{"product_id":"britains-war-to-end-the-richard-murch-9798257967511","title":"Britain's War to End the Slave Trade on the High Seas: In chains across the ocean","description":"History remembers its monuments. It carves the names of slavery abolitionists into stone, raises statues to parliamentarians, and keeps alive the speeches that moved legislatures to act. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhat it tends to forget - or never properly records - are the men who made abolition real, in the dark and the heat, far from applause.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe West Africa Squadron patrolled the Atlantic for more than six decades, from 1808 to 1870. At its height it comprised a fifth of the entire Royal Navy. It lost more men to disease than to enemy fire, its crews ravaged by yellow fever on a coast that sailors called \"the white man's grave.\" It seized over 1,600 slave ships. It freed approximately 150,000 captive Africans. And it is remembered almost nowhere.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThis is their story \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe campaign against the Atlantic slave trade was not won in Parliament. It was won in the Bight of Benin, on the deck of vessels like \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eHMS \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlack Joke, in encounters that lasted hours\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003e, days \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eand cost thousands of British lives.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePart of the forgetting is structural. Naval history has always favoured battles - Trafalgar, Copenhagen, the Nile - engagements with a clear shape, a clear victor, a clear place in the national story. The anti-slave-trade patrols were something more ambiguous: not war exactly, not peace, but a long moral enforcement action whose victories were measured in human beings rather than territories. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eT\u003cb\u003ehis does not fit the conventional grammar of military glory.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Richard Murch\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798257967511\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/18\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 92\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.27lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.24d","brand":"Richard Murch","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":49084153168127,"sku":"9798257967511","price":26.03,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_6185e18e-5651-4689-af38-afc3737f2ded.jpg?v=1787619836","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/britains-war-to-end-the-richard-murch-9798257967511","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}