Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

I recently read -- and can heartily recommend -- this nineteenth century American masterpiece. It's the book on African-American slavery in the southern United States; when published, it actually helped to precipitate the events that led to the Civil War and, ultimately, to the abolition of slavery.

One particular character that I found intriguing was the "slave trader". These rough-and-ready individuals plied their trade by buying slaves at auction -- and in the process, often tearing mother from child or husband from wife -- then selling them on at a profit, sometimes transporting them interstate to do so.

These traders were ruthless, calculating characters. As portrayed in the story, they had no particular feelings about the whole slavery enterprise -- they were just in it for the money. I was eerily reminded of their modern-day counterparts in the financial markets.

There does seem to be something universal about the niche of the trader: the quantities being traded change over the centuries, but the essential characteristics remain. With only a modicum of imagination, you could easily take the following quote as describing sub-prime mortgage brokers pre-GFC:

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public sentiment that calls for the trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

The book also provide us with the origins of the expression "to be sold down the river": often, slaves would be bought and taken from a relatively comfortable existence in a state such as Kentucky, and sold "down the river" to plantations in, say, Louisiana. There they would often be worked essentially to death under barbaric conditions.

It's grim, sobering stuff, and one of the more powerful books I can remember reading.