RECALLING THE CRUEL HORRORS OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Author: By Douglas R. Egerton

Date: SUNDAY, December 14, 1997

Page: H2

Section: Books

Despite claims advanced by the publisher, Thomas's study is far from ``the first major history of the Atlantic slave trade''; the author himself concedes that this ground has been so thoroughly trod that it is hard to imagine what can be said about the topic that is fresh. Nor is this the highly ``controversial'' book that promotion claims; popular historian Thomas says little that will surprise or challenge specialists in the field. (His view that just over 11 million Africans arrived alive in the Americas, for example, supports the findings of pioneering scholar Philip Curtin, whose estimates have been revised but never effectively challenged.) And such inflated claims of originality and contention need hardly be made. Never has the bloody story of the Atlantic trade been rendered so accessible. Thomas's prose is lively and unencumbered by the jargon that mars so much academic prose. For a massive volume, this is a surprisingly quick read.

Thomas's sprawling saga properly begins in the classical Mediterranean, at the moment when slavery began to move west into the Atlantic Ocean. Early on, unfree labor lacked the racialist component that characterized it in later centuries. Greek and Roman writers, even as they commented on physical dissimilarities between Europeans and Africans, proved quite uninterested in theories of racial superiority. So common was it to purchase agriculturalists from the Dalmatian coast that Slavs, and not Africans, provided the Western lexicon with the word that became synonymous with unpaid laborers. Where qualifiers existed regarding the ownership of slaves, it was religion and not race that was the determining factor. (A Byzantine law of 417 made it illegal for Jews to own Christians, a fact that should confound Minister Louis Farrakhan and other polemicists determined to prove that Jews dominated the later traffic in African slaves. Far from uncovering evidence to support such a theory, Thomas reminds us that for hundreds of years, Arab traders sought black Africans, especially girls and young men, for use in Muslim courts from Baghdad to Cordoba.)

By 1453, however, the Islamic seizure of Constantinople endangered the Venetian sugar plantations in Cyprus. Madeira now posed the safest alternative, and it was there that the infamous marriage of sugar and African labor was consummated for the first time in the Atlantic. Papal authority promptly fell into line. In 1492, Pius II condemned the seizure of African converts but declined to criticize the trade in ``pagan'' laborers. After all, Thomas observed, the pope was a Renaissance prince, and what was that famous rebirth but the recovery of practices -- including unfree labor -- of antiquity? Three decades before Columbus set sail for the Indies, Italian painters depicted black slaves rowing gondolas down Venetian canals.

A standard set piece in almost every textbook is the triangular trade, but Thomas echoes recent scholarship in suggesting that many seasoned slavers bypassed European markets completely in favor of direct runs across the Atlantic. Both buyer and seller quickly grasped the possibilities for deception in their profession: African marketers like King Tegbesu of Dahomey fattened and oiled their captives so they appeared healthy and young; European and American traders added water to their wine and rocks to their kegs of gunpowder, and bartered rifles they knew would burst when used.

For the author of a general history of the trade, Thomas has surprisingly little to say about those who were transported across the Atlantic chained between decks no more than two feet apart. The author admits early on that he is far more interested in the European investors, men who never set foot in Africa but realized enormous profits from black enslavement, than he is with those caught up in the trade. Not until Chapter 21 do enslaved Africans finally make an appearance in what might properly be regarded as their saga. Nor does the author (despite noting that the trade exacerbated West African warfare) wade into the often intemperate modern debate regarding the trade's impact on African economic development or lack thereof. To relegate African captives and sellers to cameo appearances in a comprehensive account is nearly inexcusable.

A survey of this size and scope is bound to contain its share of errors. Most are minor. The author of popular accounts of the Suez crisis and the Spanish Civil War, Thomas is more sure-footed when it comes to European history than the American pageant, and, in the latter case, several of his outdated monographic sources let him down. Thomas misdates by a good bit the passage of New Jersey's gradual-emancipation act; rather more seriously, he is off by one year on the servile insurrection that ended slavery in Saint Domingue, an error that renders sections of his later discussion of emancipation in the Caribbean somewhat unintelligible. John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is relocated to Connecticut.

Despite these flaws, Thomas's volume is rich with detail and irony. He accomplishes the nearly impossible task of re-creating the cruel horrors of the trade even while reminding us that for capitalists like John Locke, the philosopher of liberty, and John Brown, the patron of Brown University, the Royal African Company was little more than the Microsoft of their age.