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A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire

tended to downplay the substantial role that Britain played in the making of the transatlantic slave trade and the dispersal of Africans worldwide. He therefore attempts to cast more light on British involvement by emphasizing the economic factors drove it. The development of plantation economies in North America and the West Indies, built around the cultivation of cash crops like sugar, rice, and tobacco, prompted the need for cheap African labor. The British shipping industry responded to that need by dominating the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That trade stimulated the development not only of the shipping industry, but also of other areas of the British economy such as finance, insurance and manufacturing. Sugar and tobacco, harvested with slave labor, fed a large and hungry market in Britain and helped to define and develop popular tastes. The first chapter of the book discusses early European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Walvin, the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish used the example of Moorish Spain which initially used slaves to work on sugar plantations in the Mediterranean, and the British simply followed the precedent set by the Portuguese and the Dutch. The middle chapters of the book discuss the development of the plantation system in the West Indies and North America, including an interesting chapter on slave culture. The last chapters discuss abolitionism and blacks in Great Britain following emancipation. According to Walvin, the importance of British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was that it “brought the Atlantic system to a degree of economic perfection which profited themselves and their colonies in proportion to the plundering of Africa and the violation of their African captives” (31). This insistence on an economic connection is the book’s main strength. Like similar works, for example, Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade: The Story the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1997), Black Atlantic does not offer new interpretations but instead summarizes the main debates in the study of the transatlantic slave trade. Its strength lies in its popularization of knowledge, which makes the work more accessible to audiences that are less familiar with the literature. Although Walvin makes the case that the British engaged in the transatlantic slave trade for economic purposes, he does not explicate thoroughly enough that “black,” the conception associated with people from Africa, was a result of the transatlantic slave trade. Consequently, he gives the impression to a nonscholarly audience that Africans or “blacks” are, essentially and historically, victims of the slave trade and oppression in general.