Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“Once you’ve read this book, you can’t sustain complacent cliches about the Western part in the slave trade. The detail is extraordinary. What I found particularly interesting and different was the sense of the commercial dynamic driving it. The story starts with one monopoly company, the Royal African Company, chartered by the English monarchy. It’s based in London but is elbowed out of the way by provincial merchants in Bristol and Liverpool. They create a trade that’s far more profitable because it is much better organized, with absolute cynicism about the subject of the trade: human beings. They’re treated as commodities with advantages and disadvantages. There are the young, the elderly, the weak, the sick, and then there is the absolute prize: healthy young adult males. The essence of the trade is to acquire those assets, sort them out, and get them across the Atlantic with minimum loss, i.e. death.” Read more...

The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Theologians & Historians of Religion