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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.2 (2006) 305-306


Reviewed by
Paul E. Lovejoy
York University
A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. By Robert H. Gudmestad (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2003) 246 pp. $62.95 cloth $22.95 paper

The title of this book is misleading, because it is not about the interstate slave trade in the United States but about southern white attitudes toward that trade. The only transformation being considered is the shift in attitudes among whites, which is not directly tied to the trade itself but rather to U.S. politics alone. The book draws on an impressive array of source materials, from a long list of archives, libraries, newspapers, and primary publications. Gudmestad cannot be faulted on the extent of his research, but he can be questioned on the relevance of this research to many of the most important issues relating to the history of the slave trade and its relationship to the institution of slavery.

The problems with this book raise issues concerning the value of comparative history. This book makes no reference to the influential historiography that has emerged during the last twenty years about the scale and direction of the slave trade. Instead, Gudmestad's analysis demonstrates a need to counter narrow views of U.S. history that fail to recognize the wider context of the history of slavery elsewhere in the Americas and beyond. Although the book is about the slave trade, it has no discussion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the same period, c. 1810 to 1865, nor even of the illegal importation of slaves into the South after abolition in 1807 or American business involvement in the Cuban and Brazilian slave trades. Even the attitudes of Southern whites on these subjects are averted.

Moreover, Gudmestad makes no attempt at a demographic analysis of who moved, how many, or when, other than in a brief appendix. He discusses neither the scale, the direction and flow, nor the relative importance of overland migration versus movement by sea. In short, the broader context for this study is entirely missing. Without demographical analysis no conclusions relating to age or gender of the displaced population are possible. The considerable discussion of divided families and the attempts to avoid them is purely impressionistic, tied to what whites were thinking not to what the enslaved population was experiencing. Furthermore, the book has nothing to say about the impact of the interstate slave trade on the scale of the flight of blacks, both free and enslaved, to Canada and elsewhere.

Moreover, Gudmestad undermines his own case about the ideologically inspired debate among white Southerners by insisting on calling the slave trade little more than "speculation," in effect adopting the discourse, uncritically, of his principal subjects. He states, in contradiction, however, that the trade was "the most blatant form of capitalist exploitation in the South" (184). What he means by that statement is not clear, because his study is not business or economic history. He has much fascinating information on such businessmen as Isaac Franklin and John [End Page 305] Armfield, but their activities are not compared with the business activities of other slave traders, about which much information and analysis is available. Furthermore, it is difficult to discuss the business activities of such men without constructing price series, examining the economics of credit mechanisms, and otherwise assessing the accounts of such men. Hence, the description of this book as about commerce and trade is misleading.

To Gudmestad's credit, he offers numerous, fascinating quotations and references from the wealth of archival and other primary material that he examined. Unfortunately, he did not try to establish some way to analyze what surely is an enormous body of information, which is certainly substantial enough to warrant a database or two. The material could have been used to elucidate the voices of those who were being traded, and not just focus on the white elite. Without such analysis, the book misses the context in which the...

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