Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Philip Gould. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 258. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-01166-X.)

Philip Gould has written an innovative study of the cultural history of antislavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The symbols, language, and discourse of antislavery reveal a web of communication linking individuals and groups around the Atlantic. His study raises many important questions: How did political culture flow across such a vast distance? How did these cultural constructs affect power relations? How were cultural opinions formed in the thriving Anglo-Atlantic commercial empire? How did the language of commerce shape public debates and perceptions? Gould demonstrates that antislavery agitation gave rise to so-called imagined communities of like-minded individuals around the Atlantic--an influential public sphere of antislavery advocates that included blacks and women.

Contemporaries saw the rapidly expanding commercial empire as a source of civilization and enlightenment and a potential source of corruption. The slave trade, more than any other form of commerce, brought negative tendencies into focus. When writers first attacked the slave trade, they turned to familiar tropes, to Protestant condemnations of sin and human depravity, a genre that Gould cleverly identifies as the "commercial jeremiad" (p. 10). The authors of these polemics initially used biblical law to condemn the trade but moved toward a broader critique grounded in the standards of enlightened civilization. Slave trading was a brutal business that unleashed a host of dangerous passions and resulted in the seduction and rape of Africa. While writers emphasized the savage nature of the trade and the suffering it imposed on its victims, their sentimentalization of the trade ran headlong into the problem of race.

Antislavery poets--men and women, black and white--forced their readers to confront the humanity of the victims of the trade and thereby elevated such categories as savagery, civilization, and manners above racial differences. The problem of race in antislavery literature was compounded by the American wars with Algiers and Tripoli (1785-1815) and the popularity of works that condemned the enslavement of white Christians by North African Moslems.

As antislavery writers probed the meanings of such concepts as "liberty" and "rights," they were joined by black authors, the inhabitants of what Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic. Here Gould is particularly interested in the "collaborative autobiographies" (narratives related by blacks to sympathetic whites) of John Marrant and Venture Smith (p. 125). The narratives celebrated blacks' industry and their conversion to Christianity and sought to bring the authors closer to the white bourgeois audience that read these publications. At the same time, they launched a telling critique of slavery, a stance that situated them "simultaneously inside and outside Anglo-American culture" (p. 151).

Gould's final chapter, an analysis of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and the well-known dispute between whites and blacks in Philadelphia over the role of African Americans during the crisis, brings together many of the major themes articulated in the previous chapters. As whites fled the beleaguered city, community leaders called on blacks for assistance. African Americans came to the aid of the sick, but once the crisis had passed whites condemned them for theft, extortion, and other abuses. In Gould's hand, the episode exposes the links between the epidemic and West Indian slavery, the role of sentiment in the effort to gain black assistance, and African American claims to benevolent citizenship.

A brief review cannot do justice to the complexities of Gould's deeply layered and finely textured work. Unlike many studies on antislavery in the period, he situates his study within the larger Anglo-Atlantic world. He uncovers the wide reach and deep resonance of that literature's "commercial aesthetic" and allows us to hear the many voices that joined this vitally important discussion.

RANDY J. SPARKS

Tulane University