Slave ships and slaving

This sober maritime history examines the Atlantic slave trade through the ships, sailors, merchants, and coastal settlements that sustained it. Rather than offering a complete political history, it traces the trade as experienced at sea and on the Guinea Coast, drawing on voyage narratives, recollections, and contemporary descriptions of ships and their operations.

Listeners will encounter accounts of notorious voyages, the deadly Middle Passage, mutinies, disease, shipboard discipline, and the dangers faced by crews as well as enslaved people. Chapters also explore British and American slavers, plantation markets, factory life on the African coast, clandestine voyages after abolition, and the final years of the trade. Richly informed by maritime experience and historical illustration, the book presents an unflinching record of a brutal system and the human suffering embedded in commercial seafaring.