Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Name: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Author: David Eltis and David Richardson
ISBN: 0300185294

by David Eltis and David Richardson

This book encapsulates a huge amount of scholarship on the slave trade and slavery . The writing on slavery and the slave trade is so immense that it’s almost impossible to grasp it as a whole. David Eltis’s book is actually far more than an atlas – it is a compendium of all of the massive studies of slavery that have been made, many of them by Eltis himself, presented as maps, charts, and the flow lines of slave migrations from Africa to America. The cartography is a vivid way of getting hold of what the slave trade was. For that purpose it’s the best book written, and in its dozens of maps the most readable. Eltis and his colleagues in Britain and Canada put together a database tracing every vessel there is a record of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas. The maps track, as far as possible, where the slaves came from, the duration of the journey, the death rate on the voyage, where the slaves ended up and all the characteristics of the trade itself, including the economics. All of this he put in visual terms. If you want to know how many slaves came to Boston in a 10-year period there’s a chart for it. There are maps showing where in Africa the blacks who came to Boston were from and where the slaves from specific places in Africa went. So it’s a combination of statistical description plus visual presentation. It’s a remarkable compilation based on the most comprehensive study of the slave trade ever made. That’s an immense subject. That’s a whole world I can’t begin to go into. Yes I think so. People knew much about the slave trade before, but they never knew about it in such detail. One did not know how the ethnic groups in Africa were recruited and where each of them ended up in the Americas. We did not know the real mortality rates, the sex ratios, the languages and cultures of the slaves. It took a great energetic collaboration for all of that to be understood. That’s what Eltis and his collaborators, among many others, have done.

Recommended by

Bernard Bailyn

"This book encapsulates a huge amount of scholarship on the slave trade and slavery . The writing on slavery and the slave trade is so immense that it’s almost impossible to grasp it as a whole. David Eltis’s book is actually far more than an atlas – it is a compendium of all of the massive studies of slavery that have been made, many of them by Eltis himself, presented as maps, charts, and the flow lines of slave migrations from Africa to America. The cartography is a vivid way of getting hold of what the slave trade was. For that purpose it’s the best book written, and in its dozens of maps the most readable. Eltis and his colleagues in Britain and Canada put together a database tracing every vessel there is a record of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas. The maps track, as far as possible, where the slaves came from, the duration of the journey, the death rate on the voyage, where the slaves ended up and all the characteristics of the trade itself, including the economics. All of this he put in visual terms. If you want to know how many slaves came to Boston in a 10-year period there’s a chart for it. There are maps showing where in Africa the blacks who came to Boston were from and where the slaves from specific places in Africa went. So it’s a combination of statistical description plus visual presentation. It’s a remarkable compilation based on the most comprehensive study of the slave trade ever made. That’s an immense subject. That’s a whole world I can’t begin to go into. Yes I think so. People knew much about the slave trade before, but they never knew about it in such detail. One did not know how the ethnic groups in Africa were recruited and where each of them ended up in the Americas. We did not know the real mortality rates, the sex ratios, the languages and cultures of the slaves. It took a great energetic collaboration for all of that to be understood. That’s what Eltis and his collaborators, among many others, have done."

Atlantic History · fivebooks.com