Африка: четыре столетия работорговли - [137]
Chapter Five looks at the Africans' resistance to the trade, with episodes from numerous uprisings on the slaveships and unabating freedom stirrings on the New World plantations. By contrast the author offers evidence to prove that up to now there were no evidence of uprisings in Africa itself against the practice.
Chapter Six explores moves to abolish the slave-trade, as well as the origins of racist attitudes towards Africans. Abolition campaigning peaked in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries in Europe and the newly founded US. The study cites the reasons for slave-trade abolishion specific to each particular slaver nation and tells about campaign leaders, among them A. Benezet, T. Clarkson, W. Wilberforce, Abbot Gregoir, and the others. It was also at that time, we learn, that racism came on the scene and subsequently evolved as a theory of Africans' “inferiority” to the Europeans, as slavers were casting about for an excuse for their practices.
Chapter Seven is on the closing period of the slave-trade, the Contraband traffic from Africa. It probes the reasons for it and the abolition campaign mounted in Britain, featuring «mixed» commissions, anti-slavery blockades of the African coastline, and suchlike. It next surveys the abolition drive in major European nations and the US and reaction to it by the Russian press as indicative of Russian liberal thinking on the issue.
Chapter Eight turns to the slave-trade in West and East Africa in the lQth century as contrasted with the free slave trade.
Chapter Nine regards the latter decades of the transatlantic slave traffic, as it gradually gave way to colonial expansion on the continent.
In summing up the author looks at the consequences of the slave-trade for the Africans and for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and America.
The bibliography has documents from the Liverpool archives, the British state archives, press reports from the slave-trade days, an array of memoirs, works by abolitionists, etc.
There are also illustrations, maps, and a geographical index.
