📚 Slavery & Abolition

The oldest unfree labour and the fight to end it: the trade, the plantation, the abolitionists, and the long afterlife of it all.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject slavery in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Twelve years a slave	Solomon Northup	1853	1,029
	Up from Slavery	Booker T. Washington	1900	430
	The Negro	W. E. B. Du Bois	1915	66
	The Suppression Of The Slave Trade To The United States Of America 1638-1870	W. E. B. Du Bois	1896	55
	The history of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave, related by herself	Mary Prince	1831	54
	From slavery to freedom	John Hope Franklin	1947	51
	The impending crisis of the South: how to meet it	Hinton Rowan Helper	1857	49
	Biografía de un cimarrón	Esteban Montejo	1966	33
	Microeconomics	Edwin Mansfield	1975	30
	To Be a Slave (Plus)	Julius Lester	1968	28
	Slavery; a problem in American institutional and intellectual life	Stanley M. Elkins	1959	26
	Slavery as an industrial system	Herman Jeremias Nieboer	1900	24
	Slavery in the United States	Charles Ball	1836	22
	The peculiar institution	Kenneth M. Stampp	1956	14
	The 1619 Project	Nikole Hannah-Jones	2021	13
	White Gold	Giles Milton	2004	11
	Slavery	William Ellery Channing	1835	10
	American Negro slavery	Allen Weinstein	1968	10
	Time on the cross	Robert William Fogel	1974	10
	You Wouldn't Want to Be a Slave in Ancient Greece	Fiona MacDonald	2000	10
	Slavery	James Meadows	2001	10
	The slave trade	Hugh Thomas	1997	9
	Slave	Mende Nazer	2003	9
	Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures)	Gwyn Campbell	2003	9
	Slavery and social death	Orlando Patterson	1982	8
	Many Thousand Gone	Virginia Hamilton	1993	8
	Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome	Joy DeGruy	2005	8
	The slave community	John W. Blassingame	1972	7
	Slavery in the Arab World	Murray Gordon	1987	7
	The Dreaded Comparison	Marjorie Spiegel	1988	7

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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