James Walvin

This book is an amazing history of cane sugar, with a few mentions of beet sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and their effects up to modern times, including massive childhood dental decay in Britain and the U.S. and beyond. Millions of Africans were enslaved and shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean just for this one backbreaking crop so that Europeans could indulge in that sweet taste. The more slaves imported, the lower the price, and the more sugar spread across the globe. And the sugar show more cane crops also spread to many countries, doing great harm to the environment.

Some of the criticisms of other reviewers were valid, but more details would have created a much longer book. As an overview, it was quite informative.

I've been off sugar for ~10 years and don't miss it. But other family members cannot resist. It is like a drug. And I have to sit back and watch their obesity increase every year as they and their peer groups succumb to the Big Food corporations. It takes courage and intention to avoid the barrage of junk food ads and colorful products in the stores. I can do it, but most people cannot, especially the young.

Okay, off my soap box.

This book is highly recommended. show less

The Trader, The Owner, The Slave – Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery

James Walvin has researched and written an excellent book, shining a light into the very dark past, that some people would rather we forget about. At the same time this book is remarkable and is a very gripping read. Besides highlighting these lives, providing an insiders view of the slave trade and its cost, human and financial. What Walvin has also managed to do is alert us to the remarkable contradictions of all show more humans.

Slavery has been an age- old problem that we can see from the Bible, to our current times. What sets this apart is that there was nothing like Atlantic Slavery. In its scope, how far reaching it was and at what cost, and the profits made by so few. This is the story of three individuals whose paths may never have crossed but were all active within the Slave Trade in one form or other during the same time period.

James Newton the author of probably the world’s most recorded hymn ‘Amazing Grace.’ Newton had been many things in his life, but what brings him to this story that he was a slave captain, who knew how to negotiate in Western Africa to purchase the slaves, transport them to the West Indies, to be sold, before transporting the wealth back to Liverpool. Walvin takes you through Newton’s life, even through to his ordination and his evangelical preaching. Even though Newton eventually came out as an abolitionist, he never told the full extent of what he did on those ships. He did look back on those times when he dealt with his human cargo of slaves with brutality with shame and contrition. What he does not ever do is to explain his role in the brutality aboard ship, the floggings, and the use of the thumbscrews. Fortunately for us his ship logs still remain.

Thomas Thistlewood was a slave owner who left the world his very interesting diaries. Thistlewood moved to Jamaica to work on other plantations, and what he learnt there as an overseer would help him when he became an owner in his own right. His diaries record his interactions and work on the plantation, from what he did to what he did to the slaves who disobeyed. He lists the beatings, the summary “justice” and the rape of female slaves. We also learn that he took a common law wife from one of the slaves and had a son by her and took care of her in his will. We learn a lot about the slavers attitude towards the slaves, how they often had sexual relationships with some, got on with some and beat others.

Olaudah Equiano was a slave and died a free man. Between birth and death led many different lives, left an account of his life, which was famous in his lifetime but largely forgotten since. How even as a freed slave life was still dangerous for him, whether in England, the West Indies or in the Americas. How Equiano quickly learnt and became an important cog of where he worked. Eventually earning enough to buy his freedom, own slaves, and eventually write his own autobiography and leave a generous some of money in his will.

The three very different men that emerge from the pages of this book were all shaped by African slavery. While Africa would not have even registered with the majority of Britons at this time, these lives reveal the importance of slavery to the economy in the nineteenth century. All their stories are very different but also show the contradictions in life that we all face. Some face them better than others.

Even with the distance of a new millennia some stains on British history are too bad to try and hide away from. While some try and make excuses for it, try, and tell us it was a different time, it is hard to agree with them. The 1835 Slave Compensation Act, which gave money per slave to former owners, may have been enacted nearly 200 years ago, but the British Taxpayer was still paying back the loans for it until 2015.

It is time we British did a vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working off or facing the past) the Germans are still doing that. But due to British exceptionalism, we still have our heads in the sand and anyone challenging the narrative of things were not that bad are woke.

An excellent book, very readable, and shows Britain in its inglorious past in a different light. show less

A great overview of the Atlantic Slave Trade and its consequences, from a British perspective.

Each chapter deals with a particular topic, which render the understanding of such a complex narrative easier to digest. From the horrors of the crossing of the Atlantic to the campaigns of the abolitionist movement, from the organisation of slave societies to cultural questions (folklore, religion) and, even, the very peculiar experiences of women, here's a highly instructive and vast panorama. show more More, by focusing only on key figures, events, and most famous cases, it goes straight to the point to be a very accessible read.

To tell the history of an institution which lasted more than three centuries, while acknowledging its complexity, must have been far from being easy. James Walvin, though, succeeds here brilliantly. A must-read for anyone interested in the topic. show less

Review of: Atlas of Slavery, by James Walvin
by Stan Prager (3-26-17)

An atlas is typically a go-to reference rather than a cover-to-cover read, but there are rare exceptions, such as the Atlas of Slavery, by James Walvin, which turned out to be so notable for both its maps and accompanying narrative that I carefully read and studied every page. My interests lean decidedly towards the American Civil War as well as the antebellum African-American experience; Walvin’s fine treatment neatly show more dovetailed with each of these. Moreover, the skilled graphical treatment in this work both adds perspective and enhances comprehension on a macro level.
My ongoing complaint with many books of history is a dearth of good maps or sometimes any maps at all. It can be maddening to read about key events in an unfamiliar geography without a suitable visual frame of reference. One way to mitigate this frustration is to assemble your own collection. And I have: I own a podium-sized atlas stand and its one great shelf is mostly stocked with historical atlases, which as a category generously spills over to other adjacencies. The atlas genre, of large and small formats, tends to fall into three categories. The first is the traditional book of reference maps, with little or no accompanying text. The second features maps and an abbreviated, complementary text. The third is an atlas in which the maps and the text are integral to one another. The latter is the case with Atlas of Slavery, a smaller format trade paper volume featuring a highly informative, well-written narrative as well as finely detailed black-and-white maps that serve as an essential foundation to the author’s account.
While Atlas of Slavery sets the stage with an overview of slavery in the ancient world, the focus of the book is on the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the millions of Africans swept up in it, as well as the Europeans who exploited their labor. The author correctly identifies the African slavery made manifest by that trade as entirely distinct from human chattel slavery as it existed elsewhere in time and geography. Slavery for life based solely upon race and color which extended to subsequent generations was something very different from that which preceded it. Most welcome here is both a textual and graphical exploration of the political entities of Africa and how the traditional slavery of Africa and the Arab world was radically transformed by European demand. The racist and the ignorant have been known to feebly defend the institution of African slavery by declaring that: “They sold their own people.” Walvin soundly corrects this flawed assertion by pointing out that “The concept of being an African had no meaning for the people involved. The terms African and Africa were European terms … Africans felt no more uneasy about enslaving other Africans, from different cultures, then European traders felt uneasy when buying Africans on the coast.” [p57] In other words, people from different tribes or different kingdoms on the African continent had as little in common with each other as citizens of England and France had in that same era.
At the same time, the author unflinchingly underscores how the dramatic increase in demand by Europeans fueled a rapid expansion in the aggressive procurement of slaves from wider environs and their subsequent transport to the west coast of Africa for sale. Prior to 1700, gold and other commodities made up the bulk of African exports, before human beings became the dominant currency. This change was primarily driven by the explosive growth of the highly profitable but labor-intensive sugar cultivation in the Americas, where there happened to be a shortage of cheap labor. Not only did the pathogens unleashed in the Columbian Experience decimate indigenous populations in the New World, but the Roman Catholic church had officially proscribed enslaving the natives. At the same time, disease and climate in Africa proved a death trap for Europeans, making sugar cultivation there untenable. The confluence of these factors generated a perfect storm for those helpless victims brutally forced into the holds of slave ships bound for the Middle Passage and destined for an uncertain future in faraway lands where they were often literally worked to death on sugar plantations.
Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus at University of York, has written extensively on slavery and the slave trade and thus brings an expertise to the task often lacking by those who treat slavery on the periphery of related studies. The reward for the reader is a number of insights that probe frequently overlooked aspects of the institution, especially as it later developed in North America. Historians have long noted the bitter resistance of African-Americans in the nineteenth century to schemes that would “colonize” them back to Africa. While their ancestors may have been cruelly stolen from the African continent, these descendants, slave and free, identified with America rather than a foreign land on the other side of the Atlantic. According to Walvin, the origin of this sense of identity can be traced to specific circumstances:

Until the 1720s, the black population in North America grew via imported Africans. Thereafter, it began to increase naturally rather than via the Atlantic slave trade. The consequences of the diminishing importance of the Atlantic slave trade on North America were enormous. Africa and its multitude of cultures receded as a demographic force in the lives of local slaves: there were fewer and fewer Africans in slave communities. This had the effect of inevitably reducing the cultural influence of Africa … [p 100]

Likewise, the author connects the development of slavery in colonial North America to its post-Revolution evolution into the essential building block of the southern cotton plantation economy:

When the American colonies broke away from Britain in 1776, they took with them half a million blacks; by 1810, that had increased to 1.4 million, overwhelmingly in the old South. It was this established American slave population that was to make possible the development of the enslaved cotton revolution of the nineteenth century and the consequent westward movement of slavery from the former colonies to the new cotton frontier. When cotton thrived in the new states of the South and the frontier in the nineteenth century, the new cotton plantations turned for their labour not to Africa but to the slave populations of the old slave systems on the east coast . . . In the process, slavery was thus transformed from a British colonial institution into a critical element in the early growth and expansion of the infant republic. The slavery of British colonial North America gave birth to slavery in the USA. [p107]

Walvin’s often brilliant analyses frequently point to ironies and unintended consequences. One is that while “. . . the forms of slavery that Europeans created in the Americas proved to be among the most hostile and repressive in recorded history . . . [t]he paradox remains that Europe saw the gradual securing of individual rights to ever more people in Europe at the very same time that Europeans expanded and intensified slavery across vast tracts of the Americas.” [p15] Another is that the majority of those ripped away from their homelands and shipped to the Americas as property came via British ships, yet it was the later conscience-driven dedication to abolition in England that eventually not only shut down the Atlantic slave trade but also sparked a multinational movement towards emancipation. [p121-23]
There is a great deal more. In fact, more than enough to encourage others with interest in this topic to find this book and devour it with relish the way I did. Of course, something should also be said of the wealth of superlative maps included here—there are eight-seven of them—all derived from a variety of historical atlases and other sources, which as previously noted are absolutely integral to the narrative. For all of his achievements, Walvin’s otherwise magnificent book is not without a couple of glaring flaws, one of fact and the other of interpretation. The first is his claim that slaves built the pyramids of ancient Egypt, [p16] which historians know was not the case. The other is his contention, repeated more than once, [p110, p124] that the American Civil War was not caused by slavery. In fact, the scholarly consensus is that slavery was indeed the central cause of southern secession and the war that act triggered. Still, there are few such imperfections. Much of this fine book begs for readers seeking a deeper perspective of this unique variation of human chattel slavery that tragically proved to be the very foundation for economic development of the modern western world.

My review of: “Atlas of Slavery,” by James Walvin, is live on my book blog … https://regarp.com/2017/03/26/review-of-atlas-of-slavery-by-james-walvin/

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