The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997, and it is the most comprehensive narrative history of the transatlantic slave trade available in a single volume. Thomas covers four centuries — from the first Portuguese slave raids on the West African coast in the 1440s through the final suppression of the Brazilian and Cuban trades in the 1860s — treating the subject with the same combination of exhaustive research and powerful narrative that distinguished his earlier works.
The book’s scope is genuinely global: Thomas examines the trade from every perspective — the African kingdoms that sold captives, the European merchants who transported them, the plantation economies that consumed them, and the abolitionists who fought to end the system. He is scrupulous about numbers (drawing on the most recent demographic research to estimate the total volume of the trade at approximately eleven million people) and about the economics (the profits, the costs, the role of the trade in financing European industrialization).
Thomas does not moralize — the horror of the subject speaks for itself — but neither does he adopt the false neutrality that treats the trade as merely an economic system to be analyzed without moral judgment. His descriptions of the Middle Passage, of slave markets, and of plantation conditions are precise, restrained, and devastating precisely because they are understated.
Collecting The Slave Trade
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $8–$20
- First UK edition (Picador): $20–$50