Slavers

In recent years, Pickering and Chatto have cornered the market in facsimile editions of early British texts and, while the prices of these collections generally mean that they are purchased only by university libraries with healthy budgets, there is no disputing that they have brought into the scholarly arena a number of hitherto submerged, obscure, or difficult-to-find titles that could otherwise only have been found in major research collections. The four volumes of The British Transatlantic Slave Trade fit precisely into this category and mark Pickering and Chatto's second excursion into the literature of British slavery and abolition. The first was Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, the eight volumes of which were edited by Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee in 1999. As the title makes clear, the texts reproduced in that volume were drawn almost exclusively from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a half century that marked both the British Romantic period and the period of the most intense activity by British abolitionists. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade must be seen as a companion volume to Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, building on the success of that collection and offering a new focus. Paradoxically, that focus is both broader and narrower. The texts selected in The British Transatlantic Slave Trade range in date from John Hawkins's African-voyage narrative of 1569 to Gomer Williams's Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, published in 1897. Although more than half of all the texts reproduced do in fact date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the chronological range of the collection is nevertheless much wider than in Kitson and Lee's selection. The thematic focus of this collection is, however, much narrower. Rather than attempting to reflect the broad diversity of both proslavery and antislavery writing from both Britain and its colonies and at every corner of the triangular trade from slave-ship to plantation to Georgian drawing room, as Kitson and Lee had done, the editors of The British Transatlantic Slave Trade have selected just one aspect of the slavery system – the slave-trade itself – and have offered texts that illuminate the ways in which the trade was established, consolidated, managed, and finally abolished. The intention, as Kenneth Morgan puts it in his general introduction, is to 'provide researchers with a valuable corpus of contemporary material with which to evaluate the practice of the British slave trade and the reasons for its demise'. (vol. 1, p. xii) To that end, the editors have provided high quality facsimiles of twenty-three texts, organized by topic into four separate volumes.

Volume One, edited by Robin Law, reproduces four publications ranging from the mid sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, which describe 'the operation of the slave trade in Africa' from a variety of British perspectives. 'The selection of a limited number of texts among the abundant documentation', Law admits, 'is bound to be to some extent arbitrary.' (vol. 1, p. xlix) This is indeed unavoidable, particularly since the editors have chosen to reproduce full texts rather than extracts, but one is left wondering why such a small selection, covering such a huge span of time (330 years), was chosen. There is a giant leap from the True declaration of the troublesome voyadge [sic] of M. John Hawkins to the parties of Guynea and the west Indies, in the yeares of our Lord 1567 and 1568 (1569) to John Matthews's Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, published more than two centuries later in 1788, and this leap means that the period of expansion and consolidation of the British trade from the mid seventeenth century onwards is not represented. Indeed, all the texts in this volume were produced in exceptional periods. Hawkins's narrative describes what was essentially an act of piracy which took place almost a century before Britain entered the slave-trade in any systematic fashion. John Matthew's Voyage was written at a time when the slave...