781780763873

Media Reviews

'A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery provides a magisterial overview of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery from the mid-fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. Synthesizing a vast field of scholarship, including the latest important works, Kenneth Morgan here addresses the organisation of the slave trade, plantation slavery, resistance, abolition and emancipation, and the legacy of slavery. The author spans Europe, Africa, North, Central and South America, and includes essential information about slave demography and culture, the legal underpinnings of slavery, plantation economies and the great push to destroy inhuman bondage. Specialists and non-specialists alike will welcome this readable and succinct handbook, which should appear on the reading lists of many university courses.' - Stephen D Behrendt, Associate Professor in History, Victoria University of Wellington, co-author of The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader; 'This is an impressive book by one of Europe's leading historians of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Kenneth Morgan provides a comprehensive and very readable assessment of the European and African origins of slavery, of slaveholders and the enslaved, of the transportation of Africans to the Americas and of their experiences of enslavement and emancipation. Building on the latest scholarly work, Morgan has fashioned a penetrating assessment of how the institution of slavery was adapted over space and time, and in the process became ever more difficult to eliminate. Readers of this book will learn a great deal about and better understand not just historical slavery but also the myriad ways in which it ended. Both experts and those who are new to the subject will benefit from Morgan's able synthesis of a vast amount of scholarship, and his confident survey of the history of slavery across four hundred years and four continents. A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery is an excellent introduction to this fascinating subject.' - Simon P Newman, Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History, University of Glasgow, author of A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic

Author Bio

Kenneth Morgan is Professor of History at Brunel University. He is the author of Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (1993), Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (2000), Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (2007) and Australia: A Very Short Introduction (2012).