Recontextualizing French History: The French Atlantic Triangle and Globalization (review of <em>The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade</em> by Christopher L. Miller)

Abstract

French Atlantic slavery and the slave trade have not, given the foundational role they played in shaping the coordinates of the global economic and political landscape today, received the kind of concerted scholarly attention they warrant. Yet, the subject itself continues to inform public debate on the appropriateness of commemorative mechanisms, claims for reparation, official revisionist discourse, pedagogic and institutional responses, lingering structures of inequity associated with the disparities the trade engendered, and naturally the claims made by and on behalf of minority populations in europe with historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. Discussion of these issues has more often than not been characterized by a glaring absence of accurate information, countered in part by a handful of innovative measures such as the international Slavery museum in Liverpool and educational initiatives such as London’s Hackney museum’s special