By Gera Burton

Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, European powers transported 11,000,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. One of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in history, an undertaking of such magnitude, involving three continents, required significant planning and investment, generating vast profits. Given Ireland’s geographic location, its domination by Britain, and the fact that in the eighteenth century slavery accounted for one-third of Europe’s trade and half of Britain’s trade, the existence of an Irish dimension is hardly surprising. Who benefited from slave-trade profits? What was Ireland’s role? To what extent does Ireland’s complicated history merit scrutiny related to the slave trade? Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Nini Rodgers’ well-researched and timely study tackles these perplexing questions. The author draws on first-hand accounts and archival resources to explore African slavery’s Irish connections and offers two possible reasons for the neglect of this topic. One possibility is a reluctance on the part of researchers to confront this shameful history; the second arises from the supposed marginality of its importance. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book provides a wealth of biographical information, tracing the activities of individual merchants, capitalists, and adventurers who profited from the slave trade and described themselves as ‘Irish’, although, as the author notes in the Introduction, they did not necessarily consider themselves exclusively or consistently so. Rodgers distinguishes shades of Irishmen, including Gaelic, Hiberno-Norman or Ol