Reviews of Books

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Edited by DAVID ELTIS, STEPHEN D. BEHRENDT, DAVID RICHARDSON, and HERBERT S. KLEIN. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. $ 195.00.)

The simultaneous development of slavery and freedom has long been recognized as an important problem in the history of the early modern Western world. In The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, David Eltis develops a complex set of arguments that offers a thoughtful new perspective on this central paradox. Examining the revival of slavery in the age of European overseas expansion and the specifically racial character the institution acquired in its early modern form, Eltis finds the activities of the northwest Europeans, and the English in particular, to be of central importance. According to Eltis, "it was not the Iberian contact with Amerindians but the Dutch-English interaction with Africans that ultimately reshaped conceptions of freedom and race into forms recognisable in the early twenty-first century" (pp. 27–28).	1
For Eltis, an important reason to direct attention to the English derives from evidence of their unmatched economic productivity in the seventeenth century. "The English system," Eltis insists, "was strikingly flexible" (p. 54), exhibiting a special capacity to respond successfully to economic pressures, both at home and abroad. On the domestic front, for example, "English exports retained and expanded traditional markets on the European mainland in the face of increasing domestic wages and rising protective measures on the continent" (p. 54). Exceptional English efficiency can be seen in the Atlantic arena as well. Comparative analysis of transatlantic population movements before 1760 indicates that, despite their minor role in the sixteenth century and Portuguese domination of the slave trade before 1650, the English transported "more transatlantic migrants, both free and coerced, than any other nation" (p. 37) from the second half of the seventeenth century on. The dramatic expansion of English slaving after 1650 took place at a time when slave prices were actually falling in American markets, suggesting superior economic efficiency not only in shipping but more notably in slave trading.	2
As with the English advantage in slave trading, so with sugar production in the Americas. Barbados took the lead during the second half of the seventeenth century. Relative to its size and population, the value of exports from the island probably exceeded those of "any other polity of its time or indeed any other time up to that point," making Barbados "the Hong Kong of the preindustrial era" (p. 198). The tiny island's success was achieved in the face of economic pressures emanating from three sources: outside competition (Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, and the non-English Caribbean), declining soil quality, and falling sugar prices. Eltis finds that English sugar producers, in general, and Barbadian planters, in particular, benefited from productivity gains not enjoyed by their competitors in the colonies.	. . .