The Slave Trade and Abolition Revisited

Abstract

THE SLAVE TRADE AND ABOLITION REVISITED Herbert S. Klein. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xx + 242 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Bibliographic Essay. Index. $90.00. Cloth. $24.99. Paper. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, eds. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xii + 315 pp. Preface. Notes on Contributors. Introduction by the Editors. Tables. Graphs. Index. $34.95. Paper. Derek R. Peterson, ed. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. II + 235 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Series Editor's Preface. Acknowledgments. Bibliography. Contributors. Index. $64.95. Cloth. $28.95. Paper. $25.00. In the past five years, the world has witnessed an efflorescence of symposia, museum exhibitions, and public commemorations focused on slavery and the slave trade. There have been many events in West Africa, North America, and Europe marking the bicentennial of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade, the two hundredth anniversary of the 1808 U.S. ban on the importation of enslaved labor, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, and the tenth anniversary of France's declaration that slavery and the slave trade constitute crimes against humanity. And last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon designated December 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. Simultaneously (and perhaps not coincidentally), these same years have also witnessed a tremendous growth in the already large body of scholarly literature on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. The three books reviewed here, The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert Klein, Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, and Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, are significant contributions to this literature. The first two do not focus on a single country, region, or continent but engage, rather, in the kind of transnational history that charts the trajectories of often separate, yet interconnected, decisions and events that came to connect and effect so many different peoples from around the world over long stretches of time. The third, Liverpool, focuses on die history of this port's involvement in the Adantic slave trade, but it does so by also positioning Liverpool within the larger British context. Each book addresses a specific set of questions central to the histories of the slave trade, slavery, and imperial studies. But each also brings new information to bear on these questions as well as new perspectives. The Atlantic Slave Trade (2010), for example, is a new edition of Klein's earlier book of the same tide, first published in 1999. But his incorporation in this latest edition of David Eltis's updated and gready expanded quantitative data set on the involvement of Portuguese and Spanish ships in die Adantic trade strengthens his already compelling arguments about the importance of the South Adantic to this enterprise. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery expands upon an already good body of literature on the ports that were so central to the trade in Africa and the Americas, but the authors in this edited volume bring to this area of inquiry the kinds of quantitative data that historians of the ports in Africa would love to access in regard to African ports. It is this quantitative approach that allows the contributors to explain in convincing detail how and why Liverpool outstripped the other major ports in Britain (i.e., London and Bristol) in terms of its involvement in the slave trade while also becoming a center for abolitionist activity. The scholarly literature has long noted the connection between the abolition movement in Britain and Britain's imperialist ambitions. …