'Slavery and the British Empire' - Kenneth Morgan - Review

After visiting the Museum of the London Docklands’ exhibit: ‘London, sugar and slavery’ I was fascinated by the unique evils of the slave trade and borrowed this volume to enhance my understanding of this gruesome area of the past.  Slavery and the British Empire provides an overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history.  Its principal focus is on the Atlantic world.

Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organisation and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. 

It is extremely informative, with an excessive use of facts and figures to illustrate the extent of the trade.  However, the amount of information crammed within just 200 pages comes at the expense of fluency.  It’s narrative often possesses the qualities of an economics textbook, meaning the reader often feels detached from the evils of the trade as enslaved Africans are frequently dehumanised to mere statistics.

I would recommend this book to anyone requiring a detailed reference book for advanced study of Atlantic slavery, however for the casual reader simply interested in Britain’s involvement in the slave trade it is very much an uphill struggle, and there are numerous other works that combine Morgan’s detail with a friendlier narrative.