Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition

The Abolition of Slavery In Brazil: The "Liberation" Of Africans Through The Emancipation Of Capital. By David Baronov. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Pp. 236. $62.50 cloth.)

Negros, mulatos, esclavos y libertos en la Costa Rica del siglo XVII. By Rina Cáceres. (México, DF: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, 2001. Pp. 130. N.p.)

Honor y libertad: Discursos y recursos en la estrategia de libertad de una mujer esclava (Guayaquil a fines del período colonial). By María Eugenia Chaves. (Göteborg: Avhandlingar från Historiska Institutionen I Göteborg, 2001. Pp. 311. N.p.)

The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780. ByMaría Elena Díaz. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. 440. $49.50 cloth.)

The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. By David Eltis. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 353. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. By Sandra Lauderdale Graham. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 183. $50.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.)

Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Edited by Linda M. Heywood. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 400. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.)

"Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais. By Kathleen J. Higgins. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999. Pp. 236. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

The Atlantic Slave Trade. By Herbert S. Klein. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 234. $49.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.)

Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. By Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Pp. 239. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Na Senzala, Uma Flor: Esperanças E Recordações Da FamíLia Escrava—Brasil Sudeste, Século Xix. By Robert W. Slenes. (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999. Pp. 229. N.p.)

A capoeira escrava e outras tradições rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850). By Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares. (Campinas: Editora da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), 2001. N.p.)

This diverse collection of books, dominated by social and cultural historians, reveals major trends of recent scholarship on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. Newly available data on all known slave trade voyages is significantly revising our understanding of this massive forced migration. Most of these historians focus on slave life and culture, leaving behind older questions about the nature of slave labor, the structure of the slave system (escravismo, as it is known in Brazilian scholarship), and the impact of the familiar forms of resistance such as flight and revolt. They reveal the depth and intensity of transatlantic connections and offer more sophisticated understandings of the experience and culture of the millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Historians cannot now ignore African and creole slaves as active agents in shaping American cultures, nor can they ignore the complex social relations that shaped slavery. Bracketed by brief discussions of books on the slave trade and abolition, this review focuses primarily on the studies of slave life and culture.

The Slave Trade

Since Philip Curtin's classic The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), demographic and economic historians have dominated work on the trade, and the two books under review here are no exception. Herbert Klein's The Atlantic Slave Trade is a most welcome synthesis and an equally valuable presentation of preliminary results from the database on 27,000 slave trade voyages compiled by him and his colleagues.¹ Without footnotes but with a long bibliographical essay, this is a book designed for classroom use. The author is particularly concerned with bridging "the gap between popular understanding and scholarly knowledge" which, he argues...