David Eltis’s new book, Atlantic Cataclysm. Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades (Cambridge University Press, 2025) draws together his distinguished work on the history of slavery and the slave trade. Over the past fifty years, spent largely at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, no one has done more to narrate and analyse, with care and precision, the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere since the mid-fifteenth century.
As Eltis explains in Atlantic Cataclysm, his later work has drawn heavily on new sources of information, notably the databases constructed over the past twenty years and made available at www.slavevoyages.org, a collaboration between several different American universities.[i] This book is his attempt to write the history of the Atlantic slave trade based on this new data and so move interpretations forward. At various points he laments the failure, both in popular discussions of slavery by the mass media and also in the work of many historians, to take account of new findings and their implications for the slave trade as a whole, and also for Britain’s role in ‘the accursed trade’.
Eltis argues that conventional views of the slave trade depend on a mistaken geography. We continue to think that slave-traders set out from north-west Europe, purchased enslaved Africans in West Africa, and conveyed them to North America and the Caribbean. But many slavers set out from ports in the Americas – seventy different locations in fact, from Portland in Maine to Montevideo in Uruguay – sailing to Africa and back in two stages rather than the three we associate with the ‘middle passage’ from northern Europe to Africa, from Africa to the Americas, and then back to Europe. The largest numbers of slaves went to the South Atlantic region – Brazil most notably – rather than to the North Atlantic and Caribbean. And within the Caribbean more slaves went to the Spanish possessions than to British islands or French St. Domingue. There was also a huge and thriving intra-American trade in slaves which moved them around the various slaveholding regions and economies. The effect of these recalculations and revisions is to move the centre of gravity of the slave trade southwards. According to Eltis, “Europe increasingly appears as an appendage to the system rather than its beating heart’, and Britain’s relative role in the slave trade diminishes accordingly.
Eltis shows just how many different people were engaged in the slave trade. This was not a commerce limited to slave captains and African potentates, but involved thousands who worked servicing the trade in all the home ports across the Atlantic region, and thousands more in Africa itself. ‘Typical sales involved one to five captives and many different sellers’. As Eltis argues, Africans were as involved in the different elements of the slave trade as Europeans, and hence ‘much of the current literature does not provide sufficiently for African agency’. The popular image of slave traders dumping ‘cheap goods on gullible African consumers in exchange for human merchandise’ must be revised. Europeans and Africans bargained and traded as equals.
Eltis’s most important points concern the respective roles played by different West European nations in the Atlantic slave trade. The Portuguese were not only the first to export African slaves to the Atlantic islands and Americas but they remained the leading slaver nation throughout these centuries, enslaving the most Africans and driving down the costs of trading across the Atlantic on the shortest route between West Africa and Brazil, which they controlled. What Eltis calls ‘the Portuguese system’ was a consequence of their initiation and early dominance of Atlantic navigation. The Spanish, meanwhile, extracted the most from slave labour in the new world: the gold they sought and exported back to Europe was always a more valuable commodity than the sugar grown on British, French and Dutch islands in the Caribbean. Spain may have had a relatively small role in the enslavement of Africans on the African coast, but they dominated the trade in slaves between the different parts of the Americas. As Eltis concludes, ‘A central result of the new data is to question the old idea of the more capitalist-driven northwest Europeans taking over from the precapitalist Iberians.’ As for Britain, her dominance of the trade was restricted to 1730-1800 during which period British traders carried 1.73 million slaves, though the Portuguese were not far behind with an estimated 1.49 million even in this era.
This leads Eltis to question one of the most insistent but erroneous ideas in our present debates: that British industrialisation depended on the profits of the slave trade and Caribbean slavery.[ii] As Eltis puts it, ‘Iberian dominance in the colonial Americas as indicated by colonial trade figures (including the number of slaves traded) inevitably undermines the argument that the economic development of Western Europe depended on the slave systems of the Americas’. Indeed, he reverses the argument entirely. It was the commercial and industrial development of Britain, France and the Netherlands that allowed them to break into the trade and ‘to establish their own slave systems in the face of Iberian competition.’ Britain’s superior economic development was the cause of its engagement in slavery in the eighteenth century and not the consequence of it. According to Eltis, it is ‘beyond credulity that slavery or the slave trade that supported it could have kick-started [British] economic growth’. Indeed he goes further: ‘the evolution of…all European economies could have been little different if slave colonies had never existed.’
In any case, as Eltis shows, compared to other long-distance Atlantic commodity trades, ‘the slave trade was not highly profitable’, and comprised only a small part of the total product of all European slave-holding nations. The Royal Africa Company in the late 17th century and the South Sea Company in the early 18th century both lost money in human trading.[iii] And one of the most potent arguments used later by the abolitionists in the earliest years of the nineteenth century was that slave trading contributed so little to national revenue and wealth that its cessation would have little effect. Slaves, they argued, would simply be replaced by more lucrative cargoes.[iv]
Eltis begins his great synthesis with an expansive discussion of the context of human slavery over the whole of recorded history. He points to the estimate that in 1804 there were 45 million slaves labouring across the globe, not including all the other types of forced or indentured labour, among them tens of millions of serfs in central and eastern Europe and Russia. Only 3 million of these 45 million were of African descent and living in the Americas, or 6.6% of the total. Of these, about 750,000 were slaves on British islands, or 1.7% of the global population of slaves. As he comments, ‘How very odd that such a small proportion of slaves and their owners that were British…should have triggered an Industrial Revolution.’ The point has been made before, of course, and if one wished to be inventive one might argue, paradoxically, that European states with large slaveholdings had less of an incentive to innovate and experiment with new technologies than states like Britain where overall wealth depended far less on colonial products.
Inevitably, Eltis concludes that slavery was accepted as normal and routine across all continents and civilisations until the late-eighteenth century. Support for the slave trade was ‘widely based…on all the continents involved in it’ and in his stark words, there was ’little difference between buying people and buying commodities such as wheat, whale meat, or other products made accessible by long-distance travel’. It is a difficult but inescapable truth and one understands why so many people find this hard to accept, and one sympathises with them. It is a measure of the distance between our age and the early-modern world. But it cannot be an excuse for attributing blame or for assuming moral superiority over those who came before us and thought and acted differently.
When it comes to his analysis of the movements for the abolition of the trade and emancipation of the slaves, Eltis is surely correct to emphasise the mutual interplay of slave revolts in the Caribbean and the arguments of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. Slave revolts threatened to undermine the whole slave-based economy and allowed abolitionists to make the classic argument of all reformers in that age: in the words of Macaulay, who was himself an abolitionist, in 1832: ‘reform that you may conserve’. A planned transition to a free labour regime would allow landholders to keep their colonial estates and Britain to keep its island possessions. The continuation of slavery risked everything.
But as Eltis shows in his examination of the fate of emancipated slaves across the Americas as a whole, whether the freedpeople were working as paid labourers on sugar estates in the Caribbean or sharecroppers growing cotton on 40 acre lots in the American South after the Civil War, emancipation was not a true liberation. The racism that was used to explain and legitimize the enslavement of Africans in the sixteenth century was still in use in the nineteenth century to prevent the ex-slaves from attaining economic and political equality in post-emancipation societies. Eltis’s generalisation at this point that ‘no person of African descent had the rights of a poor European migrant arriving in New York or Quebec City’ is probably wrong. That may have been the case in the American South circa 1900, but there were states in the North where, in theory and sometimes in practice, African-Americans had equal rights. Yet his general point still stands.
Eltis writes that ‘the new historians of capitalism, the authors of the 1619 project, most scholars of the slave trade, and all the media, frequently distort the history of slavery by greatly exaggerating its economic importance.’ The significance of this conclusion cannot be overstated because so much current public discourse is premised on this exaggeration. Yet to anyone with any experience of working on modern British history Eltis’s conclusion has never been in doubt and confirms previous work published by History Reclaimed.[v] Atlantic Cataclysm is not an easy read, both because of the tragedy of its subject and the technical demands of the vast literature Eltis synthesises. But in a crowded field now inhabited by historians and others with axes to grind, it can be recommended as one of the most thorough and most reliable works on the history of slavery to have been published, ever.
[i] https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about#; https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/about#methodology/introduction/0/en/
[ii] See, for example, Fara Dabhoiwala, ‘Slavery was Foundational to Britain’s Prosperity and Rise to Global Power’, New York Review of Book, 20 Aug. 2020.
[iii] On the South Sea Company’s residual slave trading and its costs, see the recent article ‘The Myth of Church-Sponsored Slavery’, The Critic, 58, June 25, pp. 24-27. See also Professor Richard Dale, ‘Slavery did not benefit Bounty’, Church Times, 22 March 2024: ‘It was widely recognised at the time that slave-trading under the Asiento Contract was likely to be unprofitable – so much so that many proprietors of the South Sea Company opposed taking on the commitment when it was put to the vote.’
[iv] Henry Brougham, Concise Statement of the Question Regarding the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1804).
[v] https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/slavery-capitalism-and-the-industrial-revolution-a-dissent/ ;
