Overview

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.

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9781780763873

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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

Author Information

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).

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