The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

This volume consists of thirteen papers presented at a conference at the University of Rochester in 1988; these are prefaced by a 20 page introduction on the gainers and losers in the Atlantic slave trade by the editors. Nine of the thirteen papers were previously published in Social Science History. Nevertheless, the volume includes four previously unpublished papers which open up potentially significant new areas of enquiry for historians of the slave trade, Africa and the black diaspora. For this reason the publication of the papers in this format may be seen to be justified.

In dealing with the central issue of who gained and who lost from the slave trade, the contributors tend to ignore the specific groups in Europe, Africa and America who organized it or who profited from the exploitation of slave labor. Most of their concern is, instead, with the broader social costs and benefits of the slave traffic. On the whole, the answers they provide are fairly predictable; in the editors' own words, "western Europe and North America were gainers . . . |t~ropical Africa was a loser" and "the greatest losers of all were . . . the enslaved peoples of Africa and the Americas". The impact of the trade on Africa is explored in papers by Klein, Manning, and Miller, all of whom have written extensively on African history. Relying on recent research by Senegalese historians, Klein argues that, while slave exports from Senegambia were small, the traffic in slaves had a powerful impact on local politics, social violence and state policies. Moreover, there was a decline in non-slave exports as the scale of slaving increased. Where Klein looks at the political ramifications of the trade, Manning's paper highlights the severity of its demographic impact by placing the population history of West Africa in the context of population change throughout the Atlantic basin. Building on earlier work on African demography, Manning reminds us that while the population of West Africa may have fallen in 1730-1850, that of Western Europe and North America rose substantially, with the result that the African share of the population of the Atlantic basin fell by perhaps two-thirds between 1650 and 1850. Manning has yet to extend his demographic modelling techniques to other areas of Africa, but Miller's paper indicates that, following the discovery of new evidence on Anglo-French slave shipments, the scale of eighteenth-century slave exports from Angola--already accepted as the largest single source of slaves to the Atlantic trade--was even greater than historians had assumed. Unfortunately, Miller refrains from speculating about the consequences of this finding for assessments of the impact of the trade on Angola. The increase in estimated numbers shipped from the region would seem, nevertheless, to strengthen the claim of some recent historians that the trade in slaves had substantial negative effects on its historical development.

If some of the papers in this collection reaffirm the impression that the slave trade was generally detrimental to Africa, others point to the significant contribution that the trade made to the growth of Europe and North America. In an interesting paper, Austen and Smith argue that slave-produced goods such as sugar and tobacco played a decisive part in stimulating consumer demand for goods in Britain and other west European societies, and thus in fostering the growth of industrial capitalism. A similar emphasis on demand-side factors is to be found in Inikori's own contribution, which seeks to attribute the growth of the eighteenth-century English cotton industry primarily to overseas, especially African, demand for textiles. Finally, in papers that return to more traditional themes, Darity argues that the late Eric Williams was correct in claiming that the slave trade and its associated plantation trades were critical sources of capital for British industry, while Bailey, drawing inspiration from the work of DuBois and Greene, claims that the same trades played an equally important role in supplying capital to finance early industrial growth in the northeastern United States. Some of these papers carry more conviction than others. Austen and Smith's interpretation of the role of colonial goods in shaping consumerism in Britain seems particularly persuasive, and is likely to stimulate further research in this area. Relying on import-substitution theory, Inikori's paper is rather less convincing, since the size of the British cotton textile industry before 1776 remains difficult to measure. Moreover, he ignores some important publications relevant to his study, including Chaudhuri's work on the East India trade in cotton textiles and Davis's book on British overseas trade. To some extent similar omissions weaken Darity's paper, but even more importantly, in continuing to focus on the issue of capital accumulation neither he nor Bailey seem to recognise that, as the paper of Austen and Smith shows, the debate over the relationship between the slave trade and industrialization has moved on substantially since Williams and Greene wrote almost fifty years ago. Austen and Smith's paper apart, the essays relating to the impact of the slave trade on Europe and North America seem to break little new ground and appear rather dated in their approach.

The remaining contributions to this volume largely deal with the slaves or former slaves and their experiences in Africa, America and Europe. Papers by Postma and Gaspar look respectively at patterns of Dutch slave sales in America in 1630-1803 and slave resistance and flight in Antigua in the 1720s, while a paper by Drescher draws our attention to the debates in Europe over the ending of the slave trade and slavery and their impact on the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. There is also a paper by Hogendorn and Lovejoy on the debate in 1900-04 over the ending of slavery in Nigeria; looking at first glance out of place in this collection, this serves nevertheless to remind us of the scale of slavery within Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century and of the fact that the emancipation process did not end with the abolition of the slave trade or of slavery in the Americas. However, in the context of the slave trade, the most innovative and thought-provoking contributions are those by Kiple and Higgins on dehydration of slaves in the middle passage and by Wilson and Grim on hypertension in blacks in modern America. Noting both the modest water allowances for slaves in the Atlantic crossing and the heavy water losses experienced by them, these papers suggest that genetically-based salt conservation capacities were vital to the survival rate of Africans during the middle passage. Preliminary work by Wilson and Grim suggests that Ibos from the Bight of Biafra appear today to have a low salt retention capacity, and that this condition, if it existed in their ancestors, may have contributed to the well-known higher than average mortality rates of slaves from that region in the Atlantic crossing. Ironically, it was, according to the same authors, the salt-retaining capacities of those who survived the middle passage that contributed to the development of hypertension in later generations of blacks experiencing the salt-rich diet of modem America. As the editors of the volume observe, this last argument fails to take account of the pressures created by the socially disadvantaged position of blacks in the United States. Nevertheless, the papers of Wilson and Grim and of Kiple and Higgins provide some important new insights into the capacity of Africans to survive under the brutal conditions associated with slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

Overall, this is a curate's egg of a collection of essays. Adopting a social accounting approach, the authors have little to say about the architects of the trade in African slaves or about those who profited most directly from it. They do, however, suggest some potentially important new areas of research relating to the impact of the slave trade on Africa and Africans and of slave-produced goods on European consumption patterns. For this reason this volume of essays is a significant addition to the literature on the slave trade from Africa.

David Richardson University of Hull