The essays in this volume arise from a conference on the Atlantic slave trade held at the University of Rochester in 1988. Most of the prominent scholars of the Atlantic slave trade in North America were present, although not all contributed to this book. Of the contributions, 9 of the 14 have already been published in Social Science History. Three of the other 5 are drawn from (or elaborated from) monographs now in print. So while readers will find it convenient to have all these papers under one cover, they will find very little in this volume that is genuinely new. Readers of the HAHR, moreover, will be disappointed to find virtually no reference to Hispanic America or to Spain. The book also has a good index, no bibliography, and a shortage of maps.
The volume is divided into three parts, preceded by a general introduction written by Inikori and Engerman. The introduction aims to identify gainers and losers from the slave trade, and ends with the unsurprising conclusion that in net terms Europe and North America benefited and tropical Africa lost. Latin America is not considered. The assessment and the accounting methods will be familiar to readers of Inikori’s work (cited 18 times in the first nine pages here).
Part 1 deals with slavery and the slave trade in Africa. It includes four pieces, treating the Western Sudan, the abolition question in Northern Nigeria, the Angolan trade, and demographic impacts across Africa. These pieces are the work of accomplished Africanists, and they present an unsentimental vision of the subject. Part 2 features four chapters devoted to the proposition that slavery and the slave trade provided capital and other advantages that assisted either Britain or New England in achieving industrialization or simply economic growth. Each is a gloss on the Eric Williams thesis of a half-century ago. Curiously, Engerman, who has argued against this view, is left out: part 2 is unanimous.
Part 3 is a grab bag, with chapters on the Dutch slave trade, Antigua in the 1720s, dehydration as a cause of death on the Middle Passage, salt retention as an essential for survival on that passage, and finally the relationship between abolition and racism in Britain and France. The piece on the Dutch slave trade by J. Postma touches on Spanish America briefly but still more than any other chapter in this book; greater detail is available in Postma’s monograph The Dutch in Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 (1990). The two chapters on dehydration and salt retention complement each other well and offer a new vision of the Middle Passage; they are the most original contributions in the book. Biologically informed history of this sort provides more new insight than any of the other approaches in the volume, and promises a “usable past” in the sense that health problems today (such as hypertension among descendants of Middle Passage survivors) may prove easier to confront with a knowledge of relevant history.
