Slavery and the British Empire

Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.

Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834.

As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history - and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation.


"[A] lucid and well-written evaluation."--The Historian

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "An excellent introduction"--Professor Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester, and co-editor of A Historical Guide to World Slavery

"An excellent volume--and not one easily managed. It is concise (on topics that are not easily presented in concise form), and well-writtten, and it has something new to say on all his chosen themes...Morgan has given shape and coherence to material that has expanded at an extraordinary rate over the past twenty years, and yet he never trivializes in the process of writing a compact study. It is a book which manages to be both a survey of the wider scholarly field, and an original argument in itself."--New West Indian Guide

"Will push us to think about frameworks beyond the Atlantic world or the Americas that might be useful for understanding slavery...Impressive."--Journal of World History