Freedom's Debt

William A. Pettigrew is lecturer in history at the University of Kent, UK.

Pettigrew's work is a much needed examination of the political and economic underpinnings of the early years of the British slave trade.- History Today;""Cogently argued.""- Journal of Southern History;""[A] carefully researched book.""- Journal of American History;""Accessible and very interesting. . . . An admirable account of how the [Royal African Company] and its rival British slave-trading enterprises shaped, and were shaped by, the politics of the wider society they inhabited.""- Enterprise & Society;""A deeply researched, persuasive study on the political disputes between the RAC and what the author calls the independent slave traders who opposed the RAC's monopoly and were victorious by 1712 in deregulating Britain's slave trade.""- H-Net;""Pettigrew's fascinating and well-researched book is an essential contribution to the history of the Anglo-American slave trade.""- Journal of Early American History;""Well researched and coherently organized...convincing, compelling, and important... Freedom's Debt does for English history something like what Edmund S. Morgan did for American history in American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.""- William and Mary Quarterly;""[Freedom's Debt] will be a standard source for specialists for many years to come.""- Journal of Interdisciplinary History For the first time, the origins of the British slave trade receive the searching inquiry they long have deserved. With Freedom's Debt, Pettigrew tells a new story about the political foundations of the traffic as well as the ideological seeds of its dissolution.""- Christopher Leslie Brown, Columbia University