Slavery & abolition of slavery

  • The Sweetness of Water

    £8.99

    In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names. Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they’re soon discovered by the land’s owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war. When the brothers begin to live and work on George’s farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife’s edge, and it isn’t long before the inhabitants of the nearby town of Old Ox react with fury at the alliances being formed only a few miles away.

  • Capitalism and Slavery

    £9.99

    Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in this text, originally published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams’s study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system.

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

    £10.99

    Frederick Douglass’s pioneering autobiography that played a key part in the abolition of slavery.

  • A Brief History of the Caribbean

    £9.99

    Here is a concise history of the Caribbean’s long and fascinating history, from pre-contact civilisations to the present day. The history of the Caribbean does not make much sense without factoring in the cities – Pensacola, New Orleans, Galveston – and the ambitions of the states on its continental shores, notably the United States. This account is grounded in a look at the currents and channels of the sea, and its constraints, such as the Mosquito Coast, followed by the history of ‘pre-contact’ civilisations, focusing on the Maya and the Toltec Empire.

  • The Story of Afro Hair

    £9.99

    This book sensitively tells the powerful history of Black hair for younger readers.

  • The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

    £9.99

    Kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of ten, Olaudah Equiano’s memoir caused a sensation when it was first published in 1789. ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’ is the true story of his life, from his ten years of service as a slave in the British Navy to his experiences – after having purchased his freedom twice – as a freed black man living in eighteenth-century England. Equiano would go on to be a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement, boosted by the success of his memoir, which became a bestseller and went through nine editions in his lifetime.

  • Black Spartacus

    Black Spartacus

    £10.99

    The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world’s first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony’s black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life, he confronted (and for a time overcame) some of the dominant forces of his age – slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon’s invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘the most unhappy man of men’, imprisoned in a fortress in France.

  • The Good Sharps

    £10.99

    The story of an 18th-century family and their extraordinary achievements. Four brothers, three sisters. From a genteel, religious childhood in the north-east of England, the family would become known in London and across the country as ‘The Good Sharps’. In 1781, the celebrated painter Johan Zoffany made the final strokes on the luminous portrait that attested to their rise, and to their remarkable unity and passion for life. Ambitious, free-thinking and courageous, the Sharps were pioneers in the major movements that defined the 18th century – from politics and philanthropy to medicine and industry. In this vivid, moving biography, Hester Grant charts the siblings’ shared journey to prominence, and explores the values and enduring bonds that inspired their success.

  • Lose Your Mother

    Lose Your Mother

    £9.99

    The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In ‘Lose Your Mother’, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

  • The Sweetness of Water

    £18.99

    In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names. Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they’re soon discovered by the land’s owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war. When the brothers begin to live and work on George’s farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers. But this sanctuary survives on a knife’s edge, and it isn’t long before the inhabitants of the nearby town of Old Ox react with fury at the alliances being formed only a few miles away.

  • Blood Legacy

    £16.99

    Through the story of his own family’s history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The ancestors of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.

  • A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance

    £14.99

    The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom