Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (review)

In this latest addition to LSU Press's Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World series, edited by R. J. M. Blackett and James Brewer Stewart, Alexander X. Byrd undertakes an ambitious project that plots the journeys traveled by black people, enslaved and free, back and forth across the Atlantic. Africans in chains moved from east to west ensnared by a horrific transoceanic traffic in human beings. More than eleven million souls arrived thus on the Atlantic's western shores, at the cost of the lives of millions more, where most worked, lived and died, and their progeny too, as chattels within the pervasive systems of black slavery established throughout the Americas by European nations and peoples. The slave trade, of course, accounted for by far the largest movement of black people and bondage in perpetuity was the lot of the vast majority, but some slaves did secure their freedom, and a few even crossed the ocean back to Africa.

Byrd selects one of the most significant of routes of the British slave trade, from the Bight of Biafra to Jamaica, to illustrate the experiences of enslaved African captives, while his depiction of free black voyagers follows them from London and Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, and although acknowledging profound disparities in the scale, organization and motivation of these two migration streams he nevertheless sees connections. The latter was, of course, a consequence of and reaction to the former, but Byrd posits deeper social and cultural implications of movement and relocation as black people found their place and each other en route and in situ across the Atlantic world.

In a strong opening chapter, Byrd addresses indigenous cultural retention by enslaved Africans, positing that enslavement and transportation within Africa rather than homeland affinities shaped ethnic identification, a process that in the next chapter he sees further cemented during the "middle passage," while chapters 3 and 4 consider the formation and articulation of African-Jamaican life and community under the duress of the island's plantation economy. Byrd then turns his attention to the free black voyagers from London (chapters 5 and 6) and Nova Scotia (7, 8 and 9) and their arrival in Sierra Leone (10) where his stark depictions of the sea passage and the circumstances the participants faced after landing offer suggestive parallels to the slaves' experiences, not just in terms of the onerous conditions, but also the corresponding effect of journey and settlement on the organization and aspirations of black life and community along the Atlantic seaboard.

The very different source materials Byrd employs in his analyses of the various sites on land and at sea do make for a somewhat uneven presentation, while his discussion of Jamaica would have benefited from the incorporation of island-based archival records, but his findings are insightful and suggestive. They offer fruitful directions for further study and real potential for advancing our understanding of the particular characteristics of a black Atlantic world experienced by peoples of Africa and its diaspora during the late eighteenth century.