This is a book that everyone should read. A distillation of a lifetime's research and reflection on one of the great issues in history. When we were young we were taught that the Slave Trade was something that happened in the past and ended with emancipation. What James Walvin shows is that slavery was fundamental to the rise of the West and that its consequences have widened out over time and space and still affect us all today - in politics and society, in the environment, in attitudes to race, and in cultural mentalities. With unrivalled knowledge and sureness of touch, this is a truly magisterial account of these great and tragic events that transformed and remade our world; in its pages you see slavery not just in its time but still running in the bloodstream of Western civilisation.