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

First published February 1, 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

[Austin Barselau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades offers a fresh, scholarly reexamination of the evolution and structure of the Atlantic slave trades. David Eltis—Professor of History Emeritus at Emory University and a leading scholar of the slave trades—is also the lead editor of SlaveVoyages.org, an open-access digital history project that compiles records on more than 200,000 people and over 60,000 ship voyages. Eltis argues that scholarship on Atlantic slavery has advanced dramatically in both empirical knowledge and interpretive sophistication, yet “the gap between public awareness of the horrific traffic and what the sources now reveal has tended to widen rather than shrink.” His goal is to use the documentary record assembled in SlaveVoyages to deliver a “radical revision” of enduring misconceptions—both in public history and in parts of the academic literature.

Eltis’s use of extensive archival material allows him to draw detailed conclusions about the major proponents of the trade, the most common routes, the prevalence of bilateral rather than triangular exchange, the relative bargaining power among trading partners, and the broader economic significance of slavery for Europe and the Americas. Many of his central claims run against prevailing historiography. Among his key conclusions are the following:

• Iberian primacy and durability. The Portuguese and Spanish created and sustained the Atlantic slave-trading system and were the last major powers to abandon it. Eltis attributes this dominance to access to New World bullion, global commercial networks, settler connections, and commodity production (including Brazilian tobacco).
• Non-Iberian Europeans as late entrants. Non-Iberian Europeans were “latecomers” and “intruders,” and never matched the breadth of Iberian trading networks or the geographic advantages of Iberian imperial systems.
• Spanish export strength. The most valuable colonies by total exports were Spanish, not British, French, or Dutch; Spanish trade exceeded that of the British Caribbean possessions combined.
• Reassessing slavery’s role in Western European development. Iberian dominance suggests that Western Europe’s economic development did not depend as heavily on the slave trade as some accounts imply.
• “Triangular trade” as a misleading frame. The trade was not primarily triangular: the most robust routes lay in the South Atlantic, with Europe functioning “as an appendage to the system rather than its beating heart.”
• Operational advantages of American-based organization. Using the Americas as an organizational base for slave trading—rather than Europe—meant shorter voyages, reduced mortality from disease, and fewer rebellions.
• Merchant-led, credit-financed activity. State-sponsored charting ventures accounted for only a small fraction of voyages, and nearly all of them ultimately failed; most were conducted by smaller merchants operating through credit and private capital.
• African agency and internal political structure. Europeans exerted limited influence over African decision-making in the trade; Eltis emphasizes political fragmentation and the absence of a pan-African identity as key conditions enabling slave networks to develop within Africa.
• Limits of economic disruption from European imports. Most Africans—especially those distant from coastal ports—were minimally affected by overseas trade and European exports, challenging accounts that emphasize widespread economic dislocation from “cheap and destructive” European goods.

In sum, Atlantic Cataclysm is a deliberately revisionist scholarly history that aims its critique at both popular narratives and strands of the academic literature. Eltis’s command of the archival record and his long engagement with quantitative and documentary evidence lend weight to arguments that re-center Iberian dominance, complicate standard route-and-power narratives, and press readers to reconsider the scale and channels through which the Atlantic slave trades shaped the wider Atlantic world.

[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.

[Papa Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting book, but be prepared for a lot of detail, names and data.