Customer Reviews

The Atlantic Slave Trade (New Approaches to the Americas)

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The Atlantic Slave Trade is an important part of history of several nations: great part of Africa of course, the nations in America who were immmersed in this trade as buyers and those European countries who had control of the trade to its colonies. One important question that I had in my mind before reading this book was "why Africans were enslaved", curiously the first words of chapter 1, and why in this New World, the American Indians were not used as workers? Seems that everything conspired for this trading to flourish, in particular the decline of native population and because those native became new Christians. But seems there is another reason, not named in this book, and is that those native american were not that productive than Africans or Chinese.

This is a short book and the author provide an insightful introduction, focusing especially in the economic side of this trade and its organization, showing a great deal of statistical information. There is not much of the people side of events -- I am referring to the sufferings stories of the Africans, but it does name the story of Igbo Equiano, an African slave that wrote a book about his experiences and I'm eager to know more about it.

This book does an outstanding job achieving its objective--to illustrate the current turn in scholarship that shows the complexity of an exchange system predating the arrival of the European slave traders in Africa. It suggests that many African societies were implicated in the slave trade internally, primarily shipping slaves to North Africa. Indeed, learning of the legality and normality of the system in Africa was enlightening to me.

Although some readers might be a little disappointed by the methodological and dispassionate tone of the author, they should know that the author aims a different mark and does an extraordinary job in discrediting the more polemical and popular accounts of the Atlantic Slave Trade. I am now very interested in learning more about the Atlantic Slave Trade and African history in general after reading this book.

Highly recommended if you can stomach a tone disinterested in engaging with normative questions raised by slavery, imperialism, and their role in Africa generally.