Day 29 Slave Trade Research

Research on Slave Trade

• Jews and the American Slave Trade
• by Saul S. Friedman
• Amazon Comment: The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.
• Slave Trade of Eastern Africa
• by R.W. Beachey
• Amazon Comment: 
• Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader
• by Kevin Bales
• Amazon Comment: Although slavery is illegal throughout the world, we learned from Kevin Bales's highly praised exposé, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, that more than twenty-seven million people—in countries from Pakistan to Thailand to the United States--are still trapped in bondage. With this new volume, Bales, the leading authority on modern slavery, looks beyond the specific instances of slavery described in his last book to explore broader themes about slavery's causes, its continuation, and how it might be ended. Written to raise awareness and deepen understanding, and touching again on individual lives around the world, this book tackles head-on one of the most urgent and difficult problems facing us today.
• The African in Latin America
• by Ann M. Pescatello
• Amazon Comments: Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975, this volume is directed toward students of history, sociology and minority studies who wish to gain a fuller understanding of the experience of Africans in the New World and of the contributions they have made to Latin American culture.
• The Sophists
• by W.K.C. Guthrie
• Amazon Comment: The third volume of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek thought, entitled The Fifth-Century Enlightenment, deals in two parts with the Sophists and Socrates, the key figures in the dramatic and fundamental shift of philosophical interest from the physical universe to man. Each of these parts is now available as a paperback with the text, bibliography and indexes amended where necessary so that each part is self-contained. The Sophists assesses the contribution of individuals like Protagoras, Gorgias and Hippias to the extraordinary intellectual and moral fermant in fifth-century Athens. They questioned the bases of morality, religion and organized society itself and the nature of knowledge and language; they initiated a whole series of important and continuing debates, and they provoked Socrates and Plato to a major restatement and defence of traditional values.
• The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century
• by William Gervase Clarence-Smith
• Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade
• by Randy Sparks
• Amazon Comment: Annamaboe was the largest slave trading port on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, and it was home to successful, wily African merchants whose unusual partnerships with their European counterparts made the town and its people an integral part of the Atlantic's webs of exchange. Where the Negroes Are Masters brings to life the outpost's feverish commercial bustle and continual brutality, recovering the experiences of the entrepreneurial black and white men who thrived on the lucrative traffic in human beings.  Located in present-day Ghana, the port of Annamaboe brought the town's Fante merchants into daily contact with diverse peoples: Englishmen of the Royal African Company, Rhode Island Rum Men, European slave traders, and captured Africans from neighboring nations. Operating on their own turf, Annamaboe's African leaders could bend negotiations with Europeans to their own advantage, as they funneled imported goods from across the Atlantic deep into the African interior and shipped vast cargoes of enslaved Africans to labor in the Americas.
• Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade
• by Sian Rees
• Amazon Comment: 
• In 1807, at the height of the Napoleonic war, ships of nearly all the European nations crowded the malarial wharves of West Africa where merchants traded at the great slaveholding pens and packed their human property into ships’ holds bound for the sugar mills of Cuba and Haiti, and the tobacco plantations of Virginia.  In that same year Great Britain passed the Abolition Act, and the last English slave ship left the African coast with her cargo, shortly to be replaced by the ships and men of the Royal Navy’s Preventive Squadron. For the next fifty years this small fleet patrolled 3,000 miles of treacherous coastline in a determined, unilateral, and only quasi-legal effort to interdict vessels with their human cargoes.
• Inheriting the Trade; A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History
• by Thomas Norman DeWolf
• Amazon Comment: In 2001, Thomas DeWolf discovered that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for transporting at least ten thousand Africans. This is his memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced their ancestors' steps through the notorious triangle trade route—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states.
• The African Salve in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650
• by Frederick P. Bowser
• Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
• by Walter Johnson
• Amazon Comment: Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved. Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution“ in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.
• Wives, Slaves, and Concubines
• by Eric Jones
• Amazon Comment: Wives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period—changes that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company’s Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of 18th-century Batavia-Jakarta.
• London, Metropolis of the Slave Trade
• by James Rawley
• Amazon Comment: "The recognition that ordinary people could and did trade in slaves, as well as the fact that ordinary people became slaves, is, indeed, the beginning of comprehending the enormity of the forced migration of eleven million people and the attendant deaths of many more."
• In London, Metropolis of the Slave Trade, James A. Rawley collects some of his best works from the past three decades. Also included in this volume are three new pieces: an essay on a South Carolina slave trader, Henry Laurens; an analysis of the slave trade at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and a portrait of John Newton, a slave trader who became a priest in the Church of England and composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” as well as an outspoken opponent of the trade.
• African and the Industrial Revolution in England
• by J.E. Inikori
• Amazon Comment: Drawing on classical development theory and recent theoretical advances on the connection between expanding markets and technological developments, this book reveals the critical role of the expansion of Atlantic commerce in the successful completion of England's industrialization from 1650-1850. The volume is the first detailed study of the role of overseas trade in the Industrial Revolution. It revises other explanations that have recently dominated the field and shifts the assessment of African contribution away from the debate on profits.
• White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
• by Don Jordan
• Amazon Comment: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.  Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.
• The History of White People
• by Nell Irvin Painter
• Amazon Comment: Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events. 70 black-and-white illustrations
• Royal African Company
• by K.G. Davies
• Amazon Comment: 
• The Shell Money of the Slave Trade
• by Jan Hogendorn
• Amazon Comment: This study examines the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade. The shells were carried from the Maldives to the Mediterranean by Arab traders for further transport across the Sahara, and to Europe by competing Portuguese, Dutch, English and French traders for onward transport to the West African coast. In Africa they served to purchase the slaves exported to the New World, as well as other less sinister exports. Over a large part of West Africa they became the regular market currency, but were severely devalued by the importation of thousands of tons of the cheaper Zanzibar cowries. Colonial governments disliked cowries because of the inflation and encouraged their replacement by low-value coins. They disappeared almost totally, to re-appear during the depression of the 1930s, and have been found occasionally in the markets of remote frontier districts, avoiding exchange and currency control problems.
• Confronting the Classics
• by Mary Beard
• Amazon Comment: Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people―the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as gospel―not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world is still very much alive. 17 illustrations
• Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade
• by Leda Farrant
• The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815
• by Johannes Postma
• Amazon Comment: Presenting a thorough analysis of the Dutch participation in the transatlantic slave trade, this book is based upon extensive research in Dutch archives. The book examines the whole range of Dutch involvement in the Atlantic slave trade from the beginning of the 1600s to the nineteenth century.
• A Saint In The Slave Trade: Peter Claver 1581-1654
• by Arnold Lunn and Peter Claver
• World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil
• by Robert Edgar Conrad
• Amazon Comment: This is a tightly written account of the slave trade between Brazil and Africa, focusing on the 19th century. The seizure of blacks in Africa, their passage to America, and their distribution, mainly to the coffee region, are examined by Conrad, who has already made his mark as a historian of slavery in Brazil. When the British began pressing Portugal to stop shipping blacks to Brazil, the illegal trade began. Conrad's strength is in exploring the political ramifications of the trade. He here recasts materials from his other books into a readable although thin volume. A solid study mainly for undergraduates. Nicholas P. Cushner, History Dept., Empire State Coll., SUNY , Buffalo Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
• The Slave Ship Fredensborg
• by Leif Svalesen
• Amazon Comment: The Slave Ship Fredensborg, Leif Svalesen  The best documented account to date of a working slave ship, fully illustrated.  "Svalesen has turned up quite an amazing depth of sources on this ship! They allow him to reconstruct the tenor of the voyage in engaging, vivid detail, even to develop aspects of some of the personalities on board. It reads, when the sources are rich enough to bring it alive in these terms, like a dramatic narrative of the sea.... the illustrations are often new, mostly well integrated into the text.... They are a significant attraction in the published book...." —Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia
• The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade
• by William St. Clair
• Amazon Comment: Called one of the best books of the year by The Economist, the London Times, and Publishers Weekly, this is the gripping history of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the African headquarters of the British slave trade for nearly one hundred and fifty years—until the legal trade was abolished in 1807.
• The Exploitation of East African, 1856-1890;: The Slave Trade and the Scramble
• by Reginald Coupland
• Amazon Comment: London published African History