Slave Trade

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The British Transatlantic Slave Trade offers a selection of primary printed resource texts relating to the British slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The edition is of particular interest to scholars of History, Economics and American Studies, and the collection as a whole provides a stimulating and accessible range of contemporary commentary, facilitating research on all major facets of the British slave trade. Most of the texts have not been reprinted or edited in modern editions, and will now be made more widely available to scholars.

The new edition complements Pickering & Chatto’s set Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (1999), and texts have been selected so that the range of material covered does not overlap the more literary orientation of the previous set.

The British transatlantic slave trade, which flourished from the mid-seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century, was a major conduit for the enforced migration of Africans to the Americas. Between 1660 and 1807 over three million Africans were dispatched to the Americas in British vessels. This trade has been the subject of intensive academic scrutiny over the past generation and has also attracted a growing popular curiosity.

The set is divided up thematically. The first volume contains two late eighteenth century texts covering the operation of the slave trade in Africa. John Matthews’s A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone offers a descriptive account of that part of west Africa based on the author’s naval work there in 1785, 1786 and 1787. It includes an account of production and trade in Sierra Leone just before it was resettled by the black poor shipped out from London, a well-known but ill-starred philanthropic scheme of the time. It also contains a description of the modes of dealing in slaves. John Adams’s Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa offers a detailed account of slave trading in Bonny and Old Calabar, w...