In this unique and comprehensive new perspective about the transatlantic slave trade and human trafficking, David Eltis draws on new data from slavevoyages.org to argue and explore why the slave trades began and ended while debunking assumptions about the transatlantic slave trade -- for instance, how the Portuguese were the leading slave traders, not the British, and how bilateral, not triangular, trade was the norm -- in this powerful new book. Full of incredible details and data and hard to pull away from, Eltis recenters the transatlantic slave trade on the Iberian Americans, not the Caribbean or the United States, and the agency of Africans and their lives after liberation. An important and powerful read for academics and history readers of all kinds, this book is brilliantly written and totally engaging, largely in part to Eltis’s prose and his contextualization and explanation of this fascinating information. The book’s strength is in the data analysis, which is explained so well that amateur historians can understand it (though perhaps with some difficulty), and the debunking of assumptions around human trafficking is particularly fascinating and immersive. Powerful, uniquely complex, and incredibly well-reasoned, this brilliant new history title is a must-read for all history readers.

An excellent revision of the conventional wisdom of the Atlantic slave trade. The scope of the study is truly remarkable and looks beyond the traditional start and end points of the trade. Excellent synthesis of human history with broader political and economic trends that kept the embers of this hateful trade glowing for centuries.