Description

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The first telling of the unknown story of America’s two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation
 
“A work of impressive breadth, deep research, and evenhanded analysis.”—James Oakes, New York Review of Books
 
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 the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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“A work of impressive breadth, deep research, and evenhanded analysis.”—James Oakes, New York Review of Books

“An authoritative historical account of American involvement in the slave trade. . . . A brutal but compelling read.”—The Tablet

“An exceptional overview of all aspects of Americans’ participation in the international slave trade. . . . The comprehensiveness of [Kelley’s] research and the immensely detailed information he provides makes this book essential reading for anyone who wishes to acquire a solid understanding of the dynamics of slavery in colonial-era America and the antebellum United States.”—Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., Anglican and Episcopal History

“This book will for many years to come be the only comprehensive and integrated overview of U.S. involvement in the North American–based slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.”—David Eltis, coauthor of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“This is one of the best syntheses of the history of the U.S. slave trade ever written. A book that offers not only a great historical narrative of a long-term process but also dives into specific themes in new ways.”—Leonardo Marques, Universidade Federal Fluminense