Slavery in a global setting -- The ancient world -- Overland African slave routes -- European slavery and slave trades -- Exploration and the spread of sugar -- Europeans, slaves and West Africa -- Britain, slavery and the slave trade -- Africa -- The Atlantic -- Crossing the Atlantic -- Destinations -- Arrivals -- Brazil -- The Caribbean -- North America -- Cotton and the USA -- Slave resistance -- Abolition and emancipation -- East Africa and the Indian Ocean -- Slavery after abolition
Summary:
"The enslavement of Africans and their transportation across the Atlantic has come to occupy a unique place in the public imagination. Despite the wide-ranging atrocities of the twentieth century (including massive slave systems in Nazi Europe and the Russian Gulag), the Atlantic slave system continues to hold a horrible fascination. But slavery in the Atlantic world involved much more than the transportation of human cargo from one country to another, as Professor Walvin clearly explains in the Atlas of Slavery. In this new book he looks at slavery in the Americas in the broadest context, taking account of both earlier and later forms of slavery. The relationship between the critical continents, Europe, Africa and the Americas, is examined through a collection of maps and related text, which puts the key features of the history of slavery in their defining geographical setting. By foregrounding the historical geography of slavery, Professor Walvin shows how the people of three widely separated continents were brought together into an economic and human system that was characterized both by violence and cruelty to its victims and huge economic advantage to its owners and managers. Professor Walvin's synthesis of the complex history of Atlantic slavery provides a fresh perspective from which to view and understand one the most significant chapters in global history. We may think of slavery as a largely bygone phenomenon, but it is a practice that continues to this day, and the exploitation of vulnerable human beings remains a pressing contemporary issue."--Jacket
