Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> That explains why they soon outnumbered th white indentured servants everywhere south of the Potomac. In the West Indies they outnumbered the whites of all categories sometimes by more than ten to one. Because they did not reproduce themselves on West Indian sugar plantations where many of the owners said that it was “cheaper to buy than breed” the entire slave population of some islands had to be renewed from Africa every twenty or thirty years. Comparative figures would be im- possible to assemble but it seems probable that until the end of the eighteenth century more Negro than white colonists had been carried to the two Americas. This book tries to tell where the Negroes came from how they were enslaved in Africa how they were purchased by sea captains how they were packed into the hold like other merchandise (though with greater losses in transit) and how the survivors were sold in West Indian and American markets. It tells how the trade got under way how it rapidly expanded after 1650 with the development of the plantation system how it was legally abolished by Great Britain and the United States in 1807 how it persisted and even grew for a time in spite of Her Majesty’s Navy and how it ended with the Civil War. The story has not been told on the same broad scale for the last sixty years. During that time there have been many books that presented new facts about the trade or helped to explain its background. To mention only a few there are various works by Melville J. Herskovits notably The Myth of the Negro Past which reveal how much Africa has contributed to the cultures of the two Americas and there is Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery which explains the effect of the trade on the industrial revolution. There is Elizabeth Donnan’s four-volume collection Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America an invaluable source book containing the materials for a new history. (SP)