Philip Curtin’s Atlantic Slave Trade initiated a veritable spate of research, reevaluation and informed speculation about the massive migration of Africans to the New World. Much of the published results remains highly specialized or narrowly restricted in time and place. Yet, much of this new work, especially that of Colin Palmer, Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Serge Daget, and Johannes Postma, modifies in important ways the original estimates of Curtin (based essentially on secondary sources). Here Herbert Klein does not revise the gross figures arrived at by Curtin, but reviews the available literature and integrates it with his own original archival research. The result is a valuable volume which not only extends our understanding of the detailed operations of African and non-African commerce, but also provides an excellent basis for comparative and interdisciplinary assessments of the entire transatlantic slave trade.
The Middle Passage focuses on the peak periods of the trade, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when approximately eighty percent of all African slaves arrived in the New World. Klein deals with the major carriers, the principal export and import areas, and various factors which affected trade, commerce, and transportation. This includes an analysis of the Portuguese trade from Angola during the eighteenth century, the characteristics of the Rio de Janeiro trade between 1795 and 1811; mortality rates in transit; the internal Brazilian trade; the English trade to Jamaica between 1782 and 1808; the French trade; and the Cuban trade between 1790 and 1843. Klein’s examination roves far beyond the conventional “middle passage” of the Atlantic transportation system to include the American and African factors as well.
The selective segments of the trade analyzed in this book certainly elucidate many aspects of the overall transatlantic migration pattern of Africans. But while the conclusions expand to some degree our prevailing impressions of the trade, they do not fundamentally revoke any well-founded specialist opinion. Klein finds that the modes of operation and the manner of transportation among the European states were similar; that mortality rates tended to be uniform among carriers, with a decrease during the nineteenth century; that females and children were disproportionately represented among the cargoes, reflecting local African conditions; and that heavy African migrations tended to depress the growth rates of creole African populations in the Americas. These are not really revolutionary conclusions, nor are they entirely unexpected, but they are more firmly supported by data than generally available in the current literature.
Occasionally the author confuses causes and coincidences, and several assertions are unsupported by empirical evidence. Some of his discussions on the changing infant and female proportions over time on certain slave cargoes appear contrived, and his appreciation of the internal dynamics of the American slave systems strikes this reader as being sometimes shallow. But these minor blemishes do not seriously mar an otherwise fine book.
