Volume 34, Number 17 · November 5, 1987
The Labyrinth of Slavery
By David Brion Davis
African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean
by Herbert S. Klein
Oxford University Press, 311 pp., $22.95
Mutiny on the 'Amistad': The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy
by Howard Jones
Oxford University Press, 271 pp., $19.95
In the Age of Reason, when philosophy celebrated the natural rights of man, there was nothing peculiar about the South's 'peculiar institution,' a term later applied to black slavery in the United States. In the eighteenth century, exports of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade exceeded six million, nearly three times the number shipped out from 1450 to 1700.[1] Some 2.7 million of these eighteenth-century slaves were transported by Englishmen or Anglo-Americans, members of the supposedly freest and most progressive societies on earth. Although Brazil and the West Indies were the major markets for African slaves, accounting for 85 percent of the century's total imports, approximately 16,000 landed in Buenos Aires. In the late eighteenth century there were 89,000 black slaves in Peru and 12,000 in Chile. In New York City the number of black slaves increased so rapidly that by the 1740s they constituted 21 percent of the city's total population. In King's County the proportion reached 34 percent. Even in Boston in the 1740s about one fifth of the white families owned slaves.
Review, 4176 words
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