In Disease, Resistance, and Lies Dale Graden combines an analysis of slave resistance, public health, and British and American involvement to explain the end of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and Cuba. Adopting an Atlantic history framework, he explores the interconnected interests and actions of a variety of historical actors in the Americas, Africa, and Britain. This perspective reveals the movement of illnesses and epidemics between continents and the influence public health issues had on debates surrounding the slave trade. It also highlights the important role American ships, crews, investors, and commodities played in helping to sustain a highly profitable international trade, even as British, Brazilian, and Cuban political figures criticized and attempted to stop the practice. Finally, it considers how collective identities, experiences, and knowledge shared among Africans and their descendants informed resistance efforts that contributed to the demise of a murderous trade that claimed the lives of millions. The combination of an Atlantic history approach and careful reconstruction of slave voyages allows Graden to illustrate these three key points of his analysis and address why the transatlantic slave trade to Cuba and Brazil lasted as long as it did, and why it ended when it did.

Graden begins by discussing the United States' involvement in the transatlantic trade between 1815 and the 1860s. During that period, 800 to 1,000 American-built vessels transported over one million African slaves to Cuba and Brazil in defiance of both American and British laws and treaties governing the slave trade. Chapter 1 thus makes two important contributions to studies in this field: it highlights American responsibility for the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade, and it reconstructs the deceitful strategies employed by an international network of merchants, investors, and ship captains and crew to circumvent efforts to stop their commercial activities.

Yet, if American involvement explains the persistence of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, the threat transported Africans posed to public health and security explains the withdrawal of public and political support for its continuation. In Chapters 2 and 3 Graden discusses the ubiquity and devastating effects of disease along all passages of the slave trade: voyages along the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, and between ports in Brazil and Cuba. He also traces epidemics that caused local elites in Brazil and Cuba to reconsider the merits of the trade. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to slave and free-black resistance as another decisive factor in the abolition of the slave trade in these two slave societies. Graden pairs a synthesis of the historiography on slave resistance and revolts in Brazil and Cuba with his own research into the political opinions of local elites and British officials. His discussion demonstrates that Africans and their descendants fought unrelentingly against slavery, shaping in the process a view of the transatlantic slave trade as a security threat that had to be suppressed.

In his final chapter Graden addresses why the transatlantic slave trade to Cuba lasted longer than the trade to Brazil. Both societies had to weigh their fear of epidemics and slave revolts against their desire for the profits enslaved Africans could generate. Brazil's greater vulnerability to British pressures and to internal unrest led its government to outlaw the trade in 1850 and enforce its prohibition on both national and international agents. After 1850, those involved in the transatlantic slave trade turned to Cuban markets. The high profits, the demand for slave labor, and the relative leniency with which Cuban and Spanish authorities treated traders contributed to the resilience of the trade. It was, according to Graden, events in the 1860s in the United States—specifically, Lincoln's decision to allow British vessels to apprehend American slavers and the abolition of slavery—that shifted circumstances and opinions in Cuba to favor abolition of the trade.

Disease, Resistance, and Lies is at its best when reconstructing slaving voyages and explaining how they illustrate practices and tendencies within the broader history of the late transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and Cuba. It is less effective in its efforts to reconcile the influence that resistance, disease, and international events had on the final abolition of the trade. Still, Graden has produced a competent comparative history of the end of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and Cuba. That perspective has allowed him to reject any single simple explanation for the end of the trade to each region. Instead, he shows that fear of disease, slave and free-black resistance, and international efforts to put an end to the lies that supported the continued forced transportation of Africans across the Atlantic all contributed to the final suppression of the trade to Brazil and Cuba.