After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. "The Slave Trade" is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.
Chapter 1: What Heart Could Be So Hard?
Chapter 2: Humanity Is Divided into Two
Chapter 3: The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black
Chapter 4: The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game
Chapter 5: I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle
Chapter 6: The Best and Strongest Slaves Available
Chapter 7: For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women
Chapter 8: The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings
Chapter 9: A Good Correspondence with the Blacks
Chapter 10: The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda
Chapter 11: Lawful to Set to Sea
Chapter 12: He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth
Chapter 13: No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt As Great Britain
Chapter 14: By the Grace of God
Chapter 16: Great Pleasure from Our Wine
Chapter 19: A Great Strait for Slaves
Chapter 20: The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair
Chapter 21: If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea
Chapter 22: God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain
Chapter 23: Above All a Good Soul
Chapter 24: The Loudest Yelps for Liberty
Chapter 25: The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down
Chapter 26: Men in Africa of As Fine Feelings As Ourselves
Chapter 27: Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?
Chapter 28: I See . . . We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age
Chapter 29: The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin
Chapter 30: Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade
Chapter 32: Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 33: Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships
Chapter 34: Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not
Chapter 35: They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It
Chapter 36: Cuba, the Forward Sentinel
Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale - APPENDIX ONE
The Trial of Pedro José de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves - APPENDIX TWO
Estimated Statistics - APPENDIX THREE
Selected Prices of Slaves 1440-1870 - APPENDIX FOUR
The Voyage of the Enterprize - APPENDIX FIVE