After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.

CONTENTSList of MapsIntroductionBook One: GREEN SEA OF DARKNESS1 What Heart Could Be So Hard?2 Humanity Is Divided into Two3 The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black4 The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game5 I Herded Them As If They Had Been Cattle6 The Best and Strongest Slaves Available7 For the Love of God, Give Us a Pair of Slave Women8 The White Men Arrived in Ships with WingsBook Two: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE TRADE9 A Good Correspondence with the Blacks10 The Black Slave Is the Basis of the Hacienda11 Lawful to Set to Sea12 He Who Knows How to Supply the Slaves Will Share This WealthBook Three: APOGEE13 No Nation Has Plunged So Deeply into This Guilt As Great Britain14 By the Grace of GodBook Four: THE CROSSING15 A Filthy Voyage16 Great Pleasure from Our Wine17 Slave Harbors I18 Slave Harbors II19 A Great Strait for Slaves20 The Blackest Sort with Short Curled Hair21 If You Want to Learn How to Pray, Go to Sea22 God Knows What We Shall Do with Those That RemainBook Five: ABOLITION23 Above All a Good Soul24 The Loudest Yelps for Liberty25 The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down26 Men in Africa of As Fine Feeling As Ourselves27 Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?Book Six: THE ILLEGAL ERA28 I See We Have Not Yet Begun the Golden Age29 The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin30 Only the Poor Speak Ill of the Slave Trade31 Active Exertions32 Slave Harbors of the Nineteenth Century33 Sharks Are the Invariable Outriders of All Slave Ships34 Can We Resist the Torrent? I Think Not35 They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It36 Cuba, the Forward SentinelEpilogueThe Slave Trade: A ReflectionAppendix 1. Some Who Lived to Tell the TaleAppendix 2. The Trial of Pedro Jose de Zulueta in London for Trading in SlavesAppendix 3. Estimated StatisticsAppendix 4. Selected Prices of Slaves 1440-1870Appendix 5. The Voyage of the EnterprizeSources and NotesIndexIllustration CreditsLIST OF MAPSThe Atlantic Slave TradeMedieval Trans-Saharan Caravan RoutesPortuguese Discoveries in the Late 15th CenturyThe Caribbean in the 18th CenturyThe Kingdom of Congo in the 16th CenturySlave Harbors of North America in the 18th CenturyBrazil in the 18th CenturySlave Harbors of the 18th CenturyThe Naval PatrolSlave Harbors of the 19th Century