Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 by Gregory E. O’Malley (review)

Since the early days of British abolitionism, the trade in enslaved Africans has been identified with the Middle Passage. Research in the past fifty years has yielded a wealth of information about the slave trade from Africa to the Americas, culminating in the publication of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which contains information about more than 35,000 slave voyages. Not represented, however, are the shipments of Africans subsequent to disembarkation in the Americas. Many captives faced a new voyage to another destination in the New World, as did, for instance, the Africans on board the Amistad, the Spanish intercolonial slave ship that witnessed a successful revolt. Given the magnitude of the intra-American slave trade, the absence of a monograph dealing with this phenomenon is remarkable.

At long last this important topic has received its due, courtesy of Gregory E. O’Malley’s wide-ranging, superbly researched, and well-written account of the intra-American trade in captives. The foundation for the book is a database the author compiled of more than 7,600 intra-American slave-trading voyages, largely derived from Britain’s Naval Office Shipping Lists. These journeys, O’Malley writes, should be understood as the final leg of captive Africans’ journey along what resembled a major river system. Like the tributaries of a river, slave traders assembled people from widely scattered interior regions of Africa on the coast, where the captives were embarked and shipped across the water, fanning out again after their New World landfall. While the book follows the Africans from the moment of their arrival in the Americas to their final destination, the scope is limited to shipments starting in British America and ending in colonies both inside and outside the British Empire.

O’Malley’s massive database enables him to establish some significant facts about the reexport trade in enslaved Africans. Around a quarter of the captives arriving in British America from Africa were bought by merchants who sold them elsewhere as commodities. The voyages the merchants organized within British America averaged just over twenty captives, with a quarter of the ships carrying only one or two. The slave traders’ objective was to sell their captives at the right price, not to supply workers to planters who needed them. Whenever possible, they also aimed at selling goods along with people. O’Malley calculates that 90 percent of all slave shipments within the British Empire carried trade goods. The captives’ mortality rate may seem low at 4 percent per voyage, which was far below that of the Middle Passage at any point in time. Nonetheless, intracolonial voyages were so much shorter they actually claimed more lives per thousand each month than the transatlantic trade.

Obviously, the intra-American trade did not exist independently of the transatlantic trade. Having received a monopoly on slave shipments from the English Crown, the Royal African Company (RAC) chose Jamaica and Barbados as its outlets for the trade, ignoring all other colonies. Even after the RAC was disbanded in 1698, the Caribbean continued to be the chief destination of English transatlantic slave voyages. As a consequence, an intercolonial trade developed to other English islands and especially the English colonies in North America. Almost fifty thousand enslaved Africans made their way from the Caribbean to North America in the years 1701–75. Direct arrivals from Africa to North America, which grew dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century, did not extinguish the demand for slaves from the Caribbean, whose numbers increased as the century advanced. Traders based in the Caribbean often used enslaved Africans to break into new branches of commerce with North America, buying slaves to establish commercial contacts on the Eastern Seaboard.

The British intra-American slave traders also had foreign customers. British consignments of Africans to French or...