It is hard to overstate the impact of David Eltis' work on the field of the transatlantic slave trade. Over the course of nearly 40 years, Eltis has revolutionized both the way that we think about the transatlantic slave trade and the tools we have to study it.
In The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, editors Kristin Mann and Philip Misevich pay homage to Eltis' scholarship by bringing together a dozen essays that connect to some aspect of Eltis’ work. The outgrowth of a conference at Emory University in 2013, the collection is organized into two main parts, focusing first on the slave trade and then on its abolition. As such it traverses the three main phases of Eltis’ career: His early work on British abolition and the implications of British efforts to suppress the slave trade, his arguments about the connection between European ideas of individualism and liberty and the willingness of Europeans to enslave Africans, and his leading role in the creation of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a collection of approximately 36,000 slave voyages, first published to cd-rom and now searchable online.
At their best, the essays in this volume pick up on an Eltis theme, integrate it with original research and take it down a new avenue. At their most lukewarm, they simply repackage some of Eltis’ findings or have a tenuous-at-best connection. I would like to highlight a few of the most thought-provoking.
Leonardo Marques' “US Shipbuilding, Atlantic Markets and the Structures of the Contraband Slave Trade” shows just how impossible it was to prevent American capital from entering the slave trade, as long as laissez-faire ideals were in place in the nineteenth century. Building off Eltis’ Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Marques demonstrates that U.S.-built vessels dominated the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, spurring the U.S. ship-building industry. “The US government's hesitation to regulate the indirect participation of its citizens in the slave trade can be seen as the product of a complex set of international factors, such as widespread belief in laissez-faire ideals and interstate competition for markets rather than simply the domination of the federal government by slave-holding interests” (p. 208).
Misevich's essay “The Mende and Sherbro Diaspora in Nineteenth-Century Southern Sierra Leone,” looks at the unique effects of British efforts to suppress the slave trade on Sierra Leone. Combining records from the Registers of Liberated Africans with evidence from the Vice Admiralty Courts and the Courts of Mixed Commission, Misevich is able to show that the reorientation of the slave trade to southern Sierra Leone resulted in a high concentration of slaves from Mende- and Sherbro-speaking communities. Misevich and Eltis teamed up to launch the African Origins Portal (www.african-origins.org) and Misevich's contribution to this volume argues that more than two-thirds of captives in southern Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century came from areas that were just 50 or 60 miles from the coast (p. 257).
Lastly, David Richardson draws on his decades-long collaboration with Eltis to present the transatlantic slave trade as structurally determined, governed by the worldwide demand for sugar. A more synthetic piece, Richardson's essay presents some of his joint research on Caribbean slave and sugar prices and the impact that rising demand for slaves in the Americas had on prices and turn-around times on the African coast (p. 51).
Mann and Misevich's collection is geared for the specialist reader. Anyone researching or teaching a facet of the transatlantic slave trade will find useful contributions here. Jelmer Vos’ chapter, “The Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Windward Coast of Africa,” uses the records of the Middelburg Commerce Company to reassess the slave trade on the Windward Coast in the mid-eighteenth century. Although the Windward Coast supplied a small proportion of overall slave totals for Africa, Vos argues that Dutch free traders looked to the Windward Coast as a less-competitive alternative to the Bights of Biafra and Benin and bought slaves from about 50 points of embarkation (p. 133). Like Misevich's chapter, Kristin Mann's contribution, “The Illegal Slave Trade and One Yoruba Man's Transatlantic Passages from Slavery to Freedom,” takes Eltis’ arguments about British suppression and pushes them a step further. With a lot of archival sleuthing, Mann takes the micro-story of three children enslaved in the nineteenth century to show the impact of British suppression in the Lusophone world. She argues that organizational adaptions to the transatlantic slave trade post-1807 led a tighter integration of African and American worlds.
Ultimately this essay collection does what a good essay collection should do: It creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Taken together, the essays effectively show the empirical and conceptual ways in which Eltis impacted the study of the transatlantic slave trade. The endnotes for individual chapters offer many trails for the specialist wanting more.
