Klein - The Atlantic Slave Trade

Edited by
Stuart Schwartz

Herbert S. Klein

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo

Cambridge University Press

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York , NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521182508

ISBN 978-0-511-79802-3 mobipocket

ISBN 978-0-511-79942-6 eBook (Kindle edition)

ISBN 978-0-521-76630-2 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-18250-8 Paperback

Map 1. Major slave-trading zones of western Africa.

Map 2. Major slave-trading ports of Senegambia and Sierra Leone.

Map 3. Major slaving ports of the Gold Coast and the Bights of Benin and Biafra.

Map 4. Major slaving ports of southwestern and southeastern Africa.

Despite its central importance in the economic and social history of Western expansion, its fundamental role in the history of America, and its profound impact on African society, the Atlantic slave trade remained one of the least studied areas in modern Western historiography until the past quarter century. This late start was not due to any lack of sources, for the materials available for its study were abundant from the very beginning. Rather, it was ignored because of its close association with European imperialism and a resulting lack of interest in a morally difficult problem, and because of a lack of tools with which to analyze the complex quantitative data.

Even today, despite a quarter century of sophisticated multinational studies, the gap between popular understanding and scholarly knowledge remains as profound as when the trade was first under discussion in literate European circles in the eighteenth century. For a variety of political and intellectual reasons having a great deal to do with the nature of contemporary North American politics, the scholarly research is largely ignored as a society riven by racial conflict finds the trade a topic too difficult to treat in a rational manner. Yet, in the heat of the debate it is this rationality that is most needed.

Not only has there been a failure in the dialogue between the academic and general literate world, but there is a surprising ignorance even within the scholarly world at large about the nature of the trade. There exist few coherent summaries of the recent literature on the slave trade for the general or scholarly public, and this failure to communicate the recent scholarly research has allowed the general discussion about the trade to become so politicized and emotional that most academics and intellectuals refuse to confront the trade with anything approaching a rational analysis. It is for all these reasons that I have undertaken this survey of the current knowledge of the Atlantic slave trade. Though much is still unknown about the trade, there is already a surprising consensus among scholars as to its general shape and its economic arrangements. There is even some fundamental scholarly, if not popular, agreement about the numbers involved. This consensus crosses academic areas and national boundaries, and as much as possible I have tried to incorporate the latest findings from all the relevant disciplines and international literature.