This is an excellent introduction to slavery and the British Empire. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking an introduction to the topic, and to anyone looking for an introductory text for undergraduates. There are many, many hotly contested controversies in the literature on slavery and the slave trade. Too often introductory texts present biased overviews of the debates with an ax to grind. This book by Kenneth Morgan is the most balanced introduction I have read. In fact, it may be too balanced in the sense that sometimes I wanted to know what Kenneth Morgan himself thought.

The book has eight chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. Chapter 1 (“Slavery and the Slave Trade”) gives a broad overview of the British experience. A relatively lengthy review of this chapter will give the reader a sense of the depth and range of the material that you will find in this book. British participation in New World sugar production begins with the capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 by Oliver Cromwell's forces. One will then find a very good comparative discussion of the rise of slave production in the British Empire. It begins in Barbados in the 1650s. Rising sugar demand in the 1650s triggers a transition from a white farmer society to a slave plantation economy. The discussion then moves to the Chesapeake, where the transition is from indentured servitude to African slavery in the 1690s. This is the episode most familiar to American economic historians and has to do with declining transportation costs, rising prices of indentured servants, and declining slave prices. The discussion then moves to South Carolina, where there is no transition at all but reliance on slave labor from the beginning based on models introduced from Barbados.

This chapter puts the number of slaves carried across the Atlantic at 12 million. The number keeps creeping up from Philip Curtin's 11 million. The transatlantic slave trade database is now up to more than 13 million and we know that database under-counts the Portuguese and Brazilian trade by a significant amount. The chapter ends with a good discussion of the social and ideological process and justifications for enslaving Africans. It argues that there is more than economics involved, but some racism as wellotherness. Natural rights philosophers like John Locke accepted slavery (in fact, Locke was a shareholder in the Royal African Co.) because they accepted the premise that slavery flourished as an African institution. They concluded that the British weren't enslaving Africans, they would merely transporting them. But the evidence on guns for slaves in the slave trade and the evidence on the transformation of slavery in Africa over the course of the slave trade show how the slave trade made African slavery, not the other way around.

Chapter 2 (“Merchants and Planters”) is mostly a discussion of settlement but with two interesting observations that are testable. The first is that captains, not ships, returned to ports because they had accumulated knowledge about how to negotiate a corner of what was a very diverse and complex world. The transatlantic slave trade database has both ships and captain recorded for 34,000 slave voyages. The second is that West Indian islands were too small to ever consider declaring independence from Britain. How did this influence their power and play in the abolition debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?

Chapter 3 (“Triangular Trade”) is highly recommended as an introduction to the history of the Royal African Company; the entry of private merchants in the late seventeenth century; the rise of Liverpool and the associated gun trade; an accounting of the goods traded for slaves on the coast of Africa; the capture process in Africa; the Middle Passage; sales processes in the Americas; the debate about the costs and profits of the trade; and the relationship between the slave trade and British economic development. Once again, the hallmark of this chapter is the balanced approach to these very controversial issues.

Chapter 4 (“Slave Demography and Family Life”) is the subject of which we know very little. We know there was much higher child mortality and shorter lives in the West Indies compared to the United States. This is an area ripe for future research.

Chapter 5 is entitled “Work, Law, and Culture.” First, the author compares the work routines and patterns on rice, tobacco, and sugar plantationsa welcome relief from the typical focus on cotton. The chapter then launches into a most interesting discussion of the material and cultural lives of slaves, where the book takes up the issue of cultural transmissions from Africa, the relationship between sex ratios and the evolution of family structures, the creation of Creole languages, and the relationship between new arrivals from Africa and religious conversion.

Chapter 6 is entitled “Slave Resistance and Rebellion.” Chapter 7, “Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” which happened in 1807, may be the best chapter of the book. It is a topic that Kenneth Morgan knows a lot about. The final chapter is “Slave Emancipation” in the British Empire, which occurred peacefully in 1833. This chapter could have been strengthened by a discussion of post-emancipation British societies in comparative perspective.

The book packs a lot of information into its 220 pages. It is an introduction, but it is never boring.