David Eltis, David Richardson, eds. Extending the Frontiers: Essays
on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. New Haven Yale
University Press, 2008. xiii + 377 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-300-13436-0.
Reviewed by Isaac Land (Indiana State University)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2010)
Commissioned by David S. Karr
Slavery By the Numbers
The first systematic attempt to count how many enslaved Africans
crossed the Atlantic was Philip Curtin's classic 1969 _The Atlantic
Slave Trace: A __Census_, which reckoned by entire centuries and
necessarily relied on a great deal of educated guesswork. Since then,
new technologies have enabled scholars to share evidence from a wide
variety of sources on different continents, accumulating multiple
sources of information on many individual voyages. There is no longer
a high risk of counting ships and their cargoes twice (once on
departure from Africa and again on arrival in the Americas). It is
now possible to quantify how many slaves crossed the Atlantic in any
given year with a high degree of accuracy. Databases allow us to sort
the individual voyages according to many different variables,
including the port of departure, the point of arrival in Africa, the
mortality during the Middle Passage, and the American destination
that ultimately received the human cargo.
The data discussed in this volume is derived from the substantial and
wide-ranging update to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
(searchable for free at http://slavevoyages.org) that has been
carried out since the release of an earlier version of the database
on CD-ROM in 1999 and the discussion of the initial findings in the
_William and Mary Quarterly _in 2001. I will follow the convention
adopted by the editors and refer to the 1999 data as TSTD1, while the
newest findings are TSTD2. Since 1999, 8,232 new voyages have been
added to the database, and 19,729 of the voyages already included are
modified to reflect new information. The editors remark that with
this latest refinement of the data, it is possible that "this book
will be the last to devote a major part of its thrust to assessing
the overall size of the slave trade" (p. 53). The concluding essay by
David Eltis and Paul Lachance offers a reappraisal of "rates of
natural decrease" in the Caribbean, reminding us that estimates about
the scope of the slave trade have also shaped the debate on other
important demographic topics (p. 355).
It was already well known that Brazil took the lion's share of slaves
from Africa; a concentrated effort to improve the coverage of ships
flying the Portuguese or Brazilian flags has resulted in a 13 percent
increase in the overall estimate of persons removed from Africa over
the entire course of the slave trade (an additional 1.5 million human
beings unknown to TSTD1), and an 11 percent increase in the
equivalent estimate of enslaved persons arriving alive in the
Americas (p. 45). The editors note that "it now appears that British
dominance of the slave trade was confined to eight of the thirteen
decades between 1681 and 1807" with "two long periods of Portuguese
preeminence" on either side (p. 39). Indeed, even in several of the
"dominant" British decades, Portuguese slave traders nearly tied them
for the number one position. For example, in the period 1751-60, the
British accounted for the shipment of 255,346 Africans, but the
Portuguese transported 215,934 (table 1.6). The new numbers also
force some reappraisal of the role of individual port cities in the
trade as a whole: "Liverpool has often been viewed as the
quintessential slave-trading port, but in fact the ports of Bahia and
Rio de Janeiro were individually responsible for far more slaves
reaching the Americas" (p. 39). Little-known Brazilian ports, such as
Recife, sent out about two thousand slave ships in total, equivalent
to Bristol's trade and exceeding that of Nantes (p. 122). Not
surprisingly, raising our estimate of the number of slaves destined
for Brazil also involves a notable increase in the weight of the
Congo River basin and Angola, which figure more than ever as prime
contributors of captives.
The essays in this volume are concerned with what was new in TSTD2,
and this was--by design--mostly about rectifying gaps in our
knowledge of the Luso-Atlantic world, which receives no less than
four chapters of coverage. Although the French, the Dutch, and even
the Duchy of Brandenburg (which launched fifty-six voyages, mostly in
the 1690s) can boast chapters of their own, there is no chapter
devoted to Britain or its colonies per se. As I have noted, however,
the new data enables us to set Britain, its trade, and its colonies
in a broader comparative context with unprecedented accuracy. Some
refinements also improve our knowledge of the performance of various
British ports in comparison with each other. Considering the entire
history of the slave trade, "London now appears to have been twice as
important as Bristol and not far behind Liverpool, albeit with a
trade that endured over a longer period" (p. 39).
Taking a hard look at the early and mid-nineteenth-century numbers
also puts Britain's much-touted efforts to ban the transatlantic
trade in a less flattering light. In the Luso-Atlantic world, the
numbers of slaves enduring the Middle Passage went up, not down,
after 1807. Although "about eighty-five vessels from Bahia were
captured by British forces" between 1811 and 1830, which sounds
impressive, this period and the two decades that followed marked the
climax of the trade in Brazil (p. 146). The figures show that many
hundreds of thousands of slaves were never intercepted. When British
pressure made it inconvenient to disembark captives in the port of
Salvador, they were simply set down on nearby beaches and islands (p.
140). In nearby Uruguay, slaves arrived as "colonists" from Africa,
avoiding the rules while fooling no one (p. 37). The chapter on Cuba,
illuminated by insights from the Cuban archives, paints a similar
picture: slavers entered the island's ports "with complete impunity,"
while the "many hidden creeks" of the lower Congo River foiled the
British patrols on the other side of the Atlantic (pp. 187, 192). It
is particularly sobering to see that the numbers of captives
departing from Sierra Leone's creeks and inlets showed little or no
decline in the decades following 1807 (table 1.7); one would never
guess that this part of the African coast was also the site of a bold
experiment in freedom undertaken by former slaves from the Americas,
and the place where the Royal Navy delivered its "recaptives" from
intercepted slave ships.
One potential shortcoming of history by the numbers is that it may
prejudice us in favor of the study of numerically larger groups, or
of groups whose existence and movements are easiest to quantify.
TSTD2 is so impressive, and so easy to access, that there is some
risk that it could discourage historians from considering other, less
well-documented populations that fell outside its purview. Native
American slaves amounted to a modest fraction of the total of
enslaved persons in the Americas, but in certain times and places
they could be quite important, as demonstrated by Allan Gallay's
prize-winning book on South Carolina, _The Indian Slave Trade: The
Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 _(2002).
It would be unfortunate if our lavish, and entirely laudable,
attention to the demographic rise of African Americans had the effect
of eclipsing our awareness of Native American populations, which,
despite the myth of the "vanishing Indian," did in fact persist and
adapt, exercising an influence over colonial societies from beginning
to end despite their diminished numbers.
Citation: Isaac Land. Review of Eltis, David; Richardson, David,
eds., _Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave
Trade Database_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. April, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25692