The Slave Trade and Abolition Revisited

In the past five years, the world has witnessed an efflorescence of symposia, museum exhibitions, and public commemorations focused on slavery and the slave trade. There have been many events in West Africa, North America, and Europe marking the bicentennial of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade, the two hundredth anniversary of the 1808 U.S. ban on the importation of enslaved labor, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, and the tenth anniversary of France's declaration that slavery and the slave trade constitute crimes against humanity. And last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon designated December 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

Simultaneously (and perhaps not coincidentally), these same years have also witnessed a tremendous growth in the already large body of scholarly literature on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. The three books reviewed here, The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert Klein, Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, and Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbles, are significant contributions to this literature. The first two do not focus on a single country, region, or continent but engage, rather, in the kind of transnational history that charts the trajectories of often separate, yet interconnected, decisions and events that came to connect and effect so many different peoples from around the world over long stretches of time. The third, Liverpool, focuses on the history of this port's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, but it does so by also positioning Liverpool within the larger British context. Each book addresses a specific set of questions central to the histories of the slave trade, slavery, and imperial studies. But each also brings new information to bear on these questions as well as new perspectives.

The Atlantic Slave Trade (2010), for example, is a new edition of Klein's earlier book of the same title, first published in 1999. But his incorporation in this latest edition of David Eltis's updated and greatly expanded quantitative data set on the involvement of Portuguese and Spanish ships in the Atlantic trade strengthens his already compelling arguments about the importance of the South Atlantic to this enterprise. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery expands upon an already good body of literature on the ports that were so central to the trade in Africa and the Americas, but the authors in this edited volume bring to this area of inquiry the kinds of quantitative data that historians of the ports in Africa would love to access in regard to African ports. It is this quantitative approach that allows the contributors to explain in convincing detail how and why Liverpool outstripped the other major ports in Britain (i.e., London and Bristol) in terms of its involvement in the slave trade while also becoming a center for abolitionist activity.

The scholarly literature has long noted the connection between the abolition movement in Britain and Britain's imperialist ambitions. The establishment of Sierra Leone, the calls by nineteenth-century missionary societies and humanitarians for greater European intervention in the affairs of African communities to stop the internal and external slave trade, and the response of local government officials to missionary and humanitarian calls to expand imperial activity despite their governments' reluctance to do so have all been well documented. But Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic provides a welcome addition to...