Joshua D. Rothman

In white memory, slave traders were despised even by most slaveowners; Rothman shows that they were in fact quite tightly linked with white power structures in the North and South. Using their private letters, he shows that they regularly reveled in their rapes and used enslaved women’s bodies to develop and maintain ties among them; they also used beatings and family separations strategically as well as for the pleasure of domination. They were sharp dealers; their violence occasionally show more bled over from the enslaved they tortured to the white people they dealt with. They often cut legal corners to make more money and push back against mild attempts to keep the horrors of the trade from respectable white viewers, leading to things like the bodies of enslaved people who’d died of communicable illness being dumped just outside of town. But they were also fully integrated with the rest of commerce, using credit and corporate forms like others, personally acquainted with people like Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. show less

There's excellent research and historical data in tbis book. It is a bit harrowing but an excellent way to look at how Enslaved and Free Blacks were treated during the 90 years the book covers.
I found the reading to be easy and accessible to lay amateur studiers of history like myself.
My problem lies with the authors treatment of Enslaved Black Women. He seems to conflate sex with non violent rape. Rape is not about violence it's about consent. Enslaved Women were forced to have children, we show more know this from slave narratives and the journals/letters/records of owners. Even if an Enslaved Woman persued her white owner sexually it's not consent. White owners had the power to free her and any potential children. That's not consent. Slavery removes the mechanism by which the enslaved have the power to consent to sex with those who own or manage them.
The author ignores this with Enslaved men who were assaulted by white women owners. They had no agency to decline sex. It's almost like the autjor thinks slavery is similar to being a servant and it is NOT! show less

This is an absolutely brutal read and not for everyone. Essentially a group biography of a slave trading circle, these are just horrible people in nearly every sense. Every possible trigger warning on this.

The information was enlightening and infuriating, but the presentation was dry, made even dryer by the narration