Volume 45, Number 10 · June 11, 1998
A Big Business
By David Brion Davis
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870
by Hugh Thomas
Simon and Schuster, 908 pp., $37.50
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
by Robin Blackburn
Verso, 602 pp., $35.00
By limiting their attention to nation-states, especially the United States, historians have usually fragmented and obscured our understanding of the multinational Atlantic slave system. When most Americans hear the words 'African-American slavery,' they immediately think of the South and the Civil War. The story supposedly begins in Virginia, in 1619, when a colonist named John Rolfe casually noted that 'a dutch man of warre… sold us twenty Negars.'[1] At best, the standard texts make only passing reference to the flow of African labor to the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Portuguese Brazil. Even in US history, the subject of slavery has traditionally been given a marginal place—a chapter, as it were, in the history of the South (or recently a more prominent position in African-American studies).[2] Even most American college graduates would probably be astonished to learn that Portugal began importing slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1440s; that well before Columbus's famous voyages the Portuguese were exploiting black slave labor on sugar plantations in Madeira and São Tomé, off the coast of West Africa; and that enslaved African migrants to the New World greatly outnumbered European immigrants in the first three hundred and twenty years of settlement.
Review, 4531 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |