Reviews

• An excellent account of the depravity at the centre of the American slave regime. Should read alongside Seven Beckert's Empire of Cotton

• What a great book! The best book on U.S. slavery yet. Written in an easy to read popular style that is accessible but informative. If you want to understand "Black Lives Matter" this book is essential.

• The book goes well beyond the shallow few paragraphs about slavery that I got in school in Illinois, from grade school through college. It lays out the economic reasons that slavery is protected in the US constitution, how it is that among the first 6 presidents of the new nation, 4 were from Virginia. The interweaving of the independence movement and the colonial business of slavery. Well written and meticulously documented, it is the best historical discussion of the economics of slavery that I have come across. It goes into the events not only in the mainland of the Americas, but also the island territories governed by various European powers. The speculation in slaves as just another commodity, the reasons for.market fluctuations in the prices of slaves. How loans collateralized with slaves were bundled by banks and sold as investment vehicles to people who never knew their bonds were backed by the value of slaves. It is a real eye opener. How some big name Wall Street investment firms got started as cotton brokers who traded the occasional coffle of slaves for a plantation owner who needed quick cash before the cotton harvest. It is a real page turner, crisply written with copious footnotes and references, but these never bog down the narrative. I recommend this book to anyone who really wants to understand the history of the USA and its tie to slavery.

• The history that most often appears in the high school text does serious damage to the truth of the founding of the country. How often we think we know events and people but soon learn that the real story is much more complicated or even that the original story is a lie. This is the experience I had over and over again as I read this outstanding book. It was well written, thoroughly researched and riveting in providing a new portrait of events that I thought I knew. It's a page-turner. The documentation was exceptional. If only "the people" could know the truth. Well, now you can. By simply reading this book, you learn year-by-year, president-by-president the choices they faced and the decisions they made. The country's constitution is re-aligned. All is contextualized. Often known and repeated quotes appear different, richer, truer. Thought patterns that began then, now have just been updated. The "why" of the pattern is clear. Many new people are presented and interwoven in the saga. The birth, education and experiences of many known people are told in a way that you grasp who they really were, not the ones text books told us about. This book is exceptional and I hope many more people will open their eyes to the true American legacy. We are not the country we have been told. This book adds many new, essential missing pieces. Through the Lens of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

• I wish I had time to write more about this book. THE AMERICAN SLAVE COAST: A HISTORY OF THE SLAVE-BREEDING INDUSTRY is an outstanding book that I recommend to anyone who wants to know the truth about slavery and the nature of oppression under greedy men. Most of us accept that American slavery was a horrible institution that left a permanent stain on this nation, but this book makes clear the levels of extreme brutality that became acceptable and kept black people in chains. It illuminates how equating black lives with chattel under the laws of the antebellum era resulted in imbalances of power even in this nation's federal government. Supporting its thesis with quotes from documents written by founders such as Thomas Jefferson, articles from the periodicals of that time, as well as slave and notary records, this well-written work argues effectively that the South had no intention of ending slavery. There was too much money to be made by breeding black people. In fact, breeding slaves was so lucrative that it's quite possible other ethnic groups, including poor whites may have found themselves in chains as well but for the Union's victory during the Civil War. The reality was black bodies were capital for the endeavors of wealthy men. For many men in power, selling their fellow humans for profit was too good a deal to pass up, and crafting rhetoric to convince non-slaveholders that black people were subhuman was one of many moves these men made to maintain the status quo in the antebellum South.

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