| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Philip Gould. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 258. $45.00.

The eighteenth-century crusade against the slave trade in Britain, British America, and the United States gave rise to a wealth of antislavery literature. What has always been surprising is the extent to which writers concentrated overwhelmingly on the barbarity of the slave trade rather than on slavery itself. Philip Gould argues that this concentration on a branch of commerce that Britain was extremely adept at conducting was not accidental. He insists, following historians such as Eric Williams and especially David Brion Davis, that reformers targeted the slave trade because the slave trade symbolized the kind of commerce that did not fit in an emerging capitalist order committed to "free" trade. He suggests that antislavery writers attacked the slave trade in order to question the compatibility of such "inhuman commerce" with enlightened civilization. Gould's book interrogates the meaning of liberalism and challenges the ideology of possessive individualism. He emphasizes that sentiment and capitalism were mutually constitutive rather than sentiment being merely symptomatic of commercial and industrial capitalism.

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