The Diligent

"Harms has brought to this undertaking decades of training, deep knowledge of his subject and a historian's fascination with the strangeness of the past. He has produced an original book that will endure... As a comprehensive and multilayered appreciation of that trade, The Diligent has no peer."—New York Times Book Review

"History as it should be written."—Library Journal

"Africanist Robert Harms provides the most vivid and useful description of a typical slave trading voyage ever written. Imaginatively constructed, deftly, and engagingly written, a model of research, the book takes the reader deep into the tragic heart of the eighteenth-century Atlantic."—H Net Book Review

"A beautifully written, meticulously researched, compelling narrative that reveals the greed, brutality and inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade."—The News and Observer

"A compelling and illuminating narrative ...For a sense of what the trade involved and how it was made possible, Harms' story is unrivaled."—Los Angeles Times Book Review