This book centers on one of the most tragic, horrifying, and important pieces of the history of the Western world: the transatlantic slave trade. Unlike any other system of commerce in world history, the primary commodities exchanged in the slave trade were people, and this fact has implications not only for how the trade was initiated, conducted, conceptualized, and concluded, but also for how we make sense of it in the present. For on one hand, the Atlantic slave trade was indeed trade, and as such it bears comparison with and was related to the expansion of a variety of global commercial networks. On the other hand, unlike other commodities driving cross-cultural exchange in world history, slaves were human, with all this implies about their vulnerability to pain and discomfort, their capacity to resist, their real or potential relationships with sellers and buyers, and-most fundamentally to those sellers and buyers-their labor power. Understanding the Atlantic slave trade thus requires studying economic and political history, dealing largely with those who bought and sold slaves, as well as the social and cultural history of slavers, the enslaved, and the societies they lived in and built. Book jacket.