Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (review)

Abstract

Atlas of Transatlantic Slave Trade. By David Eltis and David Richardson. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 307. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Gregory E. O'MalleyIn Atlas of Transatlantic Slave Trade, David Eltis and David Richardson have produced a beautiful book on an ugly subject - forced migration of millions of African men, women, and children across ocean for sale throughout Americas. The book's 189 full-color maps present estimates and analysis of this largest coerced transoceanic migration in history in a visual format, drawing data from web site Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (to which both authors were key contributors).1 Some maps illustrate trans-Atlantic trade as a whole, while others are more specific, tracing American destinations of captives departing a single African port or showing African regions frequented by slave traders of a particular national background. As such, Atlas offers a compendium of estimates of forced migration parsed many different ways.In that sense, Atlas provides a crucial update to Philip Curtin's pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade-, it offers a new census, incorporating rich historiography of intervening forty years.2 (Indeed Atlas is dedicated to Curtin, crediting him with inspiring database that undergirds volume.) The Atlas differs from Curtin's census, however, by eschewing his monograph format in which estimates were explained and defended, opting to leave such discussion to online database. In exchange for this loss of explication, readers get vivid maps, covering many more routes and subjects, each captioned to highlight key trends or patterns. These maps appear in six topical sections, each with a useful introduction. Overall, Atlas synthesizes a vast body of scholarship into a handy and visually striking reference work.Although not organized around an argument, Atlas does emphasize several key patterns. First, it highlights sugarcane cultivation as the economic foundation of Atlantic slave trade (1). With arrows of varied widths proportionally representing forced migration to various American regions, primacy of sugar-producing areas (and relative insignificance of United States) is glaringly apparent in numerous maps. The Atlas also captures division of Atlantic slave trade between two fairly distinct systems. In North Atlantic, triangular voyages predominated, linking European ports of organization with African ports north of equator and American markets in Caribbean or on its littoral. The South Atlantic traffic, by contrast, was bilateral - organized from Brazilian ports that were also markets for captives. Typically these Brazilian ventures remained in Southern Hemisphere, acquiring captives in Congo-Angola region of West Central Africa.Of particular interest to historians of early republic period, Atlas presents period after 1 775 as one of flux for slave trade. The Age of Revolution and rise of abolitionism altered longstanding patterns, as Saint-Domingue ceased to be a market for slaves, as Cuban slavery expanded to fill void, and as various slave-trading powers withdrew from commerce in human beings. Just as gradual emancipation in northern United States shifted weight of slavery southward in new republic, Atlas illustrates a similar southward shift in Atlantic world as a whole. As northern European powers and United States withdrew from slave trade in early nineteenth century, northernmost regions of supply in Africa also declined in importance, and many American markets north of equator closed to slave arrivals. (Cuba offers a glaring exception to this trend of decline in northern hemisphere.) Meanwhile, Brazil increasingly dominated nineteenth-century trafile, as did its preferred regions of African supply south of equator. …