Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades

by David Eltis

In this comprehensive work, David Eltis offers a two-thousand-year perspective on the trafficking of people, and boldly intervenes in the expansive discussions about slavery in the last half-century. Using new and underexplored data made available by slavevoyages.org, Eltis offers compelling explanations of why the slave trades began and why they ended, and in the process debunks long-held assumptions, including how bilateral rather than triangular voyages were the norm, and how the Portuguese rather than the British were the leading slave traders. Eltis argues that two-thirds of all enslaved people ended up in the Iberian Americas, where exports were most valuable throughout the slave trade era, and not in the Caribbean or the US. Tracing the mass involvement of people in the slave trade business from all parts of the Atlantic World, Eltis also examines the agency of Africans and their experiences in the aftermath of liberation.

Genres: History, Audiobook

442 pages, Hardcover

Published February 27, 2025

About the author

David Eltis is an Emeritus Professor of History at Emory University, Atlanta and a Research Associate at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Massachusetts and at the University of British Columbia. His publications include Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (with David Richardson, 2010), The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (1999), and Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1989).

Reviews

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this unique and comprehensive new perspective about the transatlantic slave trade and human trafficking, David Eltis draws on new data from slavevoyages.org to argue and explore why the slave trades began and ended while debunking assumptions about the transatlantic slave trade -- for instance, how the Portuguese were the leading slave traders, not the British, and how bilateral, not triangular, trade was the norm -- in this powerful new book. Full of incredible details and data and hard to pull away from, Eltis recenters the transatlantic slave trade on the Iberian Americans, not the Caribbean or the United States, and the agency of Africans and their lives after liberation. An important and powerful read for academics and history readers of all kinds, this book is brilliantly written and totally engaging, largely in part to Eltis’s prose and his contextualization and explanation of this fascinating information. The book’s strength is in the data analysis, which is explained so well that amateur historians can understand it (though perhaps with some difficulty), and the debunking of assumptions around human trafficking is particularly fascinating and immersive. Powerful, uniquely complex, and incredibly well-reasoned, this brilliant new history title is a must-read for all history readers.

Thanks to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for the advance copy.