Transatlantic Slave Trade
As of late I have been reading some new (or new to me) titles on the history of the Atlantic slave trade. All of them are adding new layers of complexity to the understanding of the trade, and are staking out new methodological approaches.
First on my list is James Walvin’s latest overview of trans-Atlantic slavery, A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power (2022). The book covers a lot of ground, both temporally and spatially. What it has to say about the trans-Atlantic slave is a useful overview, updating some of the older synthetic books in light of newer scholarship. But the real impact of the book comes from its second part, which focuses on inter-American slave trades in all directions. Building on scholars like Greg O’Malley (who’s book remains indispensable), Walvin reveals the constant migration and serial dislocations that made slavery run. If ten years ago people began to look at slavery within a larger carceal landscape, it is increasingly clear that those histories of confinement need to be paired with the histories of dislocation within the plantation zones of the Americas.
If some of the material is new in Walvin’s book, no doubt his arguments about methods and sources will attract the most attention in the current landscape. As I’ve noted in other blogs, scholars of slavery are increasingly attuned to the silence in the archives, and how the power of enslavement structures what will, and won’t, be recorded there. Walvin, to the contrary, sees the relentless profit motive in systems of slavery as generating an unusually rich source of documentation. “There is a strong case to be made,” he writes, “that the enslaved people of the Americas were better documented than any other comparable historical group.” Even compared to census regimes of modern states, he writes, “there is nothing comparable to the documentation about the twelve million-plus Africans embarked on the Atlantic slave ships.” (144-45). It remains to be seen how many other scholars follow in this line of thinking, but perhaps it signals a shift in the scholarship, back toward the quantifying studies of the past generation.
If there is such a movement afoot, Nick Radburn’s impressive new book Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Trans-Atlantic Trade will stand out as a leader of it. In it, Radburn compiled his own database, which supplemented the quantitative data with a wealth of additional research, allowing him to get a clear picture of the eighteenth century British trade. Raburn is making the case that the critiques of quantification may have missed some of the many insights that large data sets can provide. To support this point, Radburn offers an important intervention on the use of “ethnicity” as a category in the slave trade scholarship. Whereas it has become common to treat the ethnic labels as the best insights into the human experiences of enslaved captives, Raburn prefers to rely on other demographic facts, ones more readily verifiable. In setting out how various other categories (age, sex, well-being) shaped people's experiences in the trade, he opens up a whole new way for us to talk about enslaved people's lives. Another key observation of the book is that scholars have not spent enough time thinking about the changes to the trade, and the creation of the engine of human trafficking during the 18th century. It is commonplace to talk about the explosion of the slave trade in the 1790s, and again in the 1820s. This work gives a better explanation as to why that atrocious episode of Atlantic history is possible. The traders evolved and innovated in their actions, allowing the trade to be more efficient, with horrific consequences for world history. On this point Radburn follows others, most especially Sowande' M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage .
Both books make the case for vast documentation, and the insights that quantification can yield. Yet they are not merely reviving older ways of doing history. Most notably, they do not treat enslaved people as data. Instead, they generate data about enslaved people to understand their lives more fully.
