Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press) 1st Edition

Served the purpose of purchase.

a book well worth reading

For many slaves the "Middle Passage" marked the beginning, not the end of their forced migration from Africa and their voyage into slavery. Gregory O'Malley provides the first, detailed exploration of the intercolonial slave trade, the trade that continued the process of enslavement and forced migration beyond the Middle Passage.

For many slaves, the Middle Passage ended with the arrival of their ship at a Caribbean entrepôt such as Jamaica or Barbados. Local plantation owners and merchant slave traders purchased slaves either at auction or from the transatlantic ship captain. Plantation owners tended to purchase healthy, male slaves in the prime of their lives. Slave traders often purchased the slaves the plantation owners didn’t want for transshipment to other North and South American ports, where the infrequency of slave ship arrivals made buyers less picky about the health, sex, and age of slaves. O’Malley focuses on this transshipment trade.

O’Malley sets out to prove five important points about the intercolonial slave trade:

1. The intercolonial slave trade was “robust” in scale.

2. The extensive scale of the intercolonial slave trade powerfully shaped enslaved people's experiences.

3. The intercolonial slave trade was not just incidental to the British transatlantic slave trade, but VITAL to its growth and to the growth of American slavery in general.

4. The intercolonial slave trade facilitated other branches of commerce, which entangled the profits of many traditional trades with the buying and selling of people.

5. The intercolonial slave trade influenced imperial policy. It pushed Great Britain, France, and Spain away from mercantilism and toward policies of free trade.

O'Malley takes on an ambitious project, but he argues all five points convincingly because he has the facts and figures to illustrate his points.

O’Malley relies on shipping records, the business papers of merchants, and state papers to prove his points. These matter-of-fact records reveal that the intercolonial slave trade was hemispheric in nature; it often began in the Caribbean and stretched to mainland North and South America. These documents also show that many British intercolonial slave traders used the slaves as a gateway commodity.

British manufacturers and merchants wanted to trade British goods in Spanish and French North American ports. As neither the French nor the Spanish could satiate their colonists’ demands for slaves, French and Spanish governors and customs officials often turned a blind eye when British ships entered their ports with slaves. Ports once closed to the British opened for slaves.

Rather quickly, British merchants learned that the more slaves they shipped to foreign ports, the more opportunities they had to trade British produce and manufactured goods. They filled ship holds with a minimum number of slaves needed to enter a foreign port and packed the rest of the holds with British manufactured goods and produce. Once ship captains disembarked their human cargo, they unloaded the rest of these goods.

O’Malley points out that the British desire to open ports to its goods resulted in the greatest horror of the intercolonial slave trade: African people became commodities. O’Malley provides ample evidence to argue this point. Business and state papers reflect that British intercolonial slave traders and the imperial government viewed Africans not as humans, but as commodities to be traded and used to open markets to British goods. However, I wish he had provided a bit more evidence to differentiate this mindset from that of the transatlantic slave traders.

This book is well-written and well-argued, but it is a dense read.

O’Malley did not have the luxury of having scores of slave narratives to tell him how Africans experienced their Middle or intercolonial passages. He does not ignore how they experienced the trade. He uses the scant personal and second-hand accounts he found, as well as the matter-of-fact business and legal records he uses throughout the book, to infer and make educated guesses about the slaves’ experiences. Unfortunately, without these first-hand accounts, there are no historical persons who readers can follow and live through vicariously throughout the book.

Although a dense read, I thought it was well-worth my time. O'Malley's work deepened my understanding of the slave trade, how and why slavery expanded throughout the western hemisphere, and why the slave trade lasted for over a century.

O'Malley's mission is broader than the title reveals: this is a book about the inter-colonial slave trade in British North America and the Caribbean, but it is also a stunning synthesis of how the Atlantic slave trade actually worked, in terms of routes, national strategies for obtaining slaves and capitalizing on the slave trade, and lived experience. O'Malley points out early in the book that the Middle Passage was indeed, for many African captives, the middle passage of three, following a long journey from the interior of Africa to the shores of the Atlantic, and preceding transshipment from a Caribbean port of arrival to another port, or a long march or river journey inland from a mainland port. He has truly mined the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database--I haven't seen anything else quite like this. It will take me a while to digest all of what I read.

Such a wonderful author. I had the pleasure to go to one of his talks. Someone truly invested in his work.