The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (review)

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. By David Eltis (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 353 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper

In this intelligent and tightly structured contribution to Atlantic history, Eltis explores the paradox of the concurrent development of slavery for Africans and freedom for Europeans in the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In ten discrete essays (five of which were published previously), four appendixes, and thirty-two tables, he addresses a large number of issues, including slavery and freedom in the early modern world; transoceanic migration from Europe; productivity in the slave trade; gender, ethnicity, and slavery in the Atlantic world; and the relationship between the Atlantic slave systems and the economy of Europe. He draws upon the social-history literature on ethnicity, gender, and identity to frame his discussion of the quantitative data and to explore propositions about the early modern Atlantic world.

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas sets out to answer two major questions: Why did Europeans revive the institution of slavery in the New World? And why were slaves in the New World exclusively peoples of non-European descent? For Eltis, the answers are to be found in both Europe and Africa. The European key lies in the anomalous evolution of European culture. The demise of slavery as an institution in Europe during the medieval period eventually led to a pan-European view that slavery was impermissible for Europeans. Eltis argues that European societies had a variety of mechanisms that could have produced an adequate supply of European unfree labor for the New World colonies, and that the reason that they did not do so was more cultural than economic.

According to Eltis, African societies were too politically powerful to permit European encroachment on African soil, and thus Africans and Europeans traded as equals along the coast. The cultural lines that determined group membership or ethnic identity in Africa were more sharply drawn in Africa than in Europe; there was no subcontinental pan-African identity. "The vast majority of African slaves were originally members of a society almost as alien to the [African] individual who carried out the act of enslavement as Africans as a whole were to Europeans" (150). These factors, in addition to ecological and epidemiological considerations, were responsible for the net result of a slave trade from Africa to the New World. Eltis credits African captives with resistance to enslavement that raised the economic costs of the Atlantic slave trade and thus reduced the numbers of Africans who might otherwise have been shipped across the Atlantic. He examines the economic contribution of African slaves in the New World slave colonies and weighs in against Williams' thesis that sugar and slavery made a substantial contribution to the process of industrialization.¹

Eltis also argues that the cultural constructions of gender are critical in understanding the gender compositions of the migrant flow from Europe and Africa. European women were not destined for hard labor in the colonies, and African women were, owing to the nature of the work that they did in the societies from which they had emigrated. Eltis brings out, in fascinating manner, the wide disparity in the gender ratios of African captives sent to the New World from various regions of Africa.

By working toward a grand synthesis, Eltis juxtaposes continental categories of "Europe" and "Africa" that, at times, seem too broad for the analytical purposes to which they are put. He does not explore the cultural and economic distinctions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, nor between Muslim and non-Muslim Africa. He accepts the now outdated view of Finley that there were only five slave societies in world history (Greek, Roman, Brazilian, Caribbean, and southeastern United States).² Nor will many Africanists be persuaded by his understandings of African ethnicity. But the strengths of this book are many. Insisting upon both...