The Trader, The Owner, The Slave

Nov 19, 2024 5:22 PM

Author:James Walvin

There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable. By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement. James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807.

John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition. Thomas Thistlewood's (1721-86) unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner's life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies. Olaudah Equiano's (1745-97) experience as a slave now speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded. All three men were contemporaries but what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system.

Reviews

Much more than just a catalogue of horrors... James Walvin is extraordinarily alert to the contradictions within the human heart... Walvin is never blind to the horrors of slavery, nor to the responsibility of individuals for their actions. But he recognises that the world was different then and that the institution of slavery encouraged individual acts of evil that would otherwise never have occurred

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday

Taken together, their stories provide a remarkably intimate insider's perspective on the slave trade, and give us some sense of its staggering human cost

—— Michael Kerrigan , Scotsman

How did Britain, the 'slave trading poacher' of the 18th century, transform herself into the 'abolitionist game-keeper' of the 19th century?... James Walvin, a renowned historian of black people in Britain, finds answers to this mystery in the lives of three men who contributed, sometimes unwittingly, to the demise of a seemingly unassailable evil

—— Esther Godfrey , Daily Telegraph

James Walvin here addresses the enormity of the slave trade by looking in depth at three individuals inextricably bound up in it

—— London Review of Books

A remarkable and gripping story, asking profound questions

—— Independent

James Walvin provides engrossing portraits of three individuals at the centre of the slave trade

—— Financial Times

Cleary written and well-researched

—— Paul Callan , Daily Express

A remarkable and gripping story

—— Independent

Deftly crafted... The power of Walvin's stories lies in their details

—— Sunday Times

The inspiring lives of two unique people, and Tolan's compassion in narrating them, illuminate the tragedy of Palestine in the most moving and revealing way

—— Karma Nabulsi, Prize Research Fellow, Oxford University

A hard book to read with dry eyes and without a lump in one's throat. And hard to read, also, without feeling - dare one even say the word? - something approaching hope

—— Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King Leopold's Ghost

An understated clash of cultures tale, delicately told

—— Radio Times

Impeccably researched... this narrative illustrates the possibility of compassionate imagination

—— TLS

Beautifully written

—— Tam Dalyell, MP

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