The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis (1996)

Abstract

The vastness of some historical events and processes attracts scholars into postulates marked by singularity. Like the Holocaust, modern slavery intuitively appeals to the historical imagination as a candidate for uniqueness: ‘There was nothing quite like black slavery, in scale, importance or consequence’, writes one of slavery’s recent chroniclers.’ Beyond slavery’s challenge to scholarly understanding, recently, considerable popular pressure has generated a demand that greater attention be paid to the story of slaves and their descendants in the world at large. The enormous increase in scholarly discussion and in the public visibility of the Holocaust in the United States has contributed to corresponding reflections on the place of slavery in American and world history. In April 1995, a New York Times front-page story on the commemoration of slavery reported that ‘some scholars compare this widespread reflection to that of Jews who have vigilantly preserved memories of the Holocaust’.2 Because both phenomena are so intimately tied to stories of mass degradation, dispersion and death, they elicit not only scholarly analysis but tempt philosophers, theologians, and politicians into competitions over comparative victimization.