The Novel
Sacred Hunger is widely considered among the most important historical novels ever written. Barry Unsworth’s Booker Prize winning tale of a Liverpool sugar trading family who enter the slave trade and the calamities it brings to all around them. The novel, which opens in 1752 and the story which runs through the 1760s, follows the journey of their ship, the Liverpool Merchant, from home port to the West African coast and through the middle passage to the Caribbean and the American colonies. Unsworth’s masterpiece illuminates the depravity of enslaving our fellow man as the worst of the many moral excesses Western society tolerated in the name of profit.
From the 15th century well into the 19th, Africa, by way of its network of rivers into the interior, was lucratively mined for human beings first by the Spanish and the Portuguese and then by the ascendant British. Along the novel’s journey, we come to know the Africans, the middlemen of all description and the enslavers -- from seamen to captains to merchants. As the doomed enterprise encounters disease and finally mutiny, slave and crew rally to build a utopian society in swampland Florida just as the territory moves from Spanish to British rule. With much in common with the Black Seminole and Maroon communities in the Deep South, this new-world utopia reexamines relations between the races and genders before its brutal reencounter with the realities of the late 18th-century colonial world.
Sacred Hunger’s narrative has retained its importance by addressing themes still current in Europe, Africa and the New World: the powerfully corrupting influence that money and profit can unleash on societies, families and human beings. This corruption is equally true in politics as in commerce. The novel stands as Unsworth’s greatest work for revealing just how twisted and inhuman man can become when the concepts of morality, ethics, and the hunger for wealth and status are madly misaligned.
From the 15th century well into the 19th, Africa, by way of its network of rivers into the interior, was lucratively mined for human beings first by the Spanish and the Portuguese and then by the ascendant British. Along the novel’s journey, we come to know the Africans, the middlemen of all description and the enslavers -- from seamen to captains to merchants. As the doomed enterprise encounters disease and finally mutiny, slave and crew rally to build a utopian society in swampland Florida just as the territory moves from Spanish to British rule. With much in common with the Black Seminole and Maroon communities in the Deep South, this new-world utopia reexamines relations between the races and genders before its brutal reencounter with the realities of the late 18th-century colonial world.
Sacred Hunger’s narrative has retained its importance by addressing themes still current in Europe, Africa and the New World: the powerfully corrupting influence that money and profit can unleash on societies, families and human beings. This corruption is equally true in politics as in commerce. The novel stands as Unsworth’s greatest work for revealing just how twisted and inhuman man can become when the concepts of morality, ethics, and the hunger for wealth and status are madly misaligned.