James Walvin

A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can only be fully understood by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the most recent scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labour, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty and taste.

This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labour of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalysing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labour and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions – in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonised and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labour lives on today.

In this timely and very readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality and suffering of slavery, but on resistance, the resistance of the enslaved themselves – from sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisings – and its impact in overthrowing slavery. He also looks that whole Atlantic world, including the Spanish Empire and Brazil.

Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits is the first book to explore the long-range cultural legacy of slavery through commonplace daily objects. Offers a new and original approach to the history of slavery by an acknowledged expert on the topic. Traces the relationship between slavery and modern cultural habits through an analysis of commonplace objects that include sugar, tobacco, tea, maps, portraiture, print, and more. Represents the only study that utilizes common objects to illustrate the cultural impact and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Makes the topic of slavery accessible to a wider public audience

A unique and dramatic book about the Atlantic slave trade published to coincide with the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery.

As we approach the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic trade, Walvin has selected the historical texts that recreate the mindset that made such a savage institution possible. Setting these historical documents against Walvin’s own incisive historical narrative, the two layers of this extraordinary, definitive account of the Atlantic slave trade enable us to understand the rise and fall of one of the most shameful chapters in British history, the repercussions of which the modern world is still living with.

The Slavery Reader brings together the most recent and essential writings on slavery. The focus is on Atlantic slavery – the enforced movement of millions of Africans from their homelands into the Americas, and the complex historical story of slavery in the Americas. Spanning almost five centuries – the late fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth – the articles trace the range and impact of slavery on the modern western world.

The national game has a colourful past, an extraordinary present and an unimaginable future. The Only Game is the first total history of football – the clubs, the managers, the matches, and the stars. Moving from its early origins, through the popular explosion of the last century, to the world sport which now reaches well beyond the pitch, The Only Game is the book all football fans have been waiting for.

The brutal story of African slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies and North America is told with clarity and compassion in this classic history. James Walvin explores the experiences which bound together slaves from diverse African backgrounds and explains how slavery transformed the tastes and economy of the Western world.

The British Empire carried more Africans into bondage across the Americas than any other nation. Not only did the British slavers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do most to hone the art of the ‘Africa Trade’, they also benefitted financially more than any of their competitors. Britain became ‘Great’ on the backs of millions of slaves.

In the four centuries before the 1860s, the Atlantic slave trade transformed the face of the Americas, enhanced the material well-being of the West and wrought enormous damage on Africa. This text aims to provide a fresh narrative and interpretation suitable for students and general readers alike.

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1787, is considered the most quoted, reprinted and widely-published writing by an African before the 20th century. This biography is the first serious study of this remarkable man, who spoke for millions of Africans during the slave trade.

What could be more British than a sweet cup of tea? James Walvin shows how the tastes of the British people were transformed by the fruits of distant empire and trade and links the global impact of Britain’s drive for imperial pre-eminence to the rise of a new kind of domestic material consumption which helped to define the very nature of Britishness itself.

This text tells the story of the Quakers in Britain and the impact they had on British society. It describes how they gradually came to dominate key 18th century industries from iron-making to chemicals, from pharmaceuticals to banking. It provides an account of how in the 19th century they went on to dominate new industries, whether shoemaking, biscuits or chocolate.
*Selected as a ‘notable book of the year’ by the New York Times

For the best part of three centuries the material well-being of the western world was dependent on slavery. Yet these systems were mainly brought to a very rapid end. This text surveys the key questions of slavery, and traces the arguments which have swirled around its history in recent years. The latest findings on slavery are presented, and a comparative analysis of slavery in the English-speaking Americas is offered.

This book takes a look at the game with a history stretching back to the late Middle Ages, with strong traditional folk-roots, that became the codified and disciplined game of urban working men in the late 19th century Britain, later spreading to Europe, South America and elsewhere. It also looks into the broader social changes which made the game so attractive over the last century.

This work set out to describe, in broad outline, the history of slavery and the slave trade in the British colonies up to 1838. In that year all slaves in British possession were freed. Moreover, those slaves were black, imported from Africa or born to Africans and their descendants in the Americas.

In 1781 Captain Collingwood ordered his men to throw 133 slaves overboard. They were suffering from malnutrition and he knew that the ship`s insurers did not cover the cargo for sickness – only loss.

This is a sociohistorical study of the concept of "manliness" in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The contributors examine the distinctive nature of Victorian masculine stereotypes, the means by which these concepts were disseminated and their translation into codes of conduct.

In the wake of the Bradford and Brussels football disasters in 1985, football in England was subjected to detailed scrutiny and criticism. This book examines the alleged roots of those violent incidents, and locate the problems afflicting the national game within the context of social and economic chan