The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert S. Klein (review)

Abstract

1022 Reviews tain topics, and that some observations are too brief or schematic. I was, forexample, surprised to see 300 years of Spanish colonial dominion of the Americas described as 'centuries of inertia' (p. 9), and the bold (but highly debatable) statement that the British imposed a 'colonial dependency' on Latin America after 1850 (p. 67). These lapses are infrequent, and, again, perhaps inevitable given the character of the book. The strongest section is the one in which Fowler is himself an expert?the early National Period. Here we get clear exposition, a review of the historiographical de? bates, and a judicious blend of narrative and analysis. The remaining sections are concise and well balanced, with a sure grasp of an evolving narrative. For my taste, there is rather too much reliance throughout on the structuralist shibboleths of depen? dency analysis?as seen in the book's emphasis on the very notion of a 'neo-colonial order' in the nineteenth century. The dependentista approach, which dominated Latin American historiography in the 1960s and 1970s, attacked the export model of growth as both structurally flawed and detrimental to long-term national interests. But more recent historiography has provided a powerful critique of its central tenets, and these alternative interpretations need to be addressed in a survey such as this. This raises a wider point. The book would certainly benefit from a fuller discussion of historiographical trends and debates. This is, perhaps, a thankless as well as dif? ficult task. But, as the author is fully aware, the historiography of Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a particularly contested field. There is a notable absence of consensus, and battles continue to rage?most recently, for example, between the proponents and critics of the 'new' cultural history. Perhaps because discretion is the better part ofvalour, the author has chosen not to engage with such controversies. He may be wise to do so, but the survey is less effectiveas a result. Goldsmiths, University of London Paul Garner The Atlantic Slave Trade. By Herbert S. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. xxi + 234pp. ?i3-95- ISBN 0-521-46588-5. The Atlantic slave trade was one of the firsttruly global trades. Involvement in it offeredmost of the participants high profitsbut only ifthey were willing to take great risks and were willing to master a bewildering variety of skills. It was an extremely complex and demanding trade, made all the more difficultbecause the buyers and sellers of the valuable produce in the trade came from widely divergent parts of the globe?Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Thus, the trade concerned more than just economic exchange: it necessitated cultural exchange on an almost unprecedented scale. Yet we are not primarily interested in the trade as an example of how globalization is not a new phenomenon. We are interested in the slave trade because we want to know more about the perishable goods carried in the trade, the 11 million Africans taken over four centuries to work the plantations and mines of the New World. The fact that the Atlantic slave trade was much more than merely a trade always causes problems foranyone writing about its structure and history. How can we write dispassionately about balance sheets, how goods were procured and then distributed, and the economic effectsof the trade in various regions of the world when this was a trade in human flesh that not only led to the deaths of millions in the trade itself but also transferred its not so fortunate survivors into an existence nearly as bad as was the horrificMiddle Passage across the Atlantic? The simple answer is that we have to know how the trade worked in order to understand it and we have to understand it before we can evaluate its significance. The historiography of the Atlantic slave trade has suddenly become interesting again after a fallow period following the 1970s when people tired of the endless disputes concerning how many people crossed the Atlantic. Thankfully, we have settled MLR, 98.4, 2003 1023 on an approximate number now and with the publication of the Atlantic slave trade CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), of which Herbert...