Cargo brings together contemporary art and current museum practices to reflect upon the different histories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade embodied within museum collections, and our relationship to contemporary slavery through everyday consumerism. Artists, curators and writers explore the changing global conditions of trade and migration today, and the lasting effect of the Slave Trade as reproduced in contemporary culture. Excavating the legacy of the Slave Trade as experienced today, this book s conceptual framework starts from the contemporary art perspective and works backwards through history. This archaeological approach is set against a more traditional linear chronology in the form of a time line of the Slave Trade from 1400 to the present. This book offers a critical platform for reflection upon ideas raised by the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery exhibition Human Cargo, a partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and