Transatlantic Slaving

Abstract

Transatlantic Slaving Kenneth Morgan (bio) Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. 908 pp. Figures, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliographical note on sources, and index. $37.50 (cloth); $20.00 (paper); London: Picador, 1997. £25. Some historians make their reputations with research articles, others with succinct monographs, still others with books written on the grand scale. Hugh Thomas is among the latter. Not for him the carefully crafted article based on archival research or the closely defined book on a particular segment of the past. Instead his intellectual energies have concentrated on wide-ranging, lengthy books dealing with broad themes of great historical importance. The Atlantic slave trade, which forms the subject of his latest book, might seem at first glance to lie beyond the skills and interests of someone who made his reputation with large books on The Spanish Civil War and Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, and who has recently concentrated on the sixteenth century in Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico. On closer inspection, however, the choice of the slave trade as a subject is not surprising. Thomas had included sections on the Spanish slave trade in Cuba; he is the author of a novel Havana about a Liverpudlian with a commission to import slaves to Cuba in 1762; and he has a penchant for the broad canvas and a marketable subject. The Slave Trade has been well reviewed in the newspaper press, and appears to be selling well judging from the copies I recently saw being bought in bookstores on a research trip to the United States. For the academic historian, the book is potentially important because there is no full-scale modern rival in print. Whether it achieves its potential is something that needs to be evaluated. The Slave Trade covers four centuries in the history of four continents, beginning with the Portuguese landing of an African cargo near Lagos on the Algarve in August 1444 and ending with the collapse of Brazilian and Cuban slavery in the 1880s. All the notable slave trading powers are covered: Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Denmark, and the British North American colonies. The supply sources of slaves in Africa are discussed, primarily the west African coast from the Sénegal River down to [End Page 513] Angola but also interior areas as far as the Sahara. The major slave markets in the New World are all included: the Caribbean islands, notably Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Lesser Antilles, as well as Brazil, Mexico and North America. The approach is global and Thomas weaves into his narrative details taken from economic, social, political, and diplomatic history. He links the slave trade to European maritime expansion, to imperial warfare, and to shifting metropolitan policies on overseas affairs. The text, supported by excellent maps and seventy-five glossy plates, amounts to about a quarter of a million words. Slavery had of course existed since ancient times, and one of the merits of The Slave Trade is the substantial amount of space devoted to contextual material about slavery and the slave trade from Biblical times onwards. Book 1 (“Green Sea of Darkness”) notes that slavery prospered as an institution in the Mediterranean basin in the Middle Ages, with Muslim merchants dominating the marketing of slaves by the fifteenth century. Slavery began its connection with sugar—the one staple crop that flourished most on slave-based plantations—on Madeira in the mid-fifteenth century, but, like Barbados two centuries later, the earliest farmers ended up bankrupt. When sugar was grown in the Canary Islands at the end of the fifteenth century, African slaves were again used as the labor force. The same phenomenon occurred around 1500 with the settlement of São Tomé, off the west African coast. Both these Portuguese settlements, as Thomas shows, served as a stepping stone between the Mediterranean and the American development of slavery. Book 2 (“The Internationalization of the Trade”) explores the first phase of Atlantic slave trading on a significant scale by focusing on Portuguese and Spanish maritime expansion in the Atlantic world during the sixteenth century. Thomas includes...