Books by Nicholas Radburn
“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
Interviews where books by Nicholas Radburn were recommended
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1
The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom
by David Woodman -
2
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
by Tim Weiner -
3
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World
by Selena Wisnom -
4
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
by Garrett Graff -
5
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
by Sophia Rosenfeld -
6
Augustine the African
by Catherine Conybeare
New History Books
New History Books
It’s a golden age for historical writing, as well-researched and sometimes quite specialist books by historians are written in an engaging style for a broad audience. History books out in recent months range from ancient Assyria to the CIA in the 21st century.
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1
Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
by Joya Chatterji -
2
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
by Nandini Das -
3
Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
by Nicholas Radburn -
4
Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution
by Andrew Seaton -
5
Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage
by Jonny Steinberg -
6
Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022
by Frank Trentmann
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch
To win the Wolfson History Prize, a book must be both original and accessible to the general reader. British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the six books that made the 2024 shortlist, from the voyage of an English diplomat to Mughal India to the intimacy of a South African marriage, from the barbarity of the slave trade in the 18th century to the history of an institution that provides free health care to all.
