Description

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A sweeping new history that reveals how British, African, and American merchants developed the transatlantic slave trade
 
“This is a landmark study given its clear status as easily the best researched and most comprehensive book on the British slave trade to date.”—David Eltis, coauthor of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
 
“A masterful account of one of the most brutal moments in the history of capitalist modernity. Radburn brilliantly details all aspects of the process of commodification of human beings in the Liverpool slave trade, vividly depicting the long journeys endured by Africans in Africa, across the Atlantic, and in the Americas.”—Leonardo Marques, Universidade Federal Fluminense
 
During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into a transatlantic system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.
 
In this wide-ranging history, Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of merchants collectively transformed the slave trade by devising highly efficient but violent new business methods. African brokers developed commercial infrastructure that facilitated the enslavement and sale of millions of people. Britons invented shipping methods that quelled enslaved people’s constant resistance on the Middle Passage. And American slave traders formulated brutal techniques through which shiploads of people could be quickly sold to colonial buyers. Truly Atlantic-wide in its vision, this study shows how the slave trade dragged millions of people into its terrible vortex and became one of the most important phenomena in world history.

About the Author

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Nicholas Radburn is a senior lecturer in Atlantic history at Lancaster University and coeditor of www.slavevoyages.org. He lives in Lancaster, England, formerly one of Britain’s largest slave-trading ports.

Praise For…

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“Radburn’s definitive and accessible debut lays bare the cold-blooded economic engine of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century, demonstrating how merchants in Britain, the U.S., and Africa refined their business practices to maximize their income. . . . Radburn provides just the right amount of detail, deftly balancing individual stories with objective data. The result is both an enlightening economic investigation and an unsparing documentation of atrocity.”—Publishers Weekly

“A meticulously researched account of how British slave merchants in their interactions with African agents made very calculated economic decisions in order to maximize the profits made from the slave trade, and how these decisions impacted Atlantic African societies and contributed to dehumanizing African men, women, and children.”—Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University

“An illuminating study of the raw ambition, brutal efficiency, and networked strategies of violence that underpinned the explosion of 18th-century British Atlantic-world slave trading. Radburn makes a compelling case for why these vaguely remembered ‘merchants’ should be reclaimed from respectability.”—Maeve Ryan, author of Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System

“This is a landmark study given its clear status as easily the best researched and most comprehensive book on the British slave trade to date.”—David Eltis, coauthor of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“This definitive analysis of the British slave trade, encompassing Europe, Africa, and the Americas, blends quantitative and qualitative research in a clear-eyed, chilling, and convincing account of a business even more ruthless than abolitionists imagined.”—Philip Morgan, Johns Hopkins University

“A masterful account of one of the most brutal moments in the history of capitalist modernity. Radburn brilliantly details all aspects of the process of commodification of human beings in the Liverpool slave trade, vividly depicting the long journeys endured by Africans in Africa, across the Atlantic, and in the Americas.”—Leonardo Marques, Universidade Federal Fluminense