The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (review)

This book is a grand, old-fashioned narrative of the Atlantic slave trade. As the author avers in the introduction, “it was the slave merchants themselves, sitting in their fine counting-houses in London or Lisbon, men who often never saw slaves but profited from their sale, who interested me; and those had been rather ignored in the controversies over the exact number of slaves carried, and the percentage of profit” (11).

Within the bounds that Thomas has selected, he has covered a broad canvas with fascinating detail, starting from the fifteenth-century Portuguese seizure of captives on Saharan beaches and continuing to the last deliveries of slaves to Cuba in 1870. The range of stories is impressive, and the writing style is strong enough to hold a serious reader to the end. The volume examines the Atlantic commerce in slaves, abstracting from commerce and society on the mainland of Africa and, for the most part, in the Americas. Thomas nonetheless has a particular interest in Cuba, and focuses attention on its slave trade.

Specialists reading in wait for an unguarded remark by this author will most likely find satisfaction in a tome of this length. For instance, in response to Thomas’ assertion that only a few thousand slaves were traded overland to the west from the eastern seaboard of the United States, several writers on the slavery electronic list (Slavery@Listserv.UH.edu) have already challenged his estimate as woefully low.

The most serious flaw in this work, however, lies more in its overall design than in the details of its execution. Thomas’ mode of presentation is strictly narrative. He argues that the work of social scientists has left a dehumanized history of slave trade. Perhaps. But in offering tales of individual initiative as replacement for the emphasis of social-science historians on social forces, he has come up with detail only on the initiative of slave merchants. The time for such one-sided analysis is surely past.

For this reader, the saddening aspect of the book is that the author wrote it for a public that would regard the slave merchants as ourselves and the slaves as others. The merchants are presented as misguided, to be sure, but they were “our” kind gone wrong. Africans in freedom and slavery play a role in the narrative, but rarely with a voice. Thus, argues Thomas, “Most Brazilians, their ancestors having used African slaves for three hundred years, still thought of slavery as part of the natural order of things” (732). Who was included among the Brazilians? Perhaps the black majority did not qualify as Brazilians in that day, but I would prefer to read a historian of slave trade who grants its victims a retrospective citizenship.

Thomas finds that “the slave remains an unknown warrior invoked by moralists on both sides of the Atlantic” (798). This bias is felt strongly enough in his decision not to explore the lives of Africans caught up in slave trade. How unnecessary it was for him to compound it in his appendix of reflections on slave trade, which is filled mainly with discredited bromides suggesting that slave trade did more good than harm for Africa.