Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (review)

This is a beautiful atlas. Most everyone who has noticed it sitting on my desk has been drawn to it. And those who have thumbed its pages have quickly declared that they will get a copy. It consists mostly of large, visually pleasing, color maps compiled from the data available in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD), which is found at www.slavevoyages.org. The maps illustrate a great variety of measurements of the Atlantic slave trade. For example, on some pages lines stretching from Africa to the Americas are drawn in varying widths to show the number of slaves leaving broad African regions and arriving in American regions. Elsewhere, circles of varying sizes make clear the number of slaves who embarked at particular African ports and disembarked at specific American ports. Bars placed on sending and receiving regions illustrate gender and age ratios on ships. The atlas also contains a wealth of color illustrations of aspects of the slave trade and is sprinkled with quotations from those who experienced it. Each of the six chapters begins with a brief text explanation of what follows. The chapters are arranged topically and examine the nations that participated in the trade, the ports that outfitted voyages, the African coastal origins of slaves, the Middle Passage, American destinations, and abolition.

The atlas should be a valuable reference for scholars of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and a teaching tool for anyone engaged with African or African diasporic history. Each picture in this book is, I am sure, worth more than a thousand words. At a glance, readers can see, for example, exactly where slaves leaving Galinhas, Ouidah, Luanda, and various other African ports ended up. They can, too, make quick comparisons—for example, between the volume of the slave trade into St. Domingue and into North America. In addition, the atlas holds some surprises. It illustrates, for instance, the importance of Caribbean and American ports as organizing centers of slave voyages. Interestingly, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia ranked number one and two, ahead of Liverpool, which was the number three port in organizing slaving ventures.

To be sure, maps generated from numerical data tell only part of the story of the Atlantic slave trade. And, of course, like all datasets the TSTD has its limitations. It allows users to trace flows of Africans from ports of embarkation to ports of disembarkation. It does not, however, say anything about slaves' places of origin within Africa or where they went in the Americas after being offloaded. It tells us nothing about the cultural assumptions that Africans brought with them on the Middle Passage. It is silent about their suffering. Moreover, though Eltis and Richardson may be correct in stating that their data set "constitutes just over 80 percent of all the slave ventures that ever set out for Africa to obtain slaves," I am not as certain as they are that their maps will not need to be redrawn soon (p. xxv). Most of the missing data would come from the early years of the Atlantic slave trade. The atlas illustrations understate, I suspect, the importance of Upper Guinea in the first century of Atlantic exchange and overstate the importance of West Central Africa. But my suspicions will be proven right or wrong only with the collection and analysis of more data—something researchers reading the Eltis and Richardson's work should be anxious to do.

For me, what is great about this volume is not that it answers so many questions but that it generates them. Why was West Central Africa the leading producer of slaves? Is there anything to be gained from looking for the African roots of Afro-Cuban culture in the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa, the regions from which the overwhelming majority of Cuba's African slaves came? What accounts for differences in mortality rates for slaves leaving different regions of Africa? My list could...