American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley
American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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American Slavers
Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644 – 1865

Author: Sean M. Kelley

Narrator: Christopher Douyard

Unabridged: 15 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/30/2023


Synopsis

The first telling of the unknown story of America's two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

Engaging with both African and American history and addressing the trade over time, Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.

In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

About Sean M. Kelley

Sean M. Kelley is professor of history at the University of Essex. He is the author of The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina and Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1865. He lives in Colchester, UK.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Matthew

Excellent, in-depth study of America’s role in the slave trade, not just in supplying slaves to the US (which represented just a small portion of overall activity), but also in supplying slaves to Cuba, Brazil and other Caribbean islands. Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island emerge as major slaver port......more

Goodreads review by David

Historian Sean Kelley has written, perhaps, the most definitive account of the business in dealing and transporting human beings from a North American perspective. As with many books that detail how a business or economic system can bring out the worst in humanity, Hannah Arendt’s quote on the banal......more