Atlas Of The Transatlantic Slave Trade, by David Eltis and David Richardson

I have to say that this book positively surprised. I expected that this book would be short on data and long on the politics of blame, and even in the most text-heavy portions of it, the foreword by David Brion Davis and the afterword by David W. Blight, those are nowhere to be found. The book certainly does comment on the feelings of horror and revulsion that many visitors (like myself) to African slave forts have had upon seeing the places where this infernal trade happened, but blame is not being laid on heavy here, although there is plenty of it to be found. Nor did I find something I expected very much to find, which was the book minimizing the other trading in slave that has gone on, including the contemporaneous Muslim slave trade that brought roughly equal numbers of Africans with perhaps even more waste of life for a longer period of time from Central and Eastern Africa to Mediterranean and Levantine slave markets. Instead, the beginning of the book put the Transatlantic Slave Trade into a larger context that included the sale of Europeans (mostly Slavs) as well as the slavery of Sub-Saharan African populations in the Muslim world, which deserves a book of its own, assuming the statistics are available. What this book did, and deserves a great deal of credit for, is place the practice of the slave trade as much as possible on a statistical basis, and letting the data itself do all the conversation that is necessary.

This book is about 300 pages long in its core contents (300 large pages, it should be noted), and is divided into six parts. After a list of maps, foreword, and information about the atlas, the introduction of the book takes about 20 pages, and includes a series of maps that look at the Atlantic basin as a whole as well as a regional look at the slave trade that took place there. The first part of the book briefly focuses on the nations transporting slaves from Africa, organizing based on the nationality of the slave trading vessel, while also looking in general at the Spanish, Portuguese/Brazilian, Dutch, British, French, North American (mostly American), and Danish/Hanseatic/Baltic slave trade. This is followed by a larger examination of the ports that outfitted voyages in the transatlantic slave trade, looking at the regions of Africa that were frequented by the slave traders of such ports as Lisbon and Seville, Brazil, British and French ports like Liverpool and La Havre, and so on, some of them divided into different eras to show how it is that sources of slaves were often based on regional connections that generations of traders had with particular local African regimes to allow for a mutually beneficial long-term trading relationship. The third part of the book discusses the African coastal origins of slaves and the links between Africa and the greater Atlantic world, including a regional analysis of slave trading expeditions as well as political and ethnolinguistic boundaries in various African regions ranging from Senegal to Mozambique. The fourth part of the book provides maps and graphs that detail the unpleasant and harrowing experience of the Middle Passage for those unfortunate enough to suffer it. The fifth part of the book then provides a large amount of data concerning the destination of slaves in the Americas and their links to the Atlantic world. The sixth and shortest part of the book then provides some maps and charts about the abolition and suppression of the Transatlantic slave trade, after which the book ends with a short afterword, timeline, and glossary.

Among the most notable aspects of this book is just how much data is available about the slave trade. To be sure, data is less present about the latter migrations of slaves after they arrived in a given area. We can thank, though, the obsession that early modern European states had with trying to maintain a positive balance of trade with the sort of records that we do have about slaves, which focused on the transit points from Africa, which were often places where the Europeans had negotiated deals with each other and with local African regimes concerning various prices and payments of taxes and duties, as well as the points in the Americas (or, to a much lesser extent, in Europe) where the slaves were marked as received and were then sold or transshipped to buyers or other markets. The book also manages to portray, through its rigorous use of data from slave voyages, the differences in slavery between mainland North America and all other areas–where far more slaves were sent to the country than managed to stay alive, unlike the natural increase found in the United States, which ironically has made the United States seem like a bigger participant in the international slave trade than was actually the case. The book also brings up the interesting and tricky point that the efforts that Great Britain made against slavery appear to have been in violation of international law at the time, pointing out a reality that self-righteous progressives have always sought to put themselves above the law through their obedience of a higher law, even when they are doing something that the authors view as an immensely praiseworthy act in seeking to interdict slave vessels. At any rate, if you want to base your understanding of the transatlantic slave trade on a firm grasp of the data as well as visualization of that data, this book is an excellent one.