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The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. Edited by Walter Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. x + 389 pp. Index, notes, maps. Paper, $35.00. ISBN: 0-300-10355-7.
The intra-American slave traffic has received a tiny fraction of the scholarly attention directed to the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, depending on definition, it is likely that it was responsible for the movement of more slaves than was its transatlantic counterpart. Almost any volume on this underexplored subject is to be welcomed. The collection of papers under review is the result of a conference at Yale in 1999.
The coverage of the essays is not quite commensurate with the role of the intra-American trade in sustaining the slave systems of the Americas. From the broad temporal perspective, that role may be divided into four parts. In the early development of any plantation system, slave markets were usually too small to warrant direct supplies of labor from Africa, and thus tended to draw heavily on intra-American sellers who could offer smaller numbers of slaves at a time. For example, Virginia, South Carolina, most of the British Leeward Islands in the seventeenth century, and Maranhao and Montevideo in the eighteenth century could not have left the starting gate as slave regions without this traffic. Second, when a plantation region grew sufficiently to trade directly with Africa, the intra-American trade acted as an important supplement to the transatlantic traffic. It was able to respond much more quickly and precisely to sudden, and perhaps temporary, market signals, so it persisted even as the transatlantic commerce thrived. Third, geography and mercantilism combined to ensure that some major areas of the Americas-most Spanish-speaking regions before 1800, Guadeloupe, Minas Gerais and Goias in Brazil, are examples-drew almost all their slaves from other American markets, even at the...