As Britain’s dominant port for the slave trade in the eighteenth century, Liverpool is crucial to the study of slavery. And as the engine behind Liverpool’s rapid growth and prosperity, slavery left an indelible mark on the history of the city. This collection of essays, boasting an international roster of leading scholars in the field, sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery. The contributors tackle a range of issues, including African agency, slave merchants and their society, and the abolitionist movement, always with an emphasis on the human impact of slavery.

Between 1500 and 1870, European traders transported millions of Africans to the Americas to work as slaves—yet despite the wealth of scholarship on this period, many people remain uninformed about the history of the slave trade and its implications for the modern black experience. Published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Transatlantic Slavery documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact of slavery on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.

Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this 'national sin' by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the 'Middle Passage', and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain's history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.

As few accounts written by slave ship captains are known to have survived, the personal papers of James Irving are of tremendous interest and academic significance. Irving built a successful career in the slave trade of eighteenth-century Liverpool, first as a ship’s surgeon and then as a captain. Remarkably he was himself enslaved when his ship was wrecked off the coast of Morocco and he was captured by people described as ‘wild Arabs’ and ‘savages’. This edition of forty letters and his journal reveals the reaction of the slaver to the experience of slavery, as well as throwing light on the complex and, to modern eyes, repugnant features of the transatlantic slave trade. The result is both a compelling narrative and a valuable reference text. This thoroughly revised edition of Suzanne Schwarz’s best-selling book includes recently discovered archive material.

The Persistence of Memory is a history of the public memory of transatlantic slavery in the largest slave-trading port city in Europe, from the end of the 18th century into the 21st century; from history to memory. Mapping this public memory over more than two centuries reveals the ways in which dissonant pasts, rather than being 'forgotten histories', persist over time as a contested public debate. This public memory, intimately intertwined with constructions of 'place' and 'identity', has been shaped by legacies of transatlantic slavery itself, as well as other events, contexts and phenomena along its trajectory, revealing the ways in which current narratives and debate around difficult histories have histories of their own. By the 21st century, Liverpool, once the 'slaving capital of the world', had more permanent and long-lasting memory work relating to transatlantic slavery than any other British city. The long history of how Liverpool, home to Britain's oldest continuous black presence, has publicly 'remembered' its own slaving past, how this has changed over time and why, is of central significance and relevance to current and ongoing efforts to face contested histories, particularly those surrounding race, slavery and empire.

Contains primary texts relating to the British slave trade in the 17th and 18th century. The first volume contains two 18th-century texts covering the slave trade in Africa. Volume two focuses on the work of the Royal African company, and volumes three and four focus on the abolitionists' struggle.

This text uses historical research to explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries, and includes sections on politics, economy, and culture. It offers an insider's perspective on the City the European Union has named 'European Capital of Culture' for 2008.

Unesco celebrated 2004 as the international year to commemorate the struggle against slavery and its abolition. The Ghanaian Government's National Slave Route Project Committee held an international conference on transatlantic slave as part of that initiative. These papers are largely the proceedings of that conference, with the inclusion of a few papers from the National Conference on the Slave Trade in 2003. Supported by the Netherlands Embassy, Unesco, and an individual benefactor, the conference brought together over 400 people: Government Ministers, Unesco and diplomatic representatives, and scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the USA. Twenty-nine papers and statements are included. The book is divided into opening statements, followed by papers on three main themes: landmarks, legacies and expectations.

How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory a momentous event like its own participation in transatlantic slavery? What are the stakes of once more restoring the slave trade to public memory? What can be learned from this history? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explores these questions in her study of depictions and remembrances of British involvement in the slave trade. Skillfully incorporating a range of material, Wallace discusses and analyzes how museum exhibits, novels, television shows, movies, and a play created and produced in Britain from 1990 to 2000 grappled with the subject of slavery. Topics discussed include a walking tour in the former slave-trading port of Bristol; novels by Caryl Phillips and Barry Unsworth; a television adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; and a revival of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In each case, Wallace reveals how these works and performances illuminate and obscure the history of the slave trade and its legacy. While Wallace focuses on Britain, her work also speaks to questions of how the United States and other nations remember inglorious chapters from their past.