156 African Studies Review
Anthologizing the Atlantic Slave Trade Literature
Joseph C. Miller
Jeremy Black, ed. Atlantic Slave Trade. Volume 1: Origins–1600. Volume 2: Sev-
enteenth Century. Volume 3: Eighteenth Century. Volume 4: Nineteenth Cen-
tury. Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Introductions with
short bibliographies. Indexes. Vol. 1: xx + 401 pp. $195.00. Vol. 2: xix + 548 pp.
$225.00. Vol. 3: xxii + 535 pp. $225.00. Vol. 4: xxii + 474 pp. $225.00. Cloth.
The ever-prolific Jeremy Black has assembled these four volumes of eighty-
five photo-reproduced articles in English. Ashgate, of course, specializes
in this style of print reader and has produced a vast array of topically orga-
nized collections, supplementing the growing availability of at least some of
the same materials in digital formats. (Readers of this journal will recall that
more than ten years ago Patrick Manning published a similarly formatted
collection centered on Africa, also through Ashgate/Variorum.)1 I have
not confirmed Internet access to the entire collection, but scanning the
sites from which the contents of these volumes were taken suggests that
nearly all may also be downloaded. The essays included date from 1940
(John Blake on the English trade to the Portuguese empire in West Africa)
through 2004 (Guillaume Daudin on profitability in the eighteenth-cen-
tury French trade). Three were published before 1960, seven in the 1960s,
twenty in the 1970s, twenty-four in the 1980s, twenty-two in the 1990s, and
eight after 2000. This is not the place to speculate on various publishers’
marketing strategies aimed at instructors seeking print collections for col-
lege and university classes, but presumably commercial as well as academic
considerations led to the exclusion of the considerable scholarship in
French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish.
Black opens each of the century-defined volumes with a short intro-
ductory essay placing the articles in their historical contexts. In the edi-
tor’s vision, the articles fit into a general conceptual framework focusing
on the challenges that Europeans eventually addressed by sailing captives
across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americ