Fans pick 100 books like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African

This book really helped me to look beyond slave trading merchants’ papers to think about the lived realities of the slave trade for those merchants’ victims.

Smallwood follows enslaved people from their initial sale on the African coast, aboard the slave ships, and then through their sale and seasoning in the English Americas—a model that brilliantly exposes the multi-staged way that captive Africans were commodified within the slave trade.

Saltwater Slavery also details the experiences of enslaved people within the trade, especially the mental and physical trauma that they suffered aboard the slave ships. 

I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.

More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.

Sensbach combines impressive archival skills with sophisticated analyses of textual and visual evidence to reconstruct the extraordinary life of a formerly enslaved woman of African descent, whose interracial marriage and missionary calling took her from the Caribbean to Germany and West Africa.

Rebecca’s Revival is a methodological tour de force, working from fragmentary evidence to reveal the complexity of issues of slavery, religion, and identity in the transatlantic eighteenth-century world.

Refusing to over-simplify the certainty of the evidence or its implications, Sensbach’s frequent use of words like “may,” “might,” “if,” and “perhaps” reflects not the weakness of indecision but rather the strength of a historian who discriminates the known from the unknown, and more importantly, the possible from the probable.

A fascinating exploration of how British imperial ambitions influenced popular representations of Black slavery and white mastery during the peak years of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (c. 1680s to 1807). Using a wide variety of sources—including shop signs, tea trays, product advertisements, portraiture, graphic satires, plays, and more—Molineux argues that British artists, writers, and shop keepers obscured the horrific realities of Atlantic slavery in favor of idealized power relations that supported Britain’s imperial fantasies and developing racial ideologies.

This book helps to answer the question: what role did Africans and people of African descent play in the British popular imagination during the height of the transatlantic slave trade?

I was on the Guggenheim committee that awarded The Reaper’s Garden the prize for the best book on the eighteenth century in 2010.

The eighteenth century marked the climax of the slave trade and the plantation system in European colonies in the Americas and elsewhere. Brown’s book brings the plantation world of eighteenth-century Jamaica alive like no other that I have read.

This was a world filled with death, not only the mortality of the African slaves but just as commonly of the white plantation owners and their families who seldom lasted two years before dying of tropical diseases. Funerals became competing sites for display between blacks and whites.

The funerals of black people became such powerful vehicles of protest and cultural identity that the plantation owners tried to repress them. Brown’s book stands out in my mind as a powerful study of the evils of slavery and morbid culture… show more.

Based on painstaking analysis of the surviving records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, this book provides a comprehensive look at British slave-ownership in 1833, when the British government abolished colonial slavery and paid £20 million to slave-owners as compensation for their loss of human property. After emancipation the enslaved received nothing. Moreover, they were forced to remain on their plantations and continue to labor for their former masters under the apprenticeship system, which was not abolished until 1838. Draper concludes that slave-owning was widespread in metropolitan Britain and that many individuals, businesses, and institutions derived wealth from African slavery.

This book demonstrates that there is indeed a strong case for reparations and it is best read as a companion piece to University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery project, an extensive database tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the development of modern Britain.

I really admire how this book traces two lines of a tumultuous family history through a series of short stories.

Opening in Ghana 250 years ago, the book follows two trajectories: one family branch that is kidnapped into slavery in America, and a second that remains in Africa while collaborating with slave traders.

This is a brave book that is not afraid to pose difficult questions, but in doing so, it opens a clear-eyed perspective on the way that history shapes us.

The 1960s and 70s were periods of Black Consciousness, both in Africa and the diaspora. At the heart of this was Pan-Africanism, a political ideology built on historical and cultural links between Black people everywhere. At the heart of these ideas was a psychical and physical “return” to Africa, the “motherland”. This short, but powerful play, explore these politics in the marriage of Ato Yawson and Eulalie Rush, a Ghanaian man and an African-American woman who emigrate from the US to Ghana in search of racial and cultural harmony. What occurs is a dramatization of what happens when political ideologies are applied to private lives. What I love about this text is its confrontation of slavery as traumas that cannot be easily erased by political rhetoric and national endeavors to “move on.”

The transatlantic slave trade was, historically, the most organized and sophisticated system of dependence, but it was not the only form of enslavement. In Africa, prior to it, and even proceeding it, were systems of bondage. This is the heart of Emecheta’s novel: set in the early 20th century, it tells the story of a young Igbo woman who loses her parents and is then sold into slavery. As characteristic of Emecheta, it is beautifully written and developed in characterization. Specifically, what I love about this novel is its perspective on the African female in situations that are physical, psychological, and cultural enslavement. 

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not just a celebrated writer, but a respected critic of African literature, known for his advocacy of African languages. In this book, wa Thiong'o provides an exploration of slavery’s effects on the historical, cultural, and literary lives of Africans. His focus is on the fragmentations that slavery created in African identities and how these play out in literature. The book advocates for a re-membering of fragments created by slavery. I think this book – and frankly any work by wa Thiong'o – is a necessary addition to the collection of any reader interested in African literature, particularly the legacy of slavery and colonialism in African writings.