One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event - an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
- ISBN10 0805094539
- ISBN13 9780805094534
- Publish Date 14 January 2014
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 10 February 2017
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Henry Holt & Company Inc
- Imprint Metropolitan Books (imprint of Henry Holt & Company)
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 384
- Language English