Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links.

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xxii, 225. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2973-0.)

It is the subtitle of this work, Restoring the Links, that best summarizes the two central theses of the book. First, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall convincingly and, through the detailed excavation of sources, forcefully demonstrates that the scholarship of the transatlantic slave trade can only move forward if scholars tack back and forth between African and American sources and look beyond the commonly relied upon English archival materials. Second, Hall contributes to the growing body of scholarship (to which her earlier work in Louisiana is central) that is directed toward recognizing how enslaved Africans constructed and maintained ethnic identities in New World settings. A less explicit yet just as important theme is that large-scale relational databases are going to become increasingly essential elements of scholarship in this field.

Hall's primary sources for this work are her Louisiana Slave Database, 1791-1820 (www.ibiblio.org/laslave), a range of manuscript collections from Louisiana, France, and Spain, and The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, by David Eltis et al., which was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press. She juxtaposes these sources, using them to challenge and illuminate one another to clarify ambiguities and seeming contradictions. In doing so, she effectively demonstrates that a more global approach to sources not only enriches our understanding of the slave trade but overthrows long-standing assumptions about the composition of the enslaved populations that were settled in different parts of the New World.

Hall has successfully constructed a comprehensive and detailed consideration of the transatlantic slave trade that succeeds on many fronts and at many levels. At the most basic level, this work is an outstanding introduction to both the sources available on the slave trade and the scholarship produced from these sources. Hall provides a dense yet very accessible summary of the regions and cultures of Africa affected during the period of the slave trade in rich diachronic detail. As such, the book will appeal to nonspecialists as well as specialists. The literature related to the transatlantic slave trade is vast and can be intimidating when attempting to initially sort through it in a meaningful way, let alone trying to master it. Hall carefully sorts through ambiguities in ethnic and regional names and demonstrates how the peoples represented by these labels on the African side of the trade continued to self-identify in similar ways on the American end. Hall powerfully counters recent critiques that suggest that ethnicity was a strong organizational identity for enslaved and free African peoples in the New World. As such, it is likely to inspire further works in this vein beyond the discipline of history.

LAURIE A. WILKIE

University of California, Berkeley