Review
"Taken together, their stories provide a remarkably intimate insider's perspective on the slave trade, and give us some sense of its staggering human cost."--"Scotsman"
The Daily Telegraph
The Scotsman
Mail on Sunday
contradictions within the human heart.'
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
John Brewer, Sunday Times
BBC History Magazine, May 2007
Times Higher Educational Supplement
introduction for the general reader of what slavery meant to ordinary men
and women at the peak of its importance to Britain"
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Times
Financial Times
at the centre of the slave trade.'
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable. By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement - a trader, an owner and a slave - James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of its historic end in April 1807.
John Newton (1725-1807), best known as the author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood (1721-86) lived his life in a remote corner of western Jamaica and his unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner's life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies. Olaudah Equiano (1745-97) was practically unknown thirty years ago, but is now an iconic figure in black history and his experience as a slave speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded. All three men were contemporaries; they even came close to each other at different points of the Atlantic compass. But what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system.
