Exposes the story of how a group of ordinary working sailors, slaves, pirates, and indentured servants played a role in leading dozens of rebellions on both sides of the Atlantic during the expansion of trade and colonization in the early 17th century.

Product Description: The global commemorative events of 2007 that marked the bicentennial anniversary of the parliamentary abolition of the African slave trade provided opportunity for widespread discussion between politicians, community groups, museums and heritage organisations, the clergy, and scholars, as to the meanings of colonial and post-colonial freedom...read more

In this classic analysis and refutation of Eric Williams's 1944 thesis, Seymour Drescher argues that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for Great Britain but instead from the British public's mobilization against the slave trade, which forced London to commit what Drescher terms "econocide." This action, he argues, was detrimental to Britain's economic interests at a time when British slavery was actually at the height of its potential. Originally published in 1977, Drescher's work was instrumental in undermining the economic determinist interpretation of abolitionism that had dominated historical discourse for decades following World War II. For this second edition, which includes a foreword by David Brion Davis, Drescher has written a new preface, reflecting on the historiography of the British slave trade since this book's original publication.

Product Description: The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived...read more

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Describes the British headquarters at Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, the 'last look' point for more than three million men, women, and children sold into the seventeenth-century slave trade.

Describes the history of how the 'Africa Trade' formed the backbone of the British Empire. This book retells the story of how the international commodity market in Africans operated, how transportation of millions of Africans over thousands of miles developed and how the experience affected slaves both in bondage and then in freedom.

Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history - and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation.

Product Description: Numerous documents attest to the horrific conditions endured by African slaves during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Less well known is the perspective of those who wielded power during this dark time in human history...read more

For the best part of three centuries the material well-being of the western world was dependent on slavery. Yet these systems were mainly brought to a very rapid end. This text surveys the key questions of slavery, and traces the arguments which have swirled around its history in recent years. The latest findings on slavery are presented, and a comparative analysis of slavery in the English-speaking Americas is offered.

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Product Description: Spanning four decades of debate on slavery and antislavery, this provocative volume by leading historian Seymour Drescher provides an in-depth comparative analysis of the transatlantic slave trade and abolition movements of nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas, and their ongoing impact on twentieth-century politics and race relations...read more

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Looks at slavery in Britain, America, and the Caribbean during the colonial period, and describes the experiences of slaves and their captors

Product Description: This work set out to describe, in broad outline, the history of slavery and the slave trade in the British colonies up to 1838. In that year all slaves in British possession were freed. Moreover, those slaves were black, imported from Africa or born to Africans and their descendants in the Americas...read more