... tremendous.

... brilliant.

... gut-wrenching.

In order to flesh out his case, Rothman makes the masterful dramatic stroke of putting three prosperous slave traders front and center: Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard. The Ledger and the Chain is in large part a biographical study of these men, both as individuals and as symbols of Rothman’s larger argument. Readers watch them preen and hustle and manage their finances, and although Rothman regularly reminds us that these men were very comfortable with 'the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade,' he does an eye-opening job of making these three vile men three-dimensionally human.

Rothman brings to life the enormity of the lucrative interstate and intrastate merchandising of brutalized Black bodies as instruments of capital and exchange in an American commerce bottomed on instruments of torture like the shackle and whip.

... harrowing.

Rothman employs his wide breadth of knowledge about the era to vividly depict the human and economic impacts of the domestic slave trade as it burgeoned in the early 19th century.