The Slave Trade

Resumen del libro

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.

Biografía del autor

Hugh Thomas nació en Windsor en 1931, estudió en la Universidad de Cambridge y en la Sorbona, y fue profesor de la Academia Real Militar de Sandhurst y de la Universidad de Reading. En 1961 se dio a conocer internacionalmente con su libro La guerra civil española, que tuvo una gran resonancia y se tradujo a numerosos idiomas; le siguieron Cuba: la lucha por la libertad (3 volúmenes), Goya y el 3 de mayo de 1808, Paz armada, Una historia inacabada del mundo y La conquista de México, publicado, con gran éxito de crítica y público, por Editorial Planeta. En 1981 fue nombrado par (lord Thomas de Swynnerton). Murió en Londres en 2017.