Books with title The Slave Trade and the Middle Passage

I am Cat Royal – Orphan, Adventurer, Actress . . . Meet the feistiest heroine in children’s historical fiction.Summer 1792. Our favourite adventurer, Cat Royal, is sailing home from the Caribbean in the company of Billy Shepherd. They stumble into a mystery in the Azores involving stargazers, thieves and far too many wasps.The Middle Passage is a wonderful short novel by the prize winning author of The Diamond of Drury Lane. Exciting, funny and packed with adventure . . . Cat Royal never fails to stir up trouble wherever she goes. Julia Golding’s award-winning adventure series for girls has all the ingredients of a Philippa Gregory books for 9+ girls. Available as an ebook

From slavery to freedom to the arduous battle for civil rights, the ten-volume Drama of African-American History series traces the black American experience from its roots to the present day. Five titles are available now. These take readers back to life in Africa before and during the slave trade, describe the horrors of that trade and the sea passage to America, and move along through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Five additional titles will carry the history up to the present day. Drama is perhaps an understatement when it comes to African-American history. The word is certainly appropriate to the subject matter, and each of the authors, while scrupulously accurate and even-handed, manages to bring a passion to their work worthy of their theme.

In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies–countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!” He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France’s routes nationales. And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region’s colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.

V.S. Naipaul undertook this Caribbean journey at the invitation, in 1960, of Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, the author's birthplace. At that time, the plantation colonies of the region were formed, culturally, in the image of the metropolis. Racial and political assertion had yet to catch up with them in varying ways. In Trinidad, African racialism found itself at odds with old colonial mimicry; forty years on, the racial issue will not be between black and white, but between black and Asian. Guyana was Marxist, but with the same racial divisions: forty years on, the country will be so ruined that a newspaper will be regarded almost as a luxury item. In Surinam, a movement was afoot to replace the Dutch language with a pidgin English called talkie-talkie: forty years on, that racial sentiment will have led to military dictatorship and an exodus of the locals to Holland. Whereas Martinique, defying geography, saw itself as France. And, in Jamaica, such rejectionism took the form of Rastafarianism which, absurdly, turns out to have been the invention of Italian black propaganda during the Abyssinian War of the 1930s. The Middle Passage catches this poor topsy-turvy world at a critical moment: a world by turns sad, earnest and hilarious indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of this great writer.