Synopses & Reviews
Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. In this extraordinary book, two leading historians have created the first comprehensive, up-to-date atlas on this 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion. It features nearly 200 maps, especially created for the volume, that explore every detail of the African slave traffic to the New World. The atlas is based on an online database (www.slavevoyages.org) with records on nearly 35,000 slaving voyagesroughly 80 percent of all such voyages ever made. Using maps, David Eltis and David Richardson show which nations participated in the slave trade, where the ships involved were outfitted, where the captives boarded ship, and where they were landed in the Americas, as well as the experience of the transatlantic voyage and the geographic dimensions of the eventual abolition of the traffic. Accompanying the maps are illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries, intended to enhance readers understanding of the human story underlying the trade from its inception to its end.
This groundbreaking work provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.
Review
“An important bookone that will take a significant place in the scholarly literature on the antislavery movement and the coming of the Civil War.”James M. McPherson, Princeton University
-- Paula Kane
Review
'“
Slavery and the Commerce Power fills a major crack in interpretive arguments over Lincoln, the nature of the Constitution, the slave trade, and the coming of the Civil War. This book will be a standard in each of these areas, and no one interested in any of them can ignore Lightners interpretations.”Kermit Hall, president, State University of New York at Albany
-- James M. McPherson'
Review
“Based on historical information compiled and extensively analyzed over the last decade, these essays expand our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade as nothing has done in the last two generations.”James Oliver Horton, co-author of
Slavery and the Making of America -- James O'Neill Spady - Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Review
“Only in recent decades have we recognized the absolutely central and indispensable role of the transatlantic slave trade in creating the New World as we know it. And only since 1999 have historians acquired massive new data that wholly revises our understanding of that historical crime. Now David Eltis and David Richardson, the two leading experts on the subject, have provided the first crucial collection of essays interpreting and explaining the new findings.”David Brion Davis, author of
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World -- James Oliver Horton
Review
"The greatest mystery in the history of the West, I believe, has always been the number of Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World. Who were these Africans? From whence did they hail? Where did they embark in Africa and disembark in the Americas? Five hundred years after that heinous trade commenced, this collection of essays, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, has finally answered these questions. Together with the new slave trade database, this project has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could. It is a scholarly miracle. Twelve and a half million slaves were lost; now, thanks to Eltis, Richardson and their contributors, they are found."Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
-- David Brion Davis
Review
'\"The Atlas is the Rosetta Stone of slave historiography, making legible through maps and charts the mass of data that, at long last, allows us to grapple with and interpret the strange and intricate history of the slave trade in African human beings to the New World between 1501 and 1866. If there were Pulitzer Prizes for databases, this would win, hands down.\"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University -- Glenn Altschuler - Philadelphia Inquirer'
Review
'\"A brilliant rendition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. This atlas is essential to the study of chattel slavery. No student of slavery should be without it.\"Ira Berlin, University of Maryland -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'
Review
'\"These magnificent mapsall 189document almost every conceivable aspect of one of the worlds worst crimes. An epic and gruesome drama receives a fitting representation. A superb contribution to scholarship.\"Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University -- Ira Berlin'
Review
'\"Sophisticated and erudite, the maps and the introductions to them offer the best and most accessible interpretations on various aspects of the transatlantic slave trade. Full of insights and new findings, the strong analysis and evidence presented will create a permanent distinguished stamp on the book, confirming it as a groundbreaking text for both beginners and advanced students.\"Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin -- Philip D. Morgan'
Review
'\"
The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is a dramatic step forward in the cartographic representation of the slave trade, tracing the flow of captives in much greater detail and with more precision than ever before. This atlas also systematically links African ports to American ports and hinterland African states to the ports from which their slaves were exported: an important step and a reminder that a great deal of the slave trade began deep in Africa.\"John Thornton, author of
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 -- Toyin Falola'
Review
"This is a highly original work and represents a major contribution to historical analysis. There are no comparable works on this topic."Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester -- John Thornton
Review
“This is an important project that will add greatly to our understanding about the major, long-term patterns of trade between Africa and the Americas, help to map the African Diaspora, and place the transatlantic slave trade in larger world history context.”Steve Behrendt, Victoria University of Wellington -- Stanley Engerman
Review
“This is a major work of enormous consequence, without parallel in the literature, deeply researched, highly original, and of immeasurable value.”Harm J. de Blij, Michigan State University -- Steve Behrendt
Review
'\"One of the most ambitious books of this--or any other--publishing season: a fascinating, horrifying, beautifully put-together atlas of the transatlantic slave trade.\"--Very Short List
-- Harm J. de Blij'
Review
' \"A monumental chronicle of this historical tragedy, one that records some 35,000 individual slaving voyages, roughly 80 percent of those made. . . . [This book] is a human document as well as a rigorous accounting. It is filled with moving poems, photographs, letters and diary entries.\"-- Dwight Garner,
New York Times -- Very Short List'
Review
'\"The studies in this book constitute an exemplary extrension of the existing frontiers of knowledge and a solid base from which to advance them even further.\"--Joseph C. Miller, New West Indian Guide -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'
Review
“Breathtaking in its erudition, The Problem of Slavery as History speaks forcefully to the canon of slavery scholarship. It takes a provocative stance against the prevailing interpretation and challenges us to think hard and critically about how we have written the history of slavery. Miller's work is a truly brilliant scholarly statement that deserves the widest attention.”—James Brewer Stewart, Macalester College
Review
"In this essential book, Joseph Miller asks readers to set aside what they think they know about slavery as an abstract institution and instead see how slavery was and is created—and how we might conceive of ways to undo its destructive work."—Vincent Brown, author of The Reapers Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
Review
“Miller offers a brilliant, insightful, intensely human analysis of enslavement as experience within history, revising in significant ways how historians and social scientists understand slaving from the dawn of humanity to present times.”—Ehud R. Toledano, Tel Aviv University
Review
“Ambitious, incisive, and poetic, The Problem of Slavery as History challenges us to rethink our understanding of African, Atlantic and global history. At once a remarkable journey through the past and a manifesto for the future, it is a must-read for all those invested in the work of history.”—Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History
Review
"A provocative and deeply informed effort to historicize slavery as an evolving practice that has nevertheless remained integral to almost every society in human history. Miller argues forcefully and convincingly for the value of a more deeply historical approach to the study of slavery, one that explores most specifically the competitive political and economic contexts that over many millennia have motivated some to enslave others."—Sandra E. Greene, author of Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast
Review
Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2012 for History, Geography, and Area Studies within the Social and Behavioral Sciences category.
Synopsis
Walter Johnson is associate professor of American Studies and History, New York University. He is the author of Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.
Synopsis
This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade.
The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery.
Synopsis
Despite the United States ban on slave importation in 1808, profitable interstate slave trading continued. The nineteenth centurys great cotton boom required vast human labor to bring new lands under cultivation, and many thousands of slaves were torn from their families and sold across state lines in distant markets. Shocked by the cruelty and extent of this practice, abolitionists called upon the federal government to exercise its constitutional authority over interstate commerce and outlaw the interstate selling of slaves. This groundbreaking book is the first to tell the complex story of the decades-long debate and legal battle over federal regulation of the slave trade.
David Lightner explores a wide range of constitutional, social, and political issues that absorbed antebellum America. He revises accepted interpretations of various historical figures, including James Madison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln, and he argues convincingly that southern anxiety over the threat to the interstate slave trade was a key precipitant to the secession of the South and the Civil War.
Synopsis
Since 1999, intensive research efforts have vastly increased what is known about the history of coerced migration of transatlantic slaves. A huge database of slave trade voyages from Columbuss era to the mid-nineteenth century is now available on an open-access Web site, incorporating newly discovered information from archives around the Atlantic world. The groundbreaking essays in this book draw on these new data to explore fundamental questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findingsthat the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and morechallenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research.
For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org.
Synopsis
Why did slavery—an accepted evil for thousands of years—suddenly become regarded during the eighteenth century as an abomination so compelling that Western governments took up the cause of abolition in ways that transformed the modern world? Joseph C. Miller turns this classic question on its head by rethinking the very nature of slavery, arguing that it must be viewed generally as a process rather than as an institution. Tracing the global history of slaving over thousands of years, Miller reveals the shortcomings of Western narratives that define slavery by the same structures and power relations regardless of places and times, concluding instead that slaving is a process which can be understood fully only as imbedded in changing circumstances.
About the Author
'David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History and principal investigator, Electronic Slave Trade Database Project, Emory University. The author of The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, he lives in Atlanta. David Richardson is director, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. He serves on the advisory board of the Electronic Slave Trade Database Project and lives in England. Together, the authors coedited Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.'