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144 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. FEBRUARY 2004 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, FEBRUARY 2004