CONTENTS
List of Maps
Introduction
Book One: GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS
1 What Heart Could Be So Hard?
2 Humanity Is Divided into Two
3 The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black
4 The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game
5 I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle
6 The Best and Strongest Slaves Available
7 For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women
8 The White Men Arrived in Ships with Wings
Book Two: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE TRADE
9 A Good Correspondence with the Blacks
10 The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda
11 Lawful to Set to Sea
12 He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This Wealth
Book Three: APOGEE
13 No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt As Great Britain
14 By the Grace of God
Book Four: THE CROSSING
15 A Filthy Voyage
16 Great Pleasure from Our Wine
17 Slave Harbors I
18 Slave Harbors II
19 A Great Strait for Slaves
20 The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair
21 If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea
22 God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That Remain
Book Five: ABOLITION
23 Above All a Good Soul
24 The Loudest Yelps for Liberty
25 The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down
26 Men in Africa of As Fine Feeling As Ourselves
27 Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?
Book Six: THE ILLEGAL ERA
28 I See We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age
29 The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin
30 Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade
31 Active Exertions
32 Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century
33 Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships
34 Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not
35 They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It
36 Cuba, the Forward Sentinel
Epilogue
The Slave Trade: A Reflection
Appendix 1. Some Who Lived to Tell the Tale
Appendix 2. The Trial of Pedro Jose de Zulueta in London for Trading in Slaves
Appendix 3. Estimated Statistics
Appendix 4. Selected Prices of Slaves 1440-1870
Appendix 5. The Voyage of the Enterprize
Sources and Notes
Index
Illustration Credits

LIST OF MAPS
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Medieval Trans-Saharan Caravan Routes
Portuguese Discoveries in the Late 15th Century
The Caribbean in the 18th Century
The Kingdom of Congo in the 16th Century
Slave Harbors of North America in the 18th Century
Brazil in the 18th Century
Slave Harbors of the 18th Century
The Naval Patrol
Slave Harbors of the 19th Century

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.