Customer Reviews

The SLAVE TRADE: THE STORY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: 1440 - 1870

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3 star:		(8)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Arghhhh! This book took me nine months to get through! Still, this super-detailed, eye-opening account of the slave trade should be required reading for every high school senior in the world. I was suprised not only by the culpability of the Africans themselves but by that of Hume, Swift, Voltaire...the greatest champions of liberty our civilization has known! I can't believe I didn't know this stuff!

I hope there will be a second edition that takes us up to the slavery currently going on in Mauritania and the Sudan.

THE SLAVE TRADE: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 is, perhaps, the single most-important work dealing with the slave trade. This masterful work builds on and partially overlaps John Thornton's AFRICA AND AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1400-1800 and Edward William Bovill's THE GOLDEN TRADE OF THE MOORS. It also provides an essential bridge between those works and Ira Berlin's MANY THOUSANDS GONE: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America & MAROON SOCIETIES: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (edited by Richard Price).

Starting with the first major shipload of African (white, café au lait and black) slaves taken in a razzia by Portuguese in 1444, Thomas briefly looks backward at the history of slavery among Christians, non-African Muslims and Africans - pagan, Christian and Muslim. He recounts the origins of the Atlantic slave trade - including the long-existing North African-Spanish conflict with mutual slave raids and the beginning of the coastal trade in West Africa associated with Prince Henry's desire for exploration, conquest, profit and religious zeal and the equal desire for conquest and / or profit of almost all African rulers and aristocrats, as well as of numerous merchants (especially Muslim and Mandingo), already familiar with the Trans-Saharan trade. Thomas recounts the early settlements in the Azores and Madeira and Cape Verde Islands, as well as the lengthy effort to conquer the Canary Islanders, including the guanches of Tenerife, and the explorations of Cadamosto. The trade began to be institutionalized by Agreements of mutual benefit between the west coast Africans and European traders (with increasing numbers of slaves being taken from the interior by coastal states)while the plantation system began to develop in Madeira and elsewhere. The fortress at El Mina (Sao Jorge da Mina) was established as well as Arguin and Luanda (which became one of the few exceptions to the principle of non-settlement - of Europeans in Africa - due to fears of antagonizing local rulers, losing trading rights and suffering debilitating and even deadly illnesses). Luso-Africans (persons claiming both Portuguese and African antecedents) increasingly took over the coastal trade in El Mina and Luanda. Despite the papal grant of Portuguese (extended to Spain when the two were temporarily united) monopoly over the trade, the English began entering the slave trade in 1562 under Captain John Hawkins and the Dutch began to be involved in the 1590s.

Thomas then describes the development of "corporations" given monopolies on trading slaves by the various European monarchs and the economic benefits accruing to various European towns, as well as the growing wealth, culture and influence of various West African towns involved the trade. In the 1600s, African slave began to trickle into North America followed by the eventual establishment of the slave-plantation system. Turning to the crossing, Thomas describes, in vivid detail, the horrible conditions slaves encountered aboard ship as well as the high rate of deaths for both (often shanghaied) sailors and human cargo and the inhumane treatment provided to both by the officers as well as the harshness suffered by the latter under the African captors. Included in this section (Book 4) is an account of the various non-human cargo brought to and from Africa.

Turning to the Abolition (of the Slave Trade, if not slavery, itself) movement, the author touches on the views, organizations and actions of political men like Pitt, Wilberforce, Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette as well as the anti-slavery philosophy of men like Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith and Burke (in opposition to the interests of men like Voltaire and Locke). In 1807, the reluctant slave owners, Madison and Jefferson, in America, enacted legislation banning Americans from involvement in the international trade of slaves while non-slaveholders William Pitt and William Wilberforce did the same in the British Empire. Great Britain began to pressure other nations to end the slave trade and many African states began to use more of their slave captives to produce goods for international trade in lieu of slave. Portugal, at the same time, began to trade in even greater numbers of slaves. African merchants also actively opposed the attempts by Britain's AFRICAN INSTITUTION to increase the industriousness and productivity of the general African populace due to the potential danger to their trading interests. Britain paid various African leaders to end the trade (although many captives were executed since the rulers could not sell them due to the abolitionist sentiments among Europeans and Americans). Still, slavery itself was not actually abolished in the British West Indies until 1838. In the mid-1850s Brazil and Britain neared war and Britain forced Brazil to adopt anti-slave trade measures in earnest. The book concludes with the end of Cuban involvement in the trade as Britain began to forcibly occupy some African states (setting the stage for the eventual "colonization" of the continent) in order to finally squash the trade - although the epilogue informs us that as late as 1980, 90,000 blacks are still reported as slaves to Arab masters.

It would not, of course, be fair to leave off without pointing some negligible errors in the book: First, the Sources and Notes section seems to have provided bold headings for some of the latter sections (books) but not the former. However, this does no discernable harm toward the body of the work and a few seconds study will clear up the confusion. In addition, while apparently relying on the best statistics available for the total number of slaves transported via the Atlantic / Trans-Atlantic journeys, the work fails to directly rebut some of the much larger numbers proposed by some historians. The author (in citing one minor source) also fails to respond to the criticisms of Sir Richard Burton and those almost identical ones of Orlando Patterson (who fails, however, to indicate his reliance on that noted bigot) on Mungo Park's reliability. However, such a response is readily available in Kate Ferguson Marsters' Introduction to Park's TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA. Thomas also fails to explain why he differs with Bovill on the exact relationship of the Sanhaja and the Tuareg. All-in-all; however, these are minor points and hardly detract from the incredible depth, breadth, organization and vividness of this masterful work!

Thomas has written a detailed, comprehensive portrait of the slave trade. He emphasizes the perspective of the slave traders, rather than the slaves. He stresses the earlier, European roots, over the earlier Muslim traders, although he does not ignore the Arab and Moorish traders. He seems to focus a little more on the European than the American traders, but there is plenty of coverage of the latter.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of the book is its voice, which is clinically detached from the material. I would expect this informative, but cool voice in a study of cotton trading. At times, Thomas' distance disarms the reader, but more often it facilitates the reader's access to this centuries-old, horrific business.

Thomas indirectly addresses the question why England so quickly converted its national policy on slave trading. He portrays several individuals who worked long, hard, and seemingly against the odds for the abolition of slave trading, if not slavery itself, but I still wonder how this policy seems to have gained such widespread acceptance among those naval officers on whom fell the duty of enforcement. I would have appreciated more insights into their feelings about slave trading and naval interdiction.

The length of the book probably did not permit the enlargement of its scope, but the reader seeking the slave's point of view may not be satisfied. Largely drawing from The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Thomas explains that there was little literature on which he could rely for this perspective.

The book is well written and seems well researched. I most appreciated Thomas' quanitification of the enormity of the slave trade without overwhelming me with statistics. I wouldn't call it a page-turner, but I had trouble putting it down.

I learned a great deal about the Atlantic slave trade from this book. Among other things,I hadn't realized how extensive the English involvement in the trade was or that there were slaves in Europe itself, even in the UK in the 18th century. The book is long in number of pages but short on summary and analysis. It has mind-numbing chapters of detail about individual slavers, but rarely a coherent description of where things stood at a given point in time. Also it would be helpful to be more familiar than I was with the general history of the West Indies, particularly the British West Indies, and with Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas because the book seems to assume that readers don't need much background on these topics. I thought it picked up speed in later chapters when it began talking about the struggles in Europe, particularly the UK, to end the slave trade - here it seemed like the author was on more familiar ground dealing with British politics, conflicts between European countries and so forth. The organization of the book is hard to follow and the chapter titles are not very helpful, so going back and trying to find information is quite difficult. The information in the book is fascinating, however, so it is still well worth reading.

Fascinating, and will recalibrate all you think you know about slavery in America. You will learn:

-Fewer than 5 per cent of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to this country.

-Slaves were sold to European merchants by other Africans who had enslaved them in the first place.

-Several of Africa's proudest empires were built on the sale of slaves. For centuries Africa's chief export was human beings. Slavery was an African institution long before it spread to the South, and there was no abolition movement to trouble it. When Europe banned the slave trade, African economies reeled.

-Slavery still exists there, in Sudan and Mauritania and probably elsewhere.

-In the Arab world African slaves were highly prized as eunuchs, and many young African men died in the process. The prevalence of eunuchs probably explains why African slavery didn't leave the Arab world with a "race problem." Given this history, it's ironic that so many American blacks adopt Arab names to spite the white man and to achieve a supposedly independent "identity."

Recommended

As a Nigerian currently in the U.S i am indeed deeply interested in slave trade,slavery and colonialism and it's effect on African people,s in Africa and the diaspora.Although it is a bulky book it is well researched and detailed giving an excellent perspective from a european historian's point of view.It starts from the first tentative contact between Africans and Europeans in the 15 th century to the gradual and then escalating involvement of various european countries and of course their few African collaborators in this heinous and repugnant crime to humanity,it also gives exacting detail about the gradual halt of the slave trade that is the trans atlantic because even today pockets of this still exist in Africa.In Conclusion there are no complete saints in this compelling narrative bur various degrees of villainy from severe to lesser forms.The victims were of course the slaves sold by a few of their fellow Africans the mordern Equivalent of which are the rulers of recent memory such as Idi Amin Dada,Bokassa ,Abacha.However there is hope with Obasanjo,Mandela ,Mbeki,Museveni.The heroes if i may say of this rupugnant,Humiliating practise include the Quakers,Oluadah Equiano,Frederick Douglas,La Rouche Foucald,Pitt,William Wilberforce,Clarkson,Harriet Tubman,Lord Palmerston,Sojourner Truth,montesquieu to name a few.This is a welcome addition to my library.

A good book on a horrifying subject. On which I learned that, from the about 11 million slaves carried across the Atlantic between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, no less than 4.5 million was by Portuguese (and Brasilian) traders, about the double of the next larger carrier, Britain. In a country where everybody is so justly proud of the overseas discoveries of the 15th and 16th Centuries maybe we should pay a little more attention to the dark side of the enterprise.

The detail in this book is astonishing, but it's no page-turner. The cast of thousands makes for slow reading. Historical references and names are tossed so casually at the reader--without elaboration--I wondered if the author intended his book for historians. The dry tone is disconcerting as well.

I think this is a magnificient book, even necessary reading - because it shows how conscience was compromised for Popes, and Royalty, and my almost everyone because there was money to be made. Even people of such astounding insight as Thomas Jefferson was blinded to the race issue - perhaps because he was always half broke! The book helped me to realise, as an Australian, how the United States has been at the cutting edge of conscience to obliterate the indignity of racial prejudice. The europeans would not allow slavery in europe, but they dumpted slaves in their colonies - but it was the United States where conscience has gradually overcome economics to systematically the inhumanity of slavery and racial prejudice. Of course there is a long way and I have never heard Americans praise them selves. They should. There is still a long way to go because ignorance is a self perpetuating phenomena. A great book

The Slave Trade is one book that every one should have to read at school and if not at school then in their normal everyday life. You will come to understand the struggle of oppressed people and why some are angry today and continue to feel disposessed.

Read how it all started and why and the conditions people had to endure to make others wealthy or live a comfortable life. If this book is not made available to schools at a secondary level then there is something wrong with the education system. This is a detailed and well researched book and makes you wonder about humankind and man's inhumanity to fellow humans. There are lessons still to be learned and this is one powerful book.