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, Hugh Thomas
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 controversial questions as who the traders were,
the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples
willingly collaborated.