Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade; A Graphic History

Abstract

Inhuman Traffick, by Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke, marks a momentous intervention in rethinking and rewriting orthodox Western historiography. This book adds to the scholarship on colonialism and slavery by introducing a phenomenological approach that puts the reader in the shoes of the people of the time (between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries). The aim of this reworked historiography is to amplify the silence, to speak in the voice of slaves, and to put a human face to the dark epoch of slavery which has shaped our world as it exists today. As one of the few of its kind, this book investigates the period of slavery from a more humanistic angle. In doing so, it dismantles the orthodox historiographic authorship and unveils the international struggle led by politicians and intellectuals to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.