New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896. First edition. Octavo (leaves measuring 222 x 145 mm). xi, [1], 335 pp. A Very Good copy. Publisher's red cloth titled in gilt. Sunning and rubbing to spine, and some sunning to top edge of upper board. Contemporary ink ownership inscription to upper pastedown. Scarce in commerce.

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade was W.E.B. Du Bois' Harvard doctoral thesis and his first published book, foreshadowing a rich career of sociological and historical writing that included Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). The work analyzes the American history of slavery from the colonial period, through the Revolutionary War, the 1804 Haitian Revolution and its effect on the slave trade in the American South, and the impact of the 1808 ban on the slave trade to Britain. In his introduction to the 2014 edition, Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it "a model of contemporary historiography that favored empiricism over universal proclamation, Suppression reveals the government's slow movement toward abolition...in which a market sensibility took precedence over moral outrage, the combination of which led to the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States until it was no longer economically beneficial" (p. xvi). Throughout the twentieth century, the work was "the standard work on the efforts made in the United States...to limit and suppress the trade in slaves between Africa and America," and remains both an important contribution to that area of study and a crucial entry in Du Bois' bibliography (LSU Press). Very Good (Item #8289)