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Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition
- Latin American Research Review
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 39, Number 2, 2004
- pp. 178-195
- 10.1353/lar.2004.0033
- Review
- Additional Information
Latin American Research Review 39.2 (2004) 178-195
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Transatlantic Ties:
Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition
Hendrik Kraay
This diverse collection of books, dominated by social and cultural historians, reveals major trends of recent scholarship on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. Newly available data on all known slave trade voyages is significantly revising our understanding of this massive forced migration. Most of these historians focus on slave life and culture, leaving behind older questions about the nature of slave labor, the structure of the slave system (escravismo, as it is known in Brazilian scholarship), and the impact of the familiar forms of resistance such as flight and revolt. They reveal the depth and intensity of transatlantic connections and offer more sophisticated understandings of the experience and culture of the millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Historians cannot now ignore African and creole slaves as active agents in shaping American cultures, nor can they ignore the complex social relations that shaped slavery. Bracketed by brief discussions of books on the slave trade and abolition, this review focuses primarily on the studies of slave life and culture.
The Slave Trade
Since Philip Curtin's classic The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), demographic and economic historians have dominated work on the trade, and the two books under review here are no exception. Herbert Klein's The Atlantic Slave Trade is a most welcome synthesis and an equally valuable presentation of preliminary results from the database on 27,000 slave trade voyages compiled by him and his colleagues.1 Without footnotes but with a long bibliographical essay, this is a book [End Page 179] designed for classroom use. The author is particularly concerned with bridging "the gap between popular understanding and scholarly knowledge" which, he argues...