West Central Africa was involved in the transatlantic slave trade from its inception in the fifteenth century until it ended in the late nineteenth century. It’s the region that lost the largest number of enslaved people to the transatlantic slave trade, with over 5.6 million people taken away. And yet Angola, where three of the five main slaving ports were located, is little studied in English. Here, Mariana Candido, a professor at Emory University, introduces us to some of the best books (available in English) on this era of Angolan history, from the biography of one ruler, Njinga Mbandi, to a survey of the entire period.

In the 17th and 18th century millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas as slaves. This trade took place at the same time as ‘liberal’ ideas about the importance of human freedom took root in Great Britain and North America. Here, historian William A. Pettigrew recommends five books to help understand the slave trade, how it was established, why it flourished and why it was eventually abolished.

Race is a real and powerful force and one he has spent his adult life trying to understand, says Anglo-Nigerian historian, writer and producer, David Olusoga. He talks us through five books on the tragedy of slavery—from the horrors of the gulag, to the plantations of Virginia, to the Islamic slave trade.

Racism is not innate but emerges under special conditions, says the King’s College professor and author of the sweeping history Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. He chooses five books that inspired him.

Harvard professor and Pulitzer prize-winning historian Bernard Bailyn recommends reading on three centuries of empire, conflict and slave trading between the Americas, Europe and Africa