The Effect of Slave Trade Represented by Life of Olaudah Equiano by Gustavas Vassc

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, recounts the story of a child who is born in West Africa, but is kidnapped and thrown into a Western world completely foreign to him. Equiano is a slave for a total of ten years and endeavors to take on certain traits and customs of Western thinking. Not only is it an in-depth account of his life in enslavement and as a freedman, but also it is the first autobiography to ever be published by a former slave and becomes apart of a broader Humanitarian Revolution. It is during the eighteenth-century, in the awake of the Enlightenment movement that new concepts are created; concepts such as: human rights, equality, progress, and tolerance.1 These concepts are what lead the success of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and point to a larger transition in European views about slavery in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Before it’s publication, many Europeans had no idea the traveling conditions of the slaves. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air s...

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