Ledger of Human Cargo. The Atlantic slave economy and the forces that dismantled it

For three centuries, the labor of enslaved Africans generated the raw materials that powered European industrial growth-sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee. This book examines the slave economy not as a moral aberration but as a highly rationalized system of extraction that financiers, planters, and colonial administrators defended with mathematical precision. It traces how enslaved people disrupted this economy through slowdowns, sabotage, and flight, and how these everyday acts of resistance accumulated into structural pressure that made the system increasingly expensive to maintain.
The narrative then shifts to the transatlantic abolition movement, analyzing the economic calculations, diplomatic pressures, and slave revolts that converged to end the legal slave trade and later slavery itself. Rather than celebrating abolitionists alone, the book shows how the labor strike of enslaved people-refusing to produce-was the decisive factor in forcing colonial powers to restructure their economies.
It concludes by examining the economic aftermath: how former colonies built new labor systems that perpetuated inequality long after emancipation.