The Trader, The Owner, The Slave : Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery

There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable.By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement.James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807. John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition.Thomas Thistlewood's (1721-86) unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner's life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies.Olaudah Equiano's (1745-97) experience as a slave now speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded.All three men were contemporaries but what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system.