Slavery from Africa to the Americas

This title begins a new and attractive history series for KS3, with a text based around the close study of documents. Extracts from journals, travel accounts, autobiographies, planter manuals and the transcripts of interviews with ex-slaves are all examined, with marginal notes to explain or expand those parts which are difficult or obscure. The book includes research into slave community life; description of life in West Africa before the development of the transatlantic slave trade; and treatment of slavery in both the Caribbean and the North American mainland, which allows students to compare the courses of slavery and abolition in each area. Hatt skilfully deploys the economic, political and social factors which were involved in 'the peculiar institution', and emphasises how black people survived, resisted and helped abolish slavery. The only omission is a consideration of the ideology of racism which was used to justify slavery and became so bound up with the identity of the southern United States that it was a hundred years after Emancipation before it could be successfully challenged.