The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870.

The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440 - 1870, by Hugh Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 928 pp., $37.50)

Mr. Edgerton is a professor of anthropology at UCLA. His recent books include The Fall of the Asante Empire and Sick Societies.

ALL known human societies have acknowledged some forms of inequality. Nobles, elders, chiefs, great warriors, and shamans have exercised power over lesser people, and men everywhere have asserted some kinds of dominance over women. But the ultimate in human inequality is represented by slavery, an institution that has taken root in many parts of the world, including some small-scale societies in, e.g., the northwest of what is now the United States and the forests of South America. By 1000 B.C., slavery was entrenched in Europe. Greeks and Romans captured Germans and Africans alike, Egyptians enslaved Nubians and Ethiopians, and soon the Chinese would take slaves from East Africa to Canton, while others found their way to India and Java. Later, Arabs would take slaves from much of Africa Africa and most of Western Europe, while Turks took Greeks, Africans, and sundry Eastern Europeans into captivity.

In a truly monumental work, Hugh Thomas has now given us the most comprehensive account of the Atlantic slave trade ever written. From its earliest origins, through its various phases, and up to its abolition, Thomas provides a balanced view of the men who made this trade into a business that would eventually send 11 million Africans to the New World, as well as poignant glimpses into the lives of the slaves themselves; finally, he looks extensively at the various forces and individuals involved in slavery's eventual abolition in Europe and the Americas.

The views of the scholar Eric Williams notwithstanding, profits from slavery were not the engine that drove the Industrial Revolution: Portugal, Spain, and Brazil profited greatly but did not industrialize. Nevertheless, the trade did enrich many people, some of whom spent their wealth in ways that benefited their countries. Some heavy investors in the trade were women, and quite a few were conversos, Jews forcibly converted to Christianity. But with these exceptions, the trade was dominated by Christian families of good social standing such as the Cabots of Boston. In ports like Liverpool, New York, and Newport, many people profited, and some made huge fortunes. But others lost money when slaves died at sea or were too enfeebled to be sold, or when prices simply fell. It was not a predictable business, especially in its early days. Thomas calculates that throughout much of the period the average profit was only 6 to 10 per cent, with even these earnings often long deferred.

As early as 1445, the Portuguese found it easier to buy slaves in Africa than to capture them; and although they did mount some military expeditions in Angola, they and all other European traders obtained the overwhelming majority of their slaves by purchase. The most common trade good was cloth, but in different times and places the currency was cowrie shells, alcohol, beads, lead, steel, copper, tobacco, horses, guns, gunpowder, and even gold. Slavery was well established long before Europeans began the Atlantic trade, but European interest gradually intensified African kings' slave-raiding activities. Powerful West African kingdoms like Asante and Dahomey, with access to coastal traders, sought guns and gunpowder in order to enslave peoples more remote from coastal trade and without firearms.

Most war captives in Africa were sold into slavery, although many became farmers, miners, and even soldiers in their captors' armies. The Asante economy, including its many gold mines, was entirely dependent on slave labor. Those destined for the Atlantic slave trade were marched to the coast under dreadful conditions; their African captors beat them, underfed them, and often raped the women. European traders wanted healthy, strong men in the prime of life; hence very few children were purchased, and only one-third of the slaves taken were women. It was widely believed that it was cheaper to work a slave to death -- often in ten years -- than it was to raise a slave child to adulthood. The United States was an exception in this regard, often managing to "breed" large numbers of slaves instead of purchasing new ones.

Thomas describes the horrors of the transatlantic voyage in enough detail to turn the strongest stomach, but he also allows that from ship to ship and nation to nation, conditions did vary. Most Africans boarded ships in terror, believing that they were going to be eaten, but some were happy to board, knowing that their fate as slaves in Africa would be poor at best, and hoping that the unknown that lay ahead would be better. Most voyages were ghastly. Hunger, filth, disease, and brutality took a terrible toll. Melancholia, dysentery, and smallpox were great killers, and so were slave rebellions. Most rebellions were bloody failures, but a few succeeded. After killing the European crew the slaves sometimes made landfall and ended up living with Indians. An average of 20 per cent died en route, and many of those who survived were so weak that they were left on the dock to die because no one would buy them.

But some ships were much more humane than others. Human kindness was no doubt less responsible for this than the fear of losing a potential sale, but some captains tried to keep up spirits by providing nutritious food and rum or wine, encouraging singing and dancing, and even allowing sexual contact. Slave quarters were regularly cleaned and fumigated. Rape by a crew member could result in brutal punishment. Free Africans sometimes sailed the Atlantic, too. Thomas points out that in 1492 Columbus's pilot on his favorite ship, the Nina, was a mulatto; and an African was said to have sailed in the second voyage a year later.

IT IS not widely known that, until 1550, the Old World was the largest importer of African slaves. For example, in 1539 there were forty thousand African slaves in Portugal; African slaves made up 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon. Spaniards also imported large numbers of slaves, many of whom had sexual relations with whites and were even allowed to intermarry. Italy, too, had many African slaves. Thomas points out that although the importation of slaves to these countries gradually diminished, there are still remote areas where the local population shows physical signs of African ancestry.

After 1550 the bulk of the trade shifted to the New World, and Thomas provides this startling statistic: between 1492 and 1820, African slaves carried to the Americas outnumbered European immigrants 5 to 1. Moreover, from 1820 to 1870 as many slaves were taken to Brazil and Cuba alone as there were white people immigrating to all of North and South America.

Of the 11 million slaves brought to the New World, the great majority worked on sugar, cotton, or coffee plantations, but one million worked in mines, another million did domestic labor, and a smaller number worked as carpenters, tile-setters, roofers, and in other forms of construction. Thomas provides rich vignettes about the lives that slaves led, focusing much more on the Caribbean and Brazil than on the United States. He leaves no doubt that previous accounts of the inhumanity of slavery were fully justified. But he adds intriguing details about some reversals of roles -- for example, when newly arrived African slaves joined their European captors in brutally killing and enslaving Carib Indians, who themselves kept slaves. He also notes some droll episodes, such as the Scottish slave trader who built a golf course on an island off Sierra Leone, where the caddies were slaves wearing kilts.

The slaves' story would not be complete without a discussion of their rebellions, and Thomas does well at this. The first major rebellion was in 1522, followed by many more, almost all of which failed. Of this first rebellion against the Spanish by mostly Wolof tribesmen from West Africa, a Spanish poet wrote this: "Clever are these Wolofs and brave,/With the vain hope of becoming knights." Still, some of the rebels escaped to join nearby Indian communities. Although the Carib sometimes used slaves in human sacrifices, a Spanish judge commented that the Indians typically treated their slaves like "relations," while the Christians treated theirs like "dogs."

Thomas devotes much attention to slavery in Cuba, which became a focal point for sugar production. By 1860, Cuba was producing one-fourth of the world's sugar and was shipping many slaves to the United States. Thanks in part to a U.S. and British blockade, Cuba quit exporting slaves in 1870, but slavery was not abolished there until 1886. Thomas also focuses on Brazil -- not surprisingly, because more than 4 million African slaves went there. In 1851, half of Rio de Janeiro's population was slave, and as late as 1870 there were still 1.5 million slaves in Brazil. Slavery was not abolished until 1888.

Thomas devotes a large segment of the book to an account of efforts to abolish the slave trade. He documents the role of intellectuals, politicians, former slaves, and slave traders in the abolition debates that dominated so much of the eighteenth century, but he gives the lion's share of the credit to Britain for using her naval might to close down the trade.

The book ends on a high note after the abolition of the African slave trade and the almost complete abolition of slavery itself, but Thomas is quick to admit that slavery endured in Africa to the end of the nineteenth century and was ended then primarily because of pressure from the European colonial powers. The book ends with the sobering report that as late as 1980, ninety thousand Africans were being held as slaves by Arabs in Mauritania.