The Trader, the Owner, the Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery by James Walvin

Even in the 18th century, when the slave trade was at its height, it was unusual for a country parson to be the former captain of a slave ship, but John Newton, one of the three individuals highlighted in Walvin's book, was an unusual man. The author of Amazing Grace, one of the most famous of all hymns, Newton spent his unregenerate youth striding the decks of a slaving vessel as it sailed between Africa and the Americas. It was only in old age, decades after his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his rise to fame as a preacher, that he added his voice to the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Walvin's two other subjects were, in their own ways, equally remarkable men. Thomas Thistlewood was a Jamaican slave owner whose diary reveals not only his interest in books, art and Enlightenment philosophy but also his almost unbelievable sadism and cruelty to his slaves. Olaudah Equiano, born as a slave, might have ended up enduring the kind of suffering Thistlewood inflicted on others; luck and his own enterprise, however, set him on the path to eventual freedom. As a free man in London he became a bestselling author and one of abolition's most eloquent advocates. These three men were all out of the ordinary but, as Walvin persuasively argues, their stories can tell us much about slavery and its central role in 18th-century life. His book skilfully reveals the macrocosm of the Atlantic slave trade through the microcosms of three lives.