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

A sweeping new history that reveals how British, African, and American merchants developed the transatlantic slave trade

Shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History Prize

“Lays bare the cold-blooded economic engine of the Atlantic slave trade, . . . deftly balancing individual stories with objective data. The result is both an enlightening economic investigation and an unsparing documentation of atrocity.”—Publishers Weekly

“This is a landmark study given its clear status as easily the best researched and most comprehensive book on the British slave trade to date.”—David Eltis, coauthor of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

During the eighteenth 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 fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.

In this wide-ranging history, Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of merchants collectively 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.