Atlantic Cataclysm

Atlantic Cataclysm exemplifies top-notch economic history because it is based on command of the secondary literature and three expert “crowdsourced” data sets approaching a full population of extant primary sources. Cliometricians might be able to address additional questions or add another layer of understanding, but the main conclusions of this book seem unlikely to be overturned anytime soon. Collectively, its conclusions trounce the view recently popularized by the so-called New History of Capitalism (NHC) group that slavery and/or the international slave trade spurred the economic transformation of northwestern Europe, especially France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, and the United States. The book shows that Iberians dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade and made far more profits from it, and earned a higher rate of return from it, than their relatively hapless northwestern European competitors did.

That conclusion, like others in the book, stems not from author David Eltis riffing on cherry-picked or misunderstood narrative sources but from careful analysis of three major databases publicly available at slavevoyages.org. One covers the transatlantic trade, one the intra-American trade, and the third, pictured below, the names, languages, and other details of both enslavers and enslaved. By combining the numbers with context from secondary sources and analytical art history, Eltis constructs a wall of evidence to reach at least ten major conclusions, some quite shocking to those conversant with the field.

Over seven chapters, a preface, and a conclusion, Atlantic Cataclysm establishes the following:

1. The Atlantic slave trade is only one chapter in a lamentable but long history of human slaving that extends from the enslavement of Denisovans and Neanderthals by Homo sapiens to sex trafficking and other forms of forced labor today. The institution remains so ubiquitous over time and place that Eltis can confidently assert that “all of us have both a slave and a slave owner in our ancestral heritage” (p. 36). It strains credulity that slavery spurred industrialization once, and only once, over that immense period.
2. That incredulity holds even if one claims that the transatlantic slave trade differed in some fundamental respect from the world’s many other long-distance slave trade routes because the Portuguese and Spanish dominated the trade, not the Americans, British, Dutch, or French. The British barely led the trade by volume from 1730 to 1800, but the Portuguese remained a close second throughout and, more importantly for the NHC’s thesis, their trade remained more profitable than that of the British. That was because the Portuguese co-opted Africans through profit-sharing arrangements and even family ties (much as French fur trappers did later in North America). In 1480, one in ten denizens of Lisbon were African, some enslaved but others the scions of African slavers learning the Portuguese language and business techniques. Because they were able to hire Africans to keep order on ships, Portuguese slavers faced few rebellions and did not suffer the expense of the “barricado” barriers that other European slavers put in the middle of their ships, often to little effect. Also, unlike other slave traders, the Portuguese were able to assemble their cargoes on land, greatly reducing time at sea. That helped to reduce the risk of rebellion and meant far fewer deaths during transport. 
3. Slaving was no more profitable than other commercial endeavors, and sometimes less so. The British were able to make a run at Portuguese dominance only by sinking capital into a competition that they could not win without adopting Portuguese methods. In other words, British economic growth may well have led to increased slaving rather than vice versa. 
4. The transatlantic slave trade did not “concentrate capital,” whatever that vague NHC claim means, because participation in all aspects of the trade, from acquisition in Africa to work role in the New World, was widespread. “Acceptance of the trade in all three continents was broadly based” and widely accessible through various risk-spreading and investment-sharing arrangements that helped slave ships to depart from 96 different European ports (p. xiv). Yes, some large families from Liverpool were heavily involved but most investors on the European side of the trade were clerks, apprentices, sailors and even, in the Portuguese case, former slaves. The same held on the African side, where most slave sales involved only one to five persons. Not even African royalty dominated the trade, although they sometimes brokered deals on behalf of their numerous countrymen eager to obtain European goods. 
5. Those European goods, it turns out, were not worthless trinkets, as sometimes claimed, but valuable wares, including New World gold, firearms, and alcohol. Even at the peak of the slave trade, non-slave goods comprised the bulk of Euro-African trade, much of which was bilateral, not triangular as often depicted. Europeans were much more dependent on trade with Africa than Africans were on trade with Europe, so the terms of trade were often in Africa’s favor. “Africans could feed, clothe, and house themselves, as well as sustain the savings and investment necessary to support these activities,” Eltis argues, “to a greater extent than European nations and their offshoots” (p. 239).
6. Contrary to belief, Africans and people of African descent did not constitute the majority of the world’s enslaved. “The typical slave prior to the nineteenth century,” Eltis shows, “was Eurasian and female—not African (or Slavic) and male” (p. 26). In 1800, Africans composed one quarter of the world’s enslaved. New World slaves that year accounted for only 6 million of the world’s estimated 45 million slaves. Yet the owners of the rest of the world’s slaves, who were widely held in the Islamic world, eastern Europe, India, and China, did not industrialize. 
7. The flow of slaves from Africa to the New World was not the largest in history. The slave trades of the Romans, and later their Germanic conquerors, was three times larger. For most of the last two millennia, “Africans were no more likely than people on other continents to be enslaved and sold into a long-distance slave trade” (p. 26). In fact, it is not clear that the slave trade reduced Africa’s population at all. Instead, it may have merely siphoned off the excess population, helping the continent to avoid a Malthusian population trap in much the same way that the U.S. frontier helped to keep wages relatively high in America’s northeast throughout the nineteenth century.
8. On all four continents involved in the transatlantic slave trade (Europe, Africa, and North and South America), most people, even the enslaved themselves, were not abolitionists. Nobody wanted to be enslaved but they did not dispute the enslavement of others, especially those from distant climes, with different religious beliefs or skin hues, who were taken captive in war, convicted of crimes, or born into bondage. British suppression of the slave trade can be interpreted cynically, as an attempt to leverage a growing revulsion against physical punishment to defeat a commercial rival, the Portuguese, who could not be vanquished in trade for the aforementioned reasons.
9. Too often studied in isolation, the abolition of slavery was just one of many post-Enlightenment movements against involuntary status and violence, including ending the “second serfdom” of Scottish colliers in 1775 (p. 266) and imprisonment for debt, crackdowns on those who committed infanticide or animal cruelty, and the phaseout of execution by torture, bodily mutilation, and even milder forms of physical chastisement. 
10. The end of the transatlantic slave trade largely meant the substitution of other forms of coerced labor in the New World, mostly indentured laborers from India and China, and an increased flow of Africans into the Indian Ocean slave trade. In addition, the end of chattel slavery did not end other forms of oppression for Africans in America or elsewhere in the New World.  

In short, the New History of Capitalism claim that slavery and/or the transatlantic slave trade spurred the economic transformation of the west rests on no empirical basis.

No academic product is ever perfect, and Eltis may get a little ahead of his evidence on a few points. His interpretations of artwork depicting slaves, slavers, and slave ships are extremely interesting and seem well-founded, for example, but might not be as empirically grounded as his quantitative analyses. That said, however, scholars should strongly prefer books, like Atlantic Cataclysm, that reason from the best available information over those that grasp at evidence picked to support a preconceived or politicized “conclusion” easily refuted by reference to more evidence. There will never be a last word on the transatlantic slave trade, but Atlantic Cataclysm should be the new starting place for future discussions.