David Olusoga's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books David Olusoga recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of David Olusoga's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Seventh Edition Enlarged

Olaudah Equiano

4.0

Recommended by David Olusoga, Francisco Bethencourt, and Juliet 'Kego Poetry4change.

David Olusoga

This is a unique and really special book, a full-length autobiography of a man who experienced every aspect of what slavery was. [source]

Francisco Bethencourt

The book showed how a former slave could be highly sensitive, emotional, articulate, with the right values. It created a totally different dynamic for the abolitionist movement. [source]

Juliet 'Kego Poetry4change

You can listen to this while in Traffic...especially for residents of Las Gidi😂 In 2020: LISTEN TO, OR READ ONE BOOK PER WEEK🙏 "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African", Written By Himself (1745-1797) https://t.co/vauzIZ7Vpo [source]

Bury the Chains

Adam Hochschild

4.4

This is the story of a handful of men, led by Thomas Clarkson, who defied the slave trade and ignited the first human rights movement. Beginning in 1788, a group of Abolitionists moved the cause of anti-slavery from the floor of Parliament to the homes of 300,000 people boycotting Caribbean sugar, and gave a platform to freed slaves.

Recommended by David Olusoga.

David Olusoga

This book came out at the moment when many of us in Britain were busy marking the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade in 2007. In all Adam’s books he places character and biography at the very heart of his stories and this is another example of him doing that brilliantly. People are perhaps hard-wired to love story, so putting people at the absolute centre of a narrative is a very powerful way to write. In some ways I think maybe it took an American, an outsider to the British story of race, slavery and abolition, to see these characters afresh. Adam looked again at people like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and tried to discover who they were, and through their biographies he explored the bigger, overarching and convoluted story of the rise and ultimate fall of British slavery. [source]

Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora

Ronald Segal

3.9

A comprehensive study of the Eastern slave trade by an eminent British scholar

A companion volume to The Black Diaspora, this groundbreaking work tells the fascinating and horrifying story of the Islamic slave trade. Islam's Black Slaves documents a centuries-old institution that still survives, and traces the business of slavery and its repercussions from Islam's inception in the seventh century,

Recommended by David Olusoga.

David Olusoga

I read this book when it came out and did a radio interview with the author. A few weeks later he asked, very kindly, if I wanted to be the facilitator when he discussed the book at the Hay-on-Wye book festival. Well, I’d never been to Hay-on-Wye and I also didn’t really appreciate who Ronald Segal was, and I was going to a party that weekend, so I said ‘no’. I then learnt who Ronald was and really regretted it. [source]

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Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle

Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, Sophie Spencer-Wood

4.6

From the bonds of slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, from the Deep South to the northern metropolises, from the Harlem Renaissance to the riots of South Central Los Angeles, Freedom tells of the African American struggle for equality from the first photographic records in the 19th century all the way to the present. It is organized chronologically in five sections with introductory essays and n

Recommended by David Olusoga.

David Olusoga

What makes it work so well is that the early decades of photography in America overlap with the last years of slavery. [source]