The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870

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Simon & Schuster, 1997 - 908 страници
No great historical subject is so laden with modern controversy or so obscured by myth and legend as the slave trade. Who were tbe slavers? How profitable was the business? Why did many African rulers and peoples collaborate? The strength of Hugh Thomas's book is that it begins with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, before Columbus's voyage to the New World, and ends with the last gasp of the slave trade, long since made illegal elsewhere, in Cuba and Brazil twenty-five years after the American Emancipation Proclamation. His narrative is vividly alive with villains and heroes, and illuminated by eyewitness accounts, many of which are published here for the first time. Hugh Thomas gives the reader the facts about the slave trade - shows us how whole towns, like Bristol and Liverpool in England, Nantes in France, or Newport in Rhode Island, grew and prospered on slavery; how each new discovery and colonization spurred the demand for slave labor. He confronts the thorny subject of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, documents the fact that many of the New England whaling captains became successful slavers on the side, and tells the story of the rising tide of the antislavery movement, first against the trade and then against the institution of slavery itself. He describes the work of men such as Montesquieu in France, Wilberforce in England, and Anthony Benezet in the United States who finally succeeded in turning public opinion against slavery and making it illegal in Europe and the New World.

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List of Maps
7
GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS
19
The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game
48
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Информация за автора (1997)

Hugh Swynnerton Thomas was born in Windsor, England on October 21, 1931. After studying history at Cambridge University, he worked at the British Foreign Office and was secretary to the British delegation at major disarmament talks. He lectured at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, Britain's premier officer training establishment. From 1979 to 1990, he served as the chairman of the Center for Policy Studies, a right-wing policy institute. He was an unofficial adviser to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war against Argentina, enlisted because of his deep knowledge of South America. He wrote numerous fiction and nonfiction works. His novels included The World's Game, The Oxygen Age, and Klara. His nonfiction books included Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, A History of the World, Rivers of Gold, The Golden Empire, and World Without End. The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1962. He was made a life peer in 1981 as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton. He died after having a stroke on May 7, 2017 at the age of 85.

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