Kenneth Morgan, series ed. Robin Law, David Ryden, and John Oldfield, vol. eds. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 1632 pp. Endnotes. Index. 4 vols. £360/$540. Cloth.

Abstract

Kenneth Morgan, series ed. Robin Law, David Ryden, and John Oldfield, vol. eds. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 1632 pp. Endnotes. Index. 4 vols. £360/$540. Cloth. For historians of Africa interested in the impact of the Atlantic slave trade there is already a considerable body of primary material available in most major libraries. Besides the many travelers' accounts republished by Frank Cass in the 1960s, we have the invaluable four-volume edition prepared by Elizabeth Donnan seventy years ago, which includes a large number of archival documents in addition to extracts from contemporary books. More recently, Robin Law has published the first two volumes of what eventually will become a four-volume edition of the local correspondence of the Royal African Company's agents on the coast of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. This new publication makes a welcome addition to the existing literature. The texts are on the whole well chosen and representative. Altogether the original texts-facsimiles of contemporary publications-cover about fourteen hundred pages. They are supplemented in each volume by a lengthy introduction and shorter subintroductions to the individual documents (150 pages), endnotes (80 pages) and a thirty-page index to the whole set. Appropriately, the series begins with Africa itself. Volume 1, focusing upon the operation of the slave trade in Africa, is edited by Robin Law, whose introduction gives us an excellent review of recent literature. Most historians of Africa working on this period will have come across the four texts selected here. John Hawkins constitutes an exceptional case both with regard to the early date (1569) and because he deals with the direct participation of Europeans in the enslaving process. John Matthews's Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone (1788) struck me as a surprising choice, given that this book, nearly two hundred pages long, was reprinted as recently as 1966, albeit without annotation. John Adams's Sketches (1821), based on voyages made between 1786 and 1800, covers most of the West African coast. Law's annotation is helpful here, as it is for the excerpt from Gomer Williams's account of the Liverpool slave trade (1897), comprising papers on Old Calabar in the years 1767 to 1783. The remaining three volumes are more concerned with debates conducted in Europe, but they too contain material that is of significance for African history. Volume 2, on the Royal African Company, edited by Kenneth Morgan, comprises six texts written during the period extending from 1680, when the company first felt obliged to defend its special position (emphasizing, among other things, the benefits of the slave trade to England), to 1746, by which time the company, although retaining its forts in West Africa, had long ceased to supply slaves to America on its own ships. …