The Slave Trade, James Walvin, Thames and Hudson History Files, 2011, paperback, 144 pp, £12.95, ISBN 9780500289174

This is a remarkably compact, beautifully illustrated book and pack on the transatlantic slave trade with the added attraction of ten facsimile documents ranging from a list of goods on a 1688 Dutch voyage for the purchase of slaves to a legal decree for the total abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Between the two dates which define this archival time frame of two centuries the landmark event was the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Professor James Walvin, a leading authority on slavery and the slave trade, who curated the Parliamentary exhibition on the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, emphasizes the relative suddenness of this unexpected development, analyses how it came about and assesses the extent of its global impact. The cruelty and brutality of the economic system underpinning the trade, which saw about twelve million Africans loaded onto slave ships to undertake the hazardous transatlantic crossing, is poignantly and vividly revealed in Walvin's illuminating and informed text. It is also illustrated in the numerous full-colour illustrations, which graphically portray the human cost of the trafficking and its enduring legacies. Moreover, it is further demonstrated in the carefully selected facsimile documents, which include extracts from a captain's log of a 1769 slaving voyage, a 1779 Jamaican newspaper notice for the return of runaway slaves and a notice of a slave sale in Charleston in 1859.