Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

"It is a deeply depressing subject. It’s hugely important, because once you’ve read this book, you can’t sustain complacent cliches about the Western part in the slave trade. The detail is extraordinary. What I found particularly interesting and different was the sense of the commercial dynamic driving it. The story starts with one monopoly company, the Royal African Company, chartered by the English monarchy. It’s based in London but is elbowed out of the way by provincial merchants in Bristol and Liverpool. They create a trade that’s far more profitable because it is much better organized, with absolute cynicism about the subject of the trade: human beings. They’re treated as commodities with advantages and disadvantages. There are the young, the elderly, the weak, the sick, and then there is the absolute prize: healthy young adult males. The essence of the trade is to acquire those assets, sort them out, and get them across the Atlantic with minimum loss, i.e. death. Radburn describes the ways in which these systems evolved. And it’s not just a story of bashing Europeans. He makes it quite clear that an essential part of this new, innovative, improved structure of the slave trade was a set of merchants who were African. It’s a tripartite trade. That’s a familiar phrase, but he’s very good at showing us how there are three sorts of actors organizing the trade. There are English merchants, African agents and collectors of people, and American merchants of English and Scots descent. For the trade, it was essential that these three sets of actors worked together and understood each other. Yes, the enslaved people have to be rescued from anonymity. It’s quite difficult to do that, because an essence of the trade was to make them non-people—to take their names away, to remove them from individuality in the human race. Radburn has got to the sources which work against that demonic aim. There were people from the 18th century who told the story from within and were encouraged by Europeans to do so. This was a small minority of people, initially, who hated the trade and linked up with those who were the subjects of it."