American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective by Enrico Dal Lago (review)

The arrival of this useful little volume is a welcome event. For at least fifty years, slavery in the United States has attracted the attention of creative and prolific scholars, a trend that shows no signs of letting up. For a long time it has been hard to keep up with the literature. That task got even harder with the development of Atlantic history in the 1990s. As an Atlantic phenomenon par excellence, slavery (and its abolition) naturally drew the interest of historians caught up in the Atlantic turn, and a large literature got even larger, more diverse, and geographically diffuse. Enrico Dal Lago has long been interested in these developments. The author of two comparative histories—one on US slaveholders and southern Italian landlords, the other on William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini—he has a sophisticated understanding of both the content of the scholarship and its theoretical nuances. Historians interested in understanding the state of the field circa 2013 and graduate students preparing for examinations will find this book especially useful.

Despite the transnational emphasis of much recent writing on slavery and abolition, this book takes slavery in the United States as its departure point to explore the comparative and transnational questions that have increasingly occupied historians. Dal Lago dispenses with a historiographical review of the literature on slavery in a short introduction that could (and maybe should) have been a lot longer. The work of Eugene Genovese, for example (Dal Lago does not mention his collaborator Elizabeth Fox-Genovese), is covered by a few breezy paragraphs that neither do justice to the influential work of these historians nor acknowledge their willingness to revise their findings in the light of new scholarship. The introduction carefully distinguishes between comparative and transnational methodologies. The former takes national boundaries as a given in examining the development of unfree systems of labor; the latter takes a critical orientation toward the relevance of national borders. It maintains that certain developments—international migration, trade, the evolution of slave labor systems—have occurred in an environment in which lines drawn on a map have not been determinative. Transnational approaches have been especially popular among historians eager to interrogate old ideas about American exceptionalism. Although Dal Lago recognizes that the lines between comparative and transnational history have become blurred, the distinction is central to his book’s organization. The first half examines the evolution of American slavery in an Atlantic (transnational) context; the second takes a comparative approach to American slavery and emancipation in the context of European developments, especially agrarian labor systems, reform movements, and nationalism.

Dal Lago presents a tight account of the now-familiar story of the development of the slave trade that grew out of fifteenth-century contact between the Portuguese and Africans, primarily on the stretch of Africa known as the Gold Coast. Those commercial relations originally depended on commodities like gold and ivory, not slaves (although for some time the Portuguese imported slaves from other regions of Africa into the Gold Coast). The account here of the evolution of slave-based economies in the plantation societies of the Americas, from Brazil to Virginia, is solid and unremarkable. More problematic is Dal Lago’s insistence that discrete African cultural identities survived on the American side. He argues that many slave societies tended to acquire their slaves from discrete regions of Africa, resulting in concentrations of Africans with similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds. John Thornton has made a compelling argument that something like that may have occurred in the early period of the slave trade—in the seventeenth century—in some regions. But there is absolutely no evidence to support Dal Lago’s insistence that “Most of the African slaves that arrived in Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were from Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea, mainly of Mandingo and Wolof ethnicities” (35), a statement he echoes for...