In 1807, Britain and the United States passed legislation limiting and ultimately prohibiting the transoceanic slave trade. As world powers negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties thereafter, British, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian,French, and US authorities seized ships suspected of illegal slave trading, raided slave barracoons, and detained newly landed slaves. The judicial processes in a network of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice not only resulted in the "li...

Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history.Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to...

A sweeping saga of the Spanish history and influence in North America over five centuries, from the acclaimed author of Empire's Crossroads.Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, the nation has much ...

A thought-provoking and important book that raises essential issues crucial not only for understanding our past but also the present day.In this panoramic history, Jeremy Black tells how slavery was first developed in the ancient world, and reaches all the way to the present in the form of contemporary crimes such as trafficking and bonded labour. He shows how slavery has taken many forms throughout history and across the world - from the uprising of Spartacus, the plantations of t...

A Concise History of the Caribbean presents a general history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement about seven thousand years ago to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonization, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements toward political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora ...

How the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War: "Meticulous, thorough, fascinating, and thought-provoking." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne s...

An "illuminating" survey of Caribbean history from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century ( Los Angeles Times).Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe's earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, w...

From the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of A Short History of Progress comes another surprising, frightening and essential book.The USA is now the world’s lone superpower, whose deeds could make or break this century. For better and worse, America has Americanized the world. How did a marginal frontier society, in a mere two centuries, become the de facto ruler of the world? Why do America’s great achievements in democracy, prosperity and civil right...

Chronicles how American culture - deeply rooted in white supremacy, slavery and capitalism - finds its origin story in the 17th century European colonization of Africa and North America, exposing the structural origins of American "looting"Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and...

This book is written mainly from my experience since my arrival in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. I came to the UK before I came in contact with any Afro American or Caribbean. In Nigeria I know some people whose parents originally returned to Nigeria from Brazil and Cuba. The names of these great people are household names in Nigeria and particularly in Lagos. The more I stay in the UK the more I realise that our people from America and Caribbean have very little knowledge of Afri...

It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?--Chief Awusa of AtorkorFor centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans wer...

If the 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which life in the United States has been shaped by the existence of slavery, this “historical, literary masterpiece” (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy) focuses on emancipation and how its afterlife further codified the racial caste system—instead of obliterating it.To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation proces...