A review by brogan7
Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History by Rafe Blaufarb

adventurous challenging informative tense medium-paced

4.0

It seems to me, unless we come to terms with the history of colonization and slavery in our world, we will never fully understand racism and sexism in our society.
 This book is a piece of that puzzle....it's just so brutal that I wonder how we fully understand it without also somehow going mad.
The scale of this massive human displacement....and the curious way that even as it was ending, or at least as it was ending for England and France, the primary concern was for jurisdictional issues and hierarchy and the outrage!  The outrage within this narrative that the slavers entrapped British subjects (the free Africans, who spoke English)--without real concern for the 280 others they were supposed to also be freeing...it is clear that what really mattered to the British admiralty was status, not people. 

And Sarah, poor Sarah, was not deemed as human as any of the free men, though she was a free woman, at the start of the story, because she was left to her fate of enslavement.  Except that one can't help but wonder, if Sarah had been saved would it be a happy ending?  What about the other 280 people who were lost in the masses of African slaves in the Caribbean that day?  What about the thousands they blended in with?>/spoiler

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Slavery