A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery

'A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery provides a magisterial overview of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery from the mid-fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. Synthesizing a vast field of scholarship, including the latest important works, Kenneth Morgan here addresses the organisation of the slave trade, plantation slavery, resistance, abolition and emancipation, and the legacy of slavery. The author spans Europe, Africa, North, Central and South America, and includes essential information about slave demography and culture, the legal underpinnings of slavery, plantation economies and the great push to destroy inhuman bondage. Specialists and non-specialists alike will welcome this readable and succinct handbook, which should appear on the reading lists of many university courses.'

- Stephen D Behrendt, Associate Professor in History, Victoria University of Wellington, co-author of The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader

'This is an impressive book by one of Europe's leading historians of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Kenneth Morgan provides a comprehensive and very readable assessment of the European and African origins of slavery, of slaveholders and the enslaved, of the transportation of Africans to the Americas and of their experiences of enslavement and emancipation. Building on the latest scholarly work, Morgan has fashioned a penetrating assessment of how the institution of slavery was adapted over space and time, and in the process became ever more difficult to eliminate. Readers of this book will learn a great deal about and better understand not just historical slavery but also the myriad ways in which it ended. Both experts and those who are new to the subject will benefit from Morgan's able synthesis of a vast amount of scholarship, and his confident survey of the history of slavery across four hundred years and four continents. A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery is an excellent introduction to this fascinating subject.'