Traders in Men

August 14, 2023
Historian Radburn’s definitive and accessible debut lays bare the cold-blooded economic engine of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century, demonstrating how merchants in Britain, the U.S., and Africa refined their business practices to maximize their income. For instance, British merchants updated their slave ships to reduce captives’ opportunities for resistance, expanded their slaving operations north of the equator, and realized that dealing with African middlemen increased profits. Radburn traces how these profit-driven developments built up the slave trade into a massive industry ensnaring millions of people. Drawing on his diligently compiled database, which documents more than 36,000 Atlantic slaving voyages and includes letters, slave narratives, and testimony from the enslaved, Radburn recreates the harrowing voyages from enslaved people’s perspectives. These include the account of teenager Ottobah Cugoano, who was kidnapped from his home in what is now Ghana before being sold to a British merchant for “a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead” and surviving months of torment aboard the merchant’s vessel. Radburn provides just the right amount of detail, deftly balancing individual stories with objective data. The result is both an enlightening economic investigation and an unsparing documentation of atrocity.