The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870

Abstract

Jordan reviews "The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870" by Hugh Thomas.

Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon, 1997. 909 pp. $37.50.

If this book had been published as a Hollywood movie, it would have been called a "blockbuster." It is a sweeping and detailed survey of the Atlantic slave trade, from its beginnings with the Portuguese in the 1440s to its end about 1870, a period of more than four hundred years. It also takes into some account the trade in slaves from West Africa northwards to Arabic regions along the southern portions of the Mediterranean Sea and to a lesser extent the Arabic slave trade in East Africa. It has similarly grand dimensions as the author's previous monumental work, Conquest. Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico, though here the chronological and geographic range is much greater.

The Slave Trade is especially valuable for the period in the nineteenth century from 1807, when Great Britain abolished the trade and then tried, with treaties and its West African naval patrols, to suppress the trade still flourishing, especially to Brazil and Cuba. Thomas shows how ineffectual these efforts were for so many years. His approach and his detailed information are a useful corrective for historians of the U.S., who often assume that the federal banning of the trade in 1808 ended this nation's complicity. Thomas demonstrates how many North American ships were still involved during that "illegal era,- built or owned or financed or manned or captained in New York, Baltimore, and especially Newport and other ports in New England.

Yet, taken as a whole, the book is seriously flawed. It is not at all clear who is actually going to read nine hundred pages on the subject, with prose that is often vigorous but at times downright ungainly. Indeed at times it reads, with all its proper names, like listings in the Yellow Pages; in one instance of only three pages it offers the names of some forty different persons. On occasion, long strings of proper names are followed by a still another comma and "not to mention," followed by another such string. Moreover, the publisher has allowed too many typographical errors to slip through, and the index is unreliable.

The author's thorough command of various western European languages has permitted him to range in many archival sources. Yet, given the sheer vastness of the subject, he has had to rely on many secondary sources, not all of them reliable. There are gross errors, such as the assertion that only 127,000 U.S. slaves went "from Eastern to Western states" in the period from 1810 to 1860-a figure that is accurate only if Texas is considered to be the only "Western" state during that entire period. It comes as a surprise that rice and indigo were grown in Virginia as well as South Carolina. And the Reverend Mr. Cotton Mather, who wrote in Boston about slavery in the early eighteenth century, is called "a Unitarian," an assertion that surely would have more than surprised him.

While the book does pay some attention to African peoples, it is much more a history of slave traders than of the enslaved victims. Of course this emphasis is partly a function of the availability of written sources, but it also results partly from the author's viewpoint, which permits him to write that Africans as slaves were "admirable workers" and "good-natured and usually docile."