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'Her harrowing story shows how inhumanity and gross violence can occur on our own road.'

Charlotte Haines-Lyon and Andrew Chapman present a round-up of some newly-published books looking at the history and impact of the slave trade, past and present.

Click on the links to buy the titles from amazon.co.uk and Christian Aid receives part of the purchase price.

Enslaved. True Stories of Modern Day Slavery
(edited by Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, foreword by Gloria Steinem, Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99).

"In the long struggle against the idea that one human being can own another, we have reached a dangerous stage: a time of believing that slavery is over." Gloria Steinem issues a stark warning in this provoking book.

Apparently, a good book is one that gives you an insight into humanity. If true then this one is the epitome of such a work.

There are few human characteristics that are excluded. Strength, naivety, cruelty, courage and brutality, live alongside each other. Sometimes such traits are in different people but occasionally in one and the same person.

Testimonies

Sage and Kasten have collected testimonies of slaves from around the world. This follows the style of nineteenth century slave narratives, which first brought the humanity of slaves to our attention.

The story of Jill Leighton is particularly disturbing. At 14 she is conned into becoming a sex slave. Why was I so appalled, compared to other stories?

I have to confess my reaction simply highlights my prejudices - slavery it something that belongs to poor countries, not the United States. Leighton's harrowing story shows how inhumanity and gross violence can occur on our own road.

And that is the horrifying point of the book. Slavery is in the everyday and ignored by so many. Leighton went to hospital with strangulation injuries but never asked questions away from her pimp.

Likewise Micheline Slattery thought she had escaped slavery in Haiti when she moved to a relative in Conneticut. Although she was sent to school she was expected to work around the clock for no money, little food and plenty of beatings. Nobody in the education system questioned her poor results or health.

It's easy to judge but do I really know what goes around me? More to the point do I really want to know or do I wander around with eyes glazed over?

Slave master

One of the most interesting stories is of Abdel Nasser Ould Yesa who was actually a slave master in Mauritania. He tells of his upbringing in which it was the norm to own slave and how he gradually became aware of this iniquitous lifestyle.

He is now an anti slavery campaigner. It highlights how we can all be awoken and change.

So what can we do, to truly abolish slavery? Maybe the wonderful URC book of prayers Dancing on Slaves has the right words ..."Fill me with... courage to speak out when I want to blend in. Make me passionate for the needs of the neighbour I do not know. Move me. Move me on."

CHL

The Anti-Slave Trade Act became law on 25 March 1807, though slavery continued across the British Empire for another 20 years. In Abolition!: The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Empire (Lion Hudson, £9.99), Richard Reddie tells this wider story of nearly 300 years of slavery and its eventual abolition.

The book locates this history in a context of an Africa which was more cultured at the time than many Europeans have assumed.

For another account of this subject, James Walvin's Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire (Blackwell, £17.99) is well worth a look, drawing on detailed scholarship to create a rich and sobering picture, with many individuals' stories explored.

A former university teacher, Walvin has established himself as an expert on all aspects of the slave trade (as well as being the author of a book about football).

In The Trader, the Owner, the Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), he explores the slave trade through the different eyes of the people it brought together.

Three specific individuals - a trader, John Newton (author of 'Amazing Grace'), an owner, Thomas Thistlewood, and a slave, Olaudah Equiano - inform his narrative.

For a snappier, more general overview, see also his A Short History of Slavery (Penguin, £9.99), a selection of historical texts woven together with his own commentary.

As for those original accounts, a number of these are available in separate editions. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself (Dover Thrift, £0.95), for example, is the autobiography of a man born into slavery in Maryland.

After his escape to Massachusetts in 1838 he became an ardent abolitionist and campaigner for women's rights. The book tells of his suffering, and of his self-education and subsequent campaigns.

Meanwhile Classic Slave Narratives (Signet Classics) brings a number of first-hand accounts from America together.

Highly respected historian Simon Schama has also written on this subject in Rough Crossings (BBC Books, £20, with a paperback edition due in May), accompanying his TV series of the same name.

This is the story specifically of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African-American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence, and is characterised by his usual lively narrative style.

Popular historian and journalist Giles Milton, meanwhile, offers White Gold (Sceptre, £7.99) - a rarer tale of white slavery. This is an account of the life of Thomas Pellow, a Cornish cabin boy who was captured at sea by a group of fanatical Islamic slave traders, the Barbary corsairs, and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa.

In Bury the Chains (Pan, £8.99), Adam Hothschild writes of "the British struggle to abolish slavery" in an account told almost like a novel with great narrative flair.

In his view, campaigner William Wilberforce has been unduly famed. Stephen Tomkins would presumably disagree, having written a highly-praised biography, William Wilberforce (Lion Hudson, £8.99).

Later this year, in June, a new challenger for the definitive work appears, with former Conservative party leader William Hague's William Wilberforce (Harper Press, £25).

Lest we forget, although slavery is illegal across the world, it sometimes continues. Without Mercy: A Woman's Struggle Against Modern Slavery (Time Warner, £7.99) and Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery (Time Warner, £6.99) tell the life stories of Miriam Ali-Kamouhi and Zana Muhsen, both of whom were sold into marriage in Yemen.

AC

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