Freedom's Debt

“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

“Pettigrew powerfully demonstrates the importance of both political contestation and capitalist disagreements in the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. In so doing, he skillfully shifts our focus from the heroic story of abolition to an earlier, more political account of the origins of the slave trade itself and the subsequent move to abolish it.” — Steve Pincus, Yale University

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[A] carefully researched book.” — Journal of American History

“[Freedom’s Debt] will be a standard source for specialists for many years to come.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“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

“Cogently argued.” — Jrnl of Southern History