‘Traders in Men:
Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’
Nicholas Radburn
Yale University Press
During the 18th century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into a transatlantic system through which 50,000 men, women, and children were enslaved every year. Traders in Men explains how thousands of merchants transformed the slave trade by devising highly efficient but violent new business methods. African brokers developed commercial infrastructure that facilitated the enslavement and sale of millions of people. Britons invented shipping methods that quelled enslaved people’s constant resistance on the Middle Passage. And American slave traders formulated brutal techniques through which shiploads of people could be quickly sold to colonial buyers. Truly Atlantic-wide in its vision, this study shows how the slave trade dragged millions of people into its terrible vortex and became one of the most important phenomena in world history.
About the author
Nicholas Radburn is Senior Lecturer in Atlantic History at Lancaster University. Educated in Britain, he emigrated to New Zealand in 2004 where he first studied Atlantic history at Victoria University of Wellington. He subsequently undertook his doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, before returning to the UK to take up his position at Lancaster. In addition to Traders in Men he has written extensively in academic journals on the history of slavery and slave trading in the Atlantic World.
Read an extract from Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
- Authoritative and meticulously researched, this is a pioneering reconstruction of the pivotal role of traders in Atlantic slavery, and the strength and complexity of the commercial networks they established.
Wolfson History Prize judges
