Sacred Hunger

When I started researching the slave trade in the mid-2000s, there wasn’t a great deal of historical work that examined the realities of the trade for its enslaved victims, nor the merchants who organized it.

I therefore had to turn to Barry Unsworth’s exceptional 1993 novel Sacred Hunger, to gain insight into the slave trade’s gruesome realities. Unsworth undertook deep historical research before writing Sacred Hunger, which examines the fictional slaving voyage of the Liverpool Merchant.

The novel vividly exposes the violence, misery, and death that was at the trade’s core, as well as enslaved people’s constant attempts to resist… show more.

Proponents of capitalism assert that human nature is constant, propelled by an unquenchable pursuit of self-interest. Historians suggest that rampant individualism that undergirds the entrepreneurial spirit is a product of the Enlightenment’s quest to displace communal values associated with religion and tradition.

In this brilliant novel, which shared the 1992 Booker Prize with The English Patient, Unsworth traces the historical emergence of the profit motive, “which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes” including multiple modes of dehumanization such as involuntary servitude and slavery. 

The searing depictions of the conditions of labor on a slave ship and the brutal commodification of… show more.