The Slave Trade
Description:... The slave trade was vile. Everybody can agree on that. But was it unambiguously the fault of the Western powers of the time? Was it something for which we should today apologize? The Anglican Church seems to think so, and so do elements of the British government. Does the modern mania for apology and breast-beating, however, not perhaps lead to an oversimplification of matters? In this timely book, published to mark 200 years since Britain took the historic step of abolishing the slave trade, Professor Black grasps the nettle of political correctness. He deftly points out the contradictions and ambiguities of the slave trade: the inconvenient fact that the Arab world played at least as large a part in the slave trade as any Western power, for instance; or the uncomfortable truth that African chieftains were all too willing to sell other Africans to Western and Arab slave dealers.
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