Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Nicholas Radburn #Slaveryarchive Book Talks
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- History
In this episode historian Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) hosts historians Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster University) to discuss his new book Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2023). During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into a transatlantic system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.
In this wide-ranging history, Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of merchants collectively transformed the slave trade by devising highly efficient but violent new business methods. African brokers developed commercial infrastructure that facilitated the enslavement and sale of millions of people. Britons invented shipping methods that quelled enslaved people’s constant resistance on the Middle Passage. And American slave traders formulated brutal techniques through which shiploads of people could be quickly sold to colonial buyers. Truly Atlantic-wide in its vision, this study shows how the slave trade dragged millions of people into its terrible vortex and became one of the most important phenomena in world history.
Nicholas Radburn is a senior lecturer in Atlantic history at Lancaster University. He is a historian of the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In addition to Traders in Men, Radburn is working on three major digital humanities projects: He is the co-editor of the AHRC- and NEH-funded project Slave Voyages, a digital memorial to the 12.5 million Africans who were forcibly transported through the slave trade; he is the principal investigator on the AHRC and NEH funded "Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company; an co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Legacies of British Slave Traders project. He has also developed digital models of two French slave ships that are used in museums and classrooms around the world.
In this episode historian Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) hosts historians Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster University) to discuss his new book Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2023). During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into a transatlantic system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year.
In this wide-ranging history, Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of merchants collectively transformed the slave trade by devising highly efficient but violent new business methods. African brokers developed commercial infrastructure that facilitated the enslavement and sale of millions of people. Britons invented shipping methods that quelled enslaved people’s constant resistance on the Middle Passage. And American slave traders formulated brutal techniques through which shiploads of people could be quickly sold to colonial buyers. Truly Atlantic-wide in its vision, this study shows how the slave trade dragged millions of people into its terrible vortex and became one of the most important phenomena in world history.
Nicholas Radburn is a senior lecturer in Atlantic history at Lancaster University. He is a historian of the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In addition to Traders in Men, Radburn is working on three major digital humanities projects: He is the co-editor of the AHRC- and NEH-funded project Slave Voyages, a digital memorial to the 12.5 million Africans who were forcibly transported through the slave trade; he is the principal investigator on the AHRC and NEH funded "Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company; an co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Legacies of British Slave Traders project. He has also developed digital models of two French slave ships that are used in museums and classrooms around the world.