Why read The Trader, The Owner, The Slave?

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

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Trader, The Owner, The Slave as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sathnam Sanghera

Author

Coming in at just over 250 pages of generously spaced text, this is not the longest book on the subject. Nor is it the most famous.

But in efficiently telling the stories of three men – John Newton, the captain of a slave ship, who later became a preacher, Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner who made a small fortune from a plantation in Jamaica, and the black slave Olaudah Equiano.

Walvin deftly reveals how slavery, like so many aspects of the empire, has been erased from the British consciousness and conscience.

From Sathnam's list on the British Empire's impact on the world.