Content area
Full text
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870. By Hugh Thomas. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. 908 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-684-81063-8.)
For historians of North America, this massive narrative will reinforce their growing vision of "American" history in its full Atlantic and world contexts. It has become axiomatic that the North American colonies (including French and Spanish ones) and the United States received only 5 percent of the approximately 10.5 million Africans who reached the New World as slaves, and that the Portuguese (and Brazilians) were the largest national carrier among the Europeans. This book's nine-hundred-plus pages thus approach the sweeping scale of a trade that linked four continents over nearly half a millennium, produced the largest human migration ever up to that time, transformed Africa, and created the environments in which racism subsequently flared.
The momentous horrors of this forced migration have inspired others to rise to the challenge of dealing with so many parts of the world through centuries of dramatic change, from late medieval Iberia through industrial Britain. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Negro (1914) inaugurated scholarly study of the trade, and Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944)...