The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas

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No great historial subject is so laden with modern controversy or so obscured by myth and legend as the slave trade. Who were the slaves? How profitable was the business? Why did many African rulers and people collaborate?

Now, finally, we have a balanced account, in a book as exciting and readable as it is important. Hugh Thomas, the author of such major historical works as Conquest and The Spanish Civil War, has spent more than thirty years studying in archives and libraries throughout Europe, Africa, the United States, and Latin America, and how now produced a major work of interpretation.

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.

Never before has the colossal impact of the slave trade been so meticulously described: It was not only people who made their fortunes by slaving but whole nations--for though slaves were shipped to the New World on a large scale by Spain and Portugal to cut sugar cane or to dig for gold, they were themselves, in fact, as valuable as the commodities for which they labored and died, the most precious cargo of all.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all history. Between 1492 and about 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to one port of another of the Americas. They were taken to work on sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields, or in houses as servants. The shippers were, in order of scale, the Portuguese (and Brazilians), the English, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the North Americans. At the height of the traffic, in the 1780s, the English and French were each carrying forty thousand slaves a year. These captives were uaually procured by barter with African monarchs or merchants who were established on the estuaries of nearly all the great African rivers that flow into the Atlantic. The goods exchanged for slaves were textiles, copper or iron bars, guns, drink (wine, brandy, and rum), and a vast number of miscellaneous objects such as beads, hats, shaving bowls, and knives. Hundreds of thousands of Africans participated in the trade, but especially the kings in Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Laongo, Congo, and Angola. Mozambique and Madagascar also contributed their thousands of prisoners to the European boats. Slavery in Africa resulted from captivity in war, from kidnappings or raids on neighbors, or sometimes from judicial decisions after crimes.

Slavery made England rich, as it had made Spain and Portugal rich before her; slavery to satisfy the need of France's Caribbean possessions made France rich and was still important enough commercially in the nineteenth century to make Napoleon sacrifice a French army to put down the slave revolt in what is now Haiti. 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 become successful slavers on the side, and tells the story of the rising tide of the antislavery movement, first against the trade and then agains the institution of slavery itself. He describes the work of men such as Montesquieu in France, Wilberforce in E ngland, 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.

Table of Contents

List of Maps

Introduction

 

Book One: Green Sea of Darkness

1. What Heart Could Be So Hard?

2. Humanity Is Divided into Two

3. The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black

4. The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game

5. I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle

6. The Best and Strongest Slaves Available

7. For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women

8. The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings

 

Book Two: The Internationalization of the Trade

9. A Good Correspondence with the Blacks

10. The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda

11. Lawful to Set to Sea

12. He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth

 

Book Three: Apogee

13. No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt

14. By the Grace of God

 

Book Four: The Crossing

15. A Filthy Voyage

16. Great Pleasure from Our Wine

17. Slave Harbors I

18. Slave Harbors II

19. A Great Strait for Slaves

20. The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair

21. If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea

22. God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain

 

Book Five: Abolition

23. Above All a Good Soul

24. The Loudest Yelps for Liberty

25. The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down

26. Men in Africa of As Fine Feeling As Ourselves

27. Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?

 

Book Six: The Illegal Era

28. I See...We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age

29. The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin

30. Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade

31. Active Exertions

32. Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century

33. Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships

34. Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not

35. They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It

36. Cuba, the Forward Sentinel

 

Epilogue

The Slave Trade: A Reflection

 

Appendix 1. Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale

Appendix 2. The Trial of Pedro Jose de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves

Appendix 3. Estimated Statistics

Appendix 4. Selected Prices for Slaves, 1440-1870

Appendix 5. The Voyage of the Enterprize

Sources and Credits

Index