A riveting account of a landmark expedition that left only one survivor, now back in print for the first time in decades. Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea—a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant—an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a corner of the world unknown to Europeans. The expedition made its way to Turkey and Egypt, by which time its members were already actively seeking to undercut and even kill one another, before disappearing into the harsh desert that was their destination. Nearly seven years later a single survivor returned to Denmark to find himself forgotten and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect. Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is a tale of intellectual rivalry and a comedy of very bad manners, as well as an utterly absorbing adventure. Arabia Felix includes 33 line drawings and maps.

Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767 (NYRB Classics)

History

Hansen, Thorkild

Ancient Civilizations

NYRB Classics

This is the third volume in Hansen's classic slave trade trilogy. When America was discovered and plantations established, slave labour became the principal export commodity from the Gold Coast. This book is about the history of Danish/Norwegian participation in the trans- Atlantic slave trade. It describes the organisation of the trade, the participants, the challenge, and the link with the West Indies to where the slaves were transported for work on the sugar plantations. It describes Danish purchase of islands in the West Indies, and traces how the decline in Dutch and British trade, and the abilities of the Danish administration led to a golden age in the Danish slave trade in the 1770s and 1780s. In that period, the Danish share in the total slave trade exceeded ten percent; and the decline in the trade with the growth of a new European consciousness, heralded abolition. Coast of Slaves, the first volume of the trilogy, was originally published in Danish in 1967. This English translation is edited to provide explantions about inaccessible references as well as established factual misrepresentations.

Coast of Slaves

Business & Money

Sub-Saharan Publishers

This is third title in Thorkild Hansen's classic trilogy on the Atlantic slave trade, originally published in Danish in 1967; and the first major translation and publication of the work in English. In Europe and North America, few are aware that the beautiful and now wealthy Virgin Islands of St Thomas, St Croix and St Jan were once Danish settlements and outposts of the slave trade. Moreover that the question of the independence of the islands was never seriously considered by the Danes, who instead sold them to the US in 1917 for 25 million dollars, several decades after the official end of slavery. This was against the will of the majority of the islanders, who were opposed to rule by the Americans, wary of their iniquitous treatment of blacks. In Denmark meanwhile, the popular view of national history presides that Denmark was the first of the imperial powers to abolish the slave trade. Thorkild Hansen's work breaks with these miss- representations of Denmark's role in the Atlantic slave trade. The third and biggest volume in the trilogy covers the period from the introduction of African slaves to the Danish islands, their official emancipation in 1848, subsequent sale to the Americans in the twentieth century, and reactions and resistance to these processes. Scrutinizing Denmark's moral obligation towards the islanders, the author draws extensively on primary sources, dramatizing and depicting real life characters into a moving and descriptive narrative. The introduction is provided by the historian A.V. Adams who states that ' Hansen's trilogy and Dako's scholarly initiative and competence in translating it contributes not only to Danes' re-reading of their own history, but also to West Indians' understanding of theirs... Hansen and Darko's contribution reaches beyond the Caribbean into the larger history of African-diaspora slave resistance... And inasmuch as the islands under consideration of the United States of America, this book through its translation becomes a text of US historiography...'

Islands of Slaves (Thorkild Hansen)

Africa

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Books by Hansen, Thorkild