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History of the Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 Reprints Edition
Author(s): Hugh Thomas (Author)
- Publisher: Macmillan
- Publication Date: 18 Sept. 1998
- Edition: Reprints
- Language: English
- Print length: 928 pages
- ISBN-10: 0333731476
- ISBN-13: 9780333731475
Book Description
The author documents the slave trade, from its beginnings on the coast of West Africa in the fifteenth century, following the development of this massive shift of human lives across the centuries until its abolition in the late nineteenth century.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon Review
Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade takes a big-picture view of New World slavery in its international context. The Portuguese and Spanish who first came to Africa, he writes, arrived in search of gold. They found it, but they also found social systems in which the ransom, buying, and selling of human beings had long been established. These systems had existed in European antiquity, and now they were revived when, shortly after making contact with Africa, the European nations began to establish colonies on the other side of the Atlantic; the horrible traffic continued well into the 19th century. Thomas mines vast archives and previously published histories to make this sweeping and remarkably useful synthesis.
About the Author
Hugh Thomas has written numerous histories on the Spanish speaking world, including The Spanish Civil War, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1962, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom, The Conquest of Mexico and The Slave Trade. His book The Unfinished History of the World won the first National Book Award for History in 1980. Hugh Thomas was chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies 1979-89 and was awarded a peerage as Lord Thomas of Swynnerton in 1981.
