Atlas of Slavery (review)

James Walvin is a very good and prolific historian. He has written or edited about thirty books, about half of them on slavery or on the history of peoples of African descent. He writes well and has an excellent grasp of his subject matter. This book contains eighty-seven maps as well as a short history of slavery and the slave trade. It would be very useful as a supplementary reading for courses on the slave trade and is a book some scholars will want on their shelves.

That said, I would like to comment on its limitations. First, despite the fact that the United States and Great Britain provide excellent source materials and serve as the principal market for this book, it is too heavily tilted toward American slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. There are maps dealing with classical antiquity, the Muslim world, and the Indian Ocean, but these do not cover the diversity of slaveries. The treatment of Africa is itself superficial and does not adequately show the complexity of the slave trade, which penetrated different parts of Africa at different times. Second, the atlas has been compiled on the cheap; almost every map is taken from some other English-language publication and many of them are inadequate or duplicate each other. Some of the maps do not really deal with slavery (for example, the two maps from classical antiquity). Two maps of the Chesapeake at different periods give a very incomplete picture of what changed between those periods and how that related to slavery. The map of Islamic expansion does not try to give a picture of slave origins or note the variety of patterns of slave use.

There are, however, some valuable maps of slave routes; a rather simple one, for example, traces diverse trade routes out of Africa in the early modern period. The best maps are from the United States: there is a map of major crops in the South, of trade routes within the United States, of the distribution of slaves, and of areas with a slave majority. Even here, however, the chapter on abolition is thin and ends the story too soon, and the map of the underground railroad is deceptive. It is a map of slave population densities with lines representing fugitive movements imposed on it, but these lines do not communicate that where slave flight was distinctive the underground railroad formed a significant presence.

Walvin ends the story of abolition with Brazil in 1888, omitting the twentieth-century emancipation measures that touched tens of millions of slaves in Africa and Asia. His chapter entitled "Slavery after Abolition" deals only with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, two regimes in which people were rounded up for a variety of reasons—including punishment and genocide—but not primarily for the provision of labor. Other modern forms of slavery are ignored.

The text that accompanies the maps is clear though rather general; it would have been more useful if it had been oriented more toward specific maps. This book would be used in a course as a supplement to other texts, perhaps even other books by the same author. In spite of my critical comments, this is a book that many instructors will find useful, if only for the many good maps it contains, which can be of great use in combating the geographical illiteracy of many of the students we teach.