The African Slave Trade

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries perhaps fifty million men, women, and children were captured, bought, or kidnapped from Africa by European slave traders to labor in the mines and on the plantations of the western hemisphere. In the revised and expanded edition of his classic work, first published in 1961 as Black Mother, Basil Davidson superbly recreates the story of this long exploitation and its impact on African history, especially the colonial era. Drawing from writings of historians, eyewitnesses, annalists, and explorers of the period, and incorporating contemporary scholarship, Davidson cuts through the maze of slave-trade myth and illusion to get at the truth of the largest forced migration in the history of mankind.