A History of the British Merchant Navy, Volume 1: Spices and Slaves 1500-1807. Full of risk, adventure and heroic action on the one hand, with exploitation, skullduggery and piracy on the other, this first of five volumes carries the reader from the emergence of Tudor England on the world stage in defiance of Spain's sea-borne empire, to the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, with an account of the slave-trade until its abolition in 1807.