Robert Harms is Henry J. Heinz Professor of History & African Studies at Yale University. He is the author of several award winning books, including River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade (1981), Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (1988/1999), and his much celebrated book The Diligent: Worlds of the Slave Trade (2001), which is based on the extraordinary journal of French lieutenant Robert Durand, who participated in the slave trade.