Description
James Pope-Hennessy’s book is less comprehensive than its title implies. It is chiefly concerned with the English slave trade from the Guinea Coast and the Niger delta to the West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It makes only passing reference to the somewhat differently organized trade from Angola to Brazil and to the complex arrangements for supplying slaves to Spanish America Scelle’s classic Traite négrière, for example, is not mentioned. The book sheds no light on business organization or financing; it is not an essay in economic history. It consists mainly of word-pictures describing conditions in the trade and drawn from the published accounts of people either engaged in it or devoted to its suppression. The author has ransacked the English literature on this topic thoroughly; the familiar accounts of horrors—and, to this reviewer at least, one or two unfamiliar ones—are rehearsed; and as usual in reading such accounts, one is amazed at the calm acceptance of horrors by men who were not all brutes or monsters.
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