The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 by Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (review)

The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867, a recent edition within the Cambridge Studies in the African Diaspora series, asserts that West Central African economic agency was essential to the continued supply of African bodies to the Atlantic slave trade after abolition of the trade by European powers. Daniel Domingues da Silva here applies the Voyages Database to critique previous scholars' emphasis on state formation as the central element in this trade. He confronts this emphasis by looking less at the rise of European capitalism and warfare among African empires as causes for the increased captive populations of the Second Slavery, and more at individual African traders' motives.

Domingues da Silva argues that the Portuguese trade to Brazil did not decline significantly in the face of early abolitionism, but fluctuated in reflection of international legal wrangling. By analysis of the trade between West Central Africa and Brazil—akin to analysis within Roquinaldo Ferreira's Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade(2012) and Walter Hawthorne's From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830(2010)—he shows how the persistence of the slave trade reflected African economic desires linking specific regions across the Atlantic Ocean.

The book makes two provocative central arguments. First, it explores the idea that African traders resisted abolitionism on account of materialist concerns. Second, and probably more contentious for Africanist scholars of the slave trade, it contends that West Central African traders did not focus on enslaving Africans external to their own communities; rather, large numbers of Africans sent to Atlantic markets came from spaces internal to traders' own populations. For Africanists, the second contention offers an important implicit critique for understanding popular questions of morality surrounding the slave trade.

Often, especially following the publication of John Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680(1992), academics have faced questions from students, the public, and some fellow researchers, focusing on the morality of Africans selling their "brethren" into slavery. Specifically, the inquiry often implies that if Africans did so, how could European powers be deemed immoral for their participation in slavery? One argument against this type of question has been that the idea of "the African" did not exist at the peak of the slave trade, and, especially during the era of the illegal trade, in the mid-nineteenth century, African traders were often enslaving Africans internal to their own cultural spaces but considered culturally external to their own nations.

The book's central focus comes in his third chapter, through a quantitative analysis of ethnonyms discovered at specific ports of embarkation that show how, in the nineteenth century, intermediary traders, rather than increased warfare between African empires, maintained a high supply for the Atlantic slave trade. With this argument, Domingues da Silva offers conclusions opposed to those of leading Africanists Joseph Miller and Jan Vansina, who have argued that the African interior was transformed through increased slave-raiding wars.

In the final chapter, Domingues da Silva addresses concerns about the use of quantitative data to study the slave trade by analyzing studies of individuals within the West Central African exchange. He points to specific circumstances that support his arguments regarding the centrality of intermediaries in the trade, the increase in the number of boys shipped, and the African economic choices that shaped the trade during the era following the rise of abolitionism. Most of these cases come from German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle's Polyglotta Africana(1854), which contains interviews with liberated Africans who experienced aspects of the West Central African trade.

This monograph should be read by all Africanist scholars of the slave trade.