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Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865 by Nini Rodgers. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 403 pp.; $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-333-77099-4.
Transatlantic slavery has proved to be a fruitful line of historical enquiry for several decades now, largely because it speaks to so many subfields of historiography including race, economics, migration, labor, and demography. The national histories of countries closely associated with the institution such as the United States, Britain, Haiti, and France have also, unsurprisingly, paid a great amount of attention to the subject. In her newest book, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865, Dr. Nini Rodgers recognizes that the intertwined problems of slavery and anti-slavery have remained "a neglected aspect of Irish history" (1). She blames this lacuna on several factors including collective shame and the plain fact that Ireland did not occupy as central a role in the slave-based transatlantic Atlantic economy as other countries. According to Rodgers, however, the main reason that the question of Irish involvement in black slavery has been neglected is that "its elements have been widely dispersed or ill-recorded" (2). Understanding "this transatlantic jigsaw puzzle" (2) is a daunting task and Dr. Rodgers is to be commended for undertaking it.
The goal of this ambitious book is to examine "the relationship between Ireland and black slavery" (1). Focusing the bulk of the study on the 17th- and 18lh-century "Black Atlantic" and the rise of a global economy and industrial revolution, Rodgers's overall argument is that the slave trade and sugar plantations were by no means extraneous to Ireland. On the contrary, Rodgers argues that "black slavery had a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across the Atlantic and upon the economy at home" (2).
Rather than present a straight narrative of Irish involvement in slavery and anti-slavery "from St Patrick to the American Civil War" (331), this book reads more like a series of 15 interconnected essays divided evenly among three parts. Part I: "Away" looks at different ways in which Irish migrants exploited the machinery of transatlantic slavery in the Caribbean, the Amazon, France, Britain, and Africa. Part II: "At Home" examines the influence of the North American and Caribbean slave plantations on the 18th-century Irish economy. Finally, Part III: "Emancipation" traces the development...