The best books about slavery 📚

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met Stowe. The quote may be apocryphal, but it points to a truth about the 1852 novel that shaped American opinions about the cruelty and injustice of slavery. The writing is a bit melodramatic for modern sensibilities, but it’s hard to beat the scene in which the escaped slave Eliza tries to carry her young son across an icy river for freedom on the other side.

A landmark work by virtue of being the first book by a black woman to be published in Britain, this is a powerfully harrowing account of Mary’s own life as a slave in the Caribbean. Though only short, it supplies valuable testimony on the gruesome British exploitation of enslaved people over the centuries, and the many cruelties inflicted upon Mary personally by her brutal ‘owners’. Should be required reading for all those who think of the British Empire with nostalgia.

An evocative account of the young Douglass and the Maryland world into which he was born. Originally published in 1980 but recently re-released, this is a beautiful book that delivers much more than the title suggests. It is also the book that finally pinpointed the correct month and year in which Douglass was born – February 1818. Those who enslaved people often kept such precious, deeply personal information away from those they enslaved - it was a sign of power, one minor manifestation of the many inquities of slavery.

A gripping and inventive study of death’s impact on social life in Britain’s largest, most profitable, and deadliest Caribbean slave colony: Jamaica. Brown shows how staggering mortality rates on the island, where the prospect of an early death awaited enslaved and free alike, profoundly shaped colonial culture, social relations, and spiritual practices. In Jamaica, the vital hub of Britain’s Atlantic slave empire, death was at once destructive and generative; it claimed countless lives sacrificed in the pursuit of British profits and inspired new, politically charged commemorative rituals and forms of enslaved resistance.

The Reaper’s Garden uncovers the interplay between death,… show more.