The French Atlantic slave empire of the seventeenth century has not so far attracted anything like the scholarly attention accorded to its eighteenth-and nineteenth-century counterparts. The three volumes and nearly two thousand pages of The Black Ordeal aim to compensate for this imbalance. The first volume is a narrative of French contacts with Africa before 1715, and it relies mainly on published seventeenth-and eighteenth-century sources for the period before 1690. The chapters are arranged chronologically, and within that geographically, usually beginning with Senegambia and ending with Angola. Half of the second volume takes up the Middle Passage, and the remainder is concerned with the French Americas. These sections make extensive use of French colonial and departmental archival records and are arranged thematically. A dozen chapters look at various aspects of slave life, including diet, resistance, working conditions, and family relations.
Any work of this size drawing on primary materials and dealing with a subject not well served in the existing literature will provide researchers with many nuggets of usable information. Nevertheless, the interpretative framework is disappointing, and indeed is hard to locate against the backdrop of the recent historiography. There is a war on nuance and intellectual tension in these volumes in which the author takes no prisoners. Walter Rodney’s approach to development is faintly visible. Thus, before the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most African societies were moving from communalist to class-based structures. When the Europeans arrived, they were obliged to cooperate with an African elite. The surplus extracted both here, through unequal trade, and in the Americas, through direct exploitation, provided the basis of subsequent European development. Despite this arrangement, in the Americas slaves survived for only a few years in a concentration camp environment; they were continually starved and were extremely unproductive. The slaveowner was a “psychotic, slavering white beast . . . parented socially by the marriage of manufacturing capitalism with Western Hemisphere black slavery” (pp. 831-32), or more simply a “rapist rampant” (p. 991).
From an interpretative standpoint, then, this work constitutes a cry of pain and rage rather than an analysis. It does not advance our understanding of the phenomenon of slavery in the Americas or, more generally, either the human capacity for cruelty or the response to such behavior. Indeed, attempts to examine relations between slave and slaveowner in terms beyond violence, deprivation, and sexual exploitation are dismissed as “bigoted and apologetic” (p. ix) or “ideological rubbish” designed “to minimize . . . the worst genocide in the annals of mankind” (p. 240). Such an approach really puts an end to history, and indeed to all attempts to understand societies and human relations. Finally, the author has been ill served by his editors. The text contains repetitions as well as awkward sentence and chapter structures.
