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Reviews of Books and Films
of British and Cuban indenture systems. David
Northrup examines indentured labor in the French
Caribbean, with particular emphasis on the relationship between freedom and indentured migrations.
Given the coercive nature of indentured labor systems,
many have likened it to slavery, and critics of these
systems in the nineteenth century insisted that indentured labor recruitment was nothing more than the
slave trade in disguise. Northrup begs to differ, stressing the need to take into account different notions of
freedom to encompass not only the views of Europeans
but definitions of individuals who were indentured as
well.
Colin Forster looks at another form of coerced
migration, comparing transportation of convicts from
France and Britain to their colonies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. He draws interesting
parallels between British and French transportation,
concluding that the French system, modeled on that of
Australia, was a failure. The chapters by Richard
Hellie and David Moon look at migration in Russia
during different periods of time. Hellieexamines the
impact of the empire on the migration of serfs and
peasants, looking at the relationship between the
growth of the Russian empire and migration, while
Moon explores the connection between the end of
forced labor systems and the increase in peasant
migration.
One criticism, which clearly reflects the bias of this
reviewer, is that in a volume on global migration,
except for the slave trade, little attention was paid to
migration in the African diaspora. Although Eltis
notes the possibility of return available to migrants and
some of the chapters refer to it tangentially, no chapter
dealt specifically with this theme. Sierra Leone and
Liberia, mentioned briefly by Eltis, are excellent case
studies for examining free and coerced migration,
given that those who migrated were at various times
both free and coerced migrants. Since the theme of
emancipation was central to many of the essays, a look
at reverse migrations and the meaning of freedom that
was often attached to them might have been warranted.
NEMATA BLYDEN
George Washington University
ROBERT HARMS. The Diligent: A Voyage through the
Worlds of the Slave Trade. New York: Basic Books.
2002. Pp. xxx, 466. $30.00.
By the 1730s, France had long since emerged as one of
the leading European nations involved in transporting
captive Africans to colonies in the Americas, where
they provided enslaved labor for the production of
colonial goods. One regional destination of the slave
traders was the Caribbean, where the island of Martinique was a valuable French sugar colony. Ultimately, the French slave trade led to the creation of
strong transatlantic links among France, the Atlantic
coasts of Africa, and France's colonies in the Ameri-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
cas, three broad sets of worlds. Robert Harms offers a
probing contextualization of the French slave trade of
the early eighteenth century by exploring the interconnected worlds of the Atlantic basin as they were
reflected in the trading voyage of a French slave ship,
the Diligent, in 1731-1732. Hundreds of slave trading
ships belonging to Portuguese, English, Dutch, and
French investors crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the
Atlantic African coasts to the plantation colonies of
the Americas by the 1730s, so the voyage of the
Diligent, a converted grain ship, although unique in
some ways, also reflects much about Atlantic slave
trading in general at this time. The volume also throws
much light on the numerous interconnected segments
of a complete slaving voyage.
This ambitious book was prepared with the general
reader in mind. Harms relies heavily on a journal of
the voyage of the Diligent from the small Atlantic
French port of Vannes, not far from the major slave
trading port of Nantes, to the West African coast and
then on to Martinique and back to Vannes. The
journal (113 pages of text and eighty-one drawings or
sketches) was kept by twenty-six-year-old Robert Durand, first lieutenant of the Diligent, who was making
his first voyage to Africa, Readers will be impressed by
the breadth of research and the myriad questions that
Harms has tried to answer sticking close to the journal's contents but often-appropriately-filling in
missing information. Harms is perhaps at his best when
he fleshes out contexts from slight references. In such
an undertaking, he faced difficulties beyond those
normally related to the publication of annotated documents, including accounts of slave trading voyages.
There was also the challenge of making the complexities of the worlds of slave trading accessible to the
general reader.
While Harms does achieve much success at historical contextualization and readability, the labor that
went into the former sometimes seems to yield so
much information that the Diligent, its crew, its mission, and the unfolding voyage become obscured. A
good example occurs in the several chapters about
conditions on the African coast, particularly at Whydah, Assou, and Jakin, and at the Atlantic islands of
Principe and Sao Thome off the coast, where the
Diligent stopped or traded. The discussion of political,
military, and commercial relations in these areas during the 1720s and up to the arrival of the slave ship
throws considerable light on how these relations were
shaped by the European demand for slaves, increasing
opportunities particularly through warfare for the sale
of captives. It also illuminates the significance of the
immediate circumstances that led to the captivity and
enslavement of thousands of Africans in the Americas.
What role did such circumstances play in the adjustment of the African captive to colonial enslavement?
Enslaved victims of the Atlantic slave trade should be
considered first as displaced Africans whose particular
backgrounds can greatly illuminate both the slave
trade and colonial slavery.
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Comparative/World
The Diligent delivered 256 African captives to Martinique; nine captives died during the Atlantic crossing, as did four of the thirty-seven crew members of the
ship. However, the voyage did not prove to be the
success that its outfitters in Vannes, the brothers
Guillaume and Francois Billy and Mr. La Croix, had
anticipated. In his stirring reconstruction of the failed
voyage of the Diligent, Harms has succeeded in revealing "the various 'worlds' through which it passed and
the various local interests that conditioned its impact
and outcome" (p. xx). That, in the end, is the book's
most striking achievement: connecting the most important elements of the worlds of Europe, the African
coast, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Americas to offer a
broad-ranging and illuminating account of the Atlantic
slave trade.
DAVID BARRY GASPAR
Duke University
SELWYN H. H. CARRINGTON. The Sugar Industry and the
Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810. Foreword by
COLIN PALMER. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2002. Pp. xxii, 362. $59.95.
In his foreword to Selwyn H. H. Carrington's exhaustively researched book, Colin Palmer heralds it as
"likely to be the most important work on the economic
history of the Caribbean and the relationship of the
state of the island economies to abolition and emancipation since Eric Williams published Capitalism and
Slavery in 1944" (pp. xvi-xvii). Both the strengths and
the limitations of Carrington's study are engendered
by this lineage, particularly by its core "economic
decline thesis," developed by the eminent Caribbean
historian Lowell Ragatz in 1928, linked by Williams to
the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade, and
rejected ever since by those North Atlantic historians
who have preferred a philanthropic and largely metropolitan genealogy for slave trade abolition. Although
Carrington himself does not always pursue the wideranging possibilities that his data tantalizingly suggest,
his book may well help to outline new plots and recast
the dramatis personae for future studies of empire,
slavery, and the political economies of the Atlantic
world.
Carrington's extensive research in colonial archives
as well as in plantation accounts and owners' and
managers' personal papers in both the Caribbean and
Britain has produced statistical data on an array of
questions relating to the condition of plantations and
the sugar economies in the British Caribbean between
1775 and 1807. They persuasively demonstrate what
Williams had proposed in 1944: that the American
Revolution disastrously disrupted the proscribed but
vigorous intercolonial trade that sustained (with both
supplies and markets) the British Caribbean sugar
industry, and that in strictly enforcing the Navigation
Acts after the revolution, the Sheffield ministry effectively destroyed the Caribbean economies dependent
on sugar production and trade through higher costs
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
145
(for supplies and shipping) and taxes on cash-strapped
and debt-ridden producers ill equipped to cope with
the new conditions.
Carrington's data show how the subsequent crises
affected not only plantation owners and merchants
(the usual suspects in studies of the West Indian sugar
industry and abolition) but also the other residents of
the sugar colonies, enslaved and free, whose diets, life
expectancies, fertility rates, work, and welfare were
intimately affected by the costs and accessibility of
food, material, shipping, and markets. Chapters on
"New Management Techniques and Planter Reforms"
and "Hired Slave Labour" show the range of strategies
plantation owners and managers, colonial assemblies
and governors adopted to deal with these conditions
and with the higher slave morbidity and mortality rates
precipitated by the war and exacerbated by the peace.
They also demonstrate the extent and variety of conflict within plantations and colonies, among colonies,
and between the different colonies and the metropole
over management of the plantation economy and of
the enslaved labor on which it was based.
Indeed, a major strength of the study lies in its
abundant illustration of the heterogeneity of the West
Indian colonies. Carrington's data suggest that both
Colonial Office contemporaries and historians who
have relied. primarily on the records they produced
consistently generalized about the islands on the basis
of the most influential planters and prolific commentators on Barbados and Jamaica, themselves the earliest and biggest of the West Indian sugar producers,
respectively. In so doing, these informants and sources
may have (by extension) obscured the wide variety of
local conditions and resources that shaped colonial
West Indians' responses to both British colonial policies and international developments like the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Here, Carrington's focus on the decline debate overshadows
other questions that may be more significant in the
long run not only to the historiographies on abolition
of the British slave trade (and, indeed,of slavery a
quarter-century later) but also to the study of the
complex political economies of empire and the Atlantic world.
For example, given Carrington's evidence about the
acknowledged significance of the American trade, to
what extent did fear of slave insurrection and piracy
incline West Indian sugar producers toward the empire and its naval might through the end of the
American War for Independence? To what extent did
the Haitian Revolution contribute to the abolition of
the British trade in enslaved Africans? Given the
production and commercial conditions Carrington's
data present, what inspired investors and the Colonial
Office to invest in expanding sugar cultivation in
Trinidad and Demerara, acquired from the French in
1797? While Carrington does not address these questions directly, his book makes an invaluable contribution to a number of fields, not only in the data it
presents but also in the future research that the study,
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