The first two chapters, are concerned with the initial period of slave-trade. The Portuguese were followed, from the 16th* century on, by arrivals in West Africa from the Netherlands, England, and France. The European nations embarked on colonial expansion had by then already seized territories on the American mainland and in the West Indies. The colonies needed cheap labour, and that the Europeans found in Africa.
Nowhere in Africa was the slave hunt more ruthless than in Congo and Angola, with the Portuguese concentrating exclusively on it there as Brazil was opened. The historians tell us that in a century between the 1580s and the 1680s no less than a million slaves were taken to the New World from Angola alone.
Chapter Two is about East Africa in the 16th-18th centuries, the arrival there of Europeans, and their relations with the Swahili Arabs and indigenous Africans. All through that time the Arab slave-trade was far in excess of the Europeans', the book points out. In the 15th-18th centuries, the Arabs kept up the flow of slaves to the East dispite the European presence. The European-American slave-trade picked up in the 19th century, already after nearly all European and American, nations had abolished the practice.
Chapter Three investigates the second period, when the “free” slave-trade was at its apex. The flourishing plantations and mines in the West Indies and both Americas supplying Europe with their products required ever more slave labour: the Barbados colonists alone were pressing for no less than 25,000 sla ves a year to meet their needs. The study shows the way the slave-trade affected Europe, specifically the slave-trading cities like Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and others.
Chapter Four considers the systems of slave-trade in West Africa; it peruses a mine of documents like stories by slaveship crewmen, slavers, travellers, as well as parliamentary documents snowing the way the slave-trade was being kept up by sustained demand from Europe. We learn of how Africans were being enslaved through armed raids by Europeans on African villages, brazen hostage-taking, intertribe wars, special “slave-hunting” expeditions, kidnapping, selling people into slavery for crimes on charges often trumped up by the slavers. We further learn about the chief methods of slave purchases by European and American slave-traders. The chapter also describes the trade itself and the wares Africans demanded from the Europeans in exchange for the slaves.
Chapter Five looks at the Africans' resistance to the trade, with episodes from numerous uprisings on the slaveships and unabating freedom stirrings on the New World plantations. By contrast the author offers evidence to prove that up to now there were no evidence of uprisings in Africa itself against the practice.
Chapter Six explores moves to abolish the slave-trade, as well as the origins of racist attitudes towards Africans. Abolition campaigning peaked in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries in Europe and the newly founded US. The study cites the reasons for slave-trade abolishion specific to each particular slaver nation and tells about campaign leaders, among them A. Benezet, T. Clarkson, W. Wilberforce, Abbot Gregoir, and the others. It was also at that time, we learn, that racism came on the scene and subsequently evolved as a theory of Africans' “inferiority” to the Europeans, as slavers were casting about for an excuse for their practices.
Chapter Seven is on the closing period of the slave-trade, the Contraband traffic from Africa. It probes the reasons for it and the abolition campaign mounted in Britain, featuring В«mixedВ» commissions, anti-slavery blockades of the African coastline, and suchlike. It next surveys the abolition drive in major European nations and the US and reaction to it by the Russian press as indicative of Russian liberal thinking on the issue.
Chapter Eight turns to the slave-trade in West and East Africa in the lQth century as contrasted with the free slave trade.
Chapter Nine regards the latter decades of the transatlantic slave traffic, as it gradually gave way to colonial expansion on the continent.
In summing up the author looks at the consequences of the slave-trade for the Africans and for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and America.
The bibliography has documents from the Liverpool archives, the British state archives, press reports from the slave-trade days, an array of memoirs, works by abolitionists, etc.
There are also illustrations, maps, and a geographical index.
