Derek G. Handley on James Walvin’s *A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and Origins of Global Power*

James Walvin’s book A World Transformed provides a wide overview of the transatlantic slave trade and of the nations that benefited from it. The scope of this book is massive in covering over 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade and how European countries amassed vast riches from it. Walvin demonstrates how “enslaved African labor created tentacles of economic activity which crept in the distant corners of the world.”[1] He writes that the trade lasted from 1501 until 1867 when the last of the slave ships transported Africans to Cuba.[2] During this period of over 400 years,” “an armada of European and American vessels made an estimated 42,500 voyages and embarked twelve and a half million Africans.”[3] My initial fear in reading any book about the economic activity of the slave trade is that the story and the trauma of the people enslaved would be ignored or minimized. However, Walvin avoids this pitfall by also discussing the inhumanity of the slave trade and its victims.

The book is organized in six parts with a total of eight chapters. Parts one through three trace the origins of the trade along with the locations of people victimized by it. In Part 1 “The Trade,” Walvin argues that although Portugal pioneered the European trade with West Africa, it was the “imperial ambitions” of Spain who focused its interests on Africa and enslaving Africans.[4] He informs the reader how more enslaved Africans came from Angola than any other place on the continent.[5] This section also shows how the system of the slave trade worked. Walvin explains that the combinations sugar and African slavery were the economic drivers of the trade in the Americas from the very beginning in early Portuguese settlements in Brazil through to the last days of slavery in Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century.[6]

In Part two “People and Cargoes,” Walvin spends only two chapters discussing the victims of the slave trade but shares how valuable they were to the wealth-building powers of Europe. Walvin argues that the slave trade not triangular.[7] From Walvin’s analysis, it was clear that European traders wanted primarily African people, and not African goods except when gold was available.[8] Part three “Internal Trades” highlights where the trades took place within in the Americas. For instance, Walvin traces one group of enslaved Angolans who were “scattered between Barbados and South Carolina” over a six-month period after their arrival to the Americas.[9]

Parts four through six focus on the economics of slavery, slave resistance, and the legacy of slavery. In Part four “Managing Slavery,” Walvin uses four chapters to explain the detailed economic and brutal physical management of the enslaved people. One of his more interesting claims is that that he believes that “there is a strong case to be made that the enslaved people of the Americas were better documented than any other comparable historical group.[10] In Part five “Demanding Freedom” Walvin returns to the perspectives of the enslaved persons themselves. But as in Part two, he only uses two chapters to focus on the perspectives of the enslaved people. He uses these two chapters to discuss how enslaved persons protested and resisted the condition in which they found themselves. Walvin makes note of the important role enslaved women played in the slave economies and by their finding their political voice.[11]

In Part six “A World Transformed,” Walvin ends the book with the last three chapters discussing the legacy of the slave trade and how it changed the “human geography of the globe.”[12] But the slave trade also created an abundance of European wealth, which of course benefitted an enormous number of people over time.. In the final chapter of the book, Walvin traces the academic study of slavery and its importance in more recent events including the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Walvin suggests that the events of 2020 were “the global insistence that the West confront its past and take steps to redress the sins of the fathers.”[13] A sentiment that many people certainly agree with.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is that it provides readers who are not familiar with the nuances of the slave trade a greater sense of its breadth and scope of the inhumane enterprise. Walvin highlights both the economic elements and the dehumanizing acts of the slave trade. The reader comes away with a greater understanding of the global strategies and the economic wealth acquired by European empires. But given the scope of the project, it is not able to probe deeply into the individual stories of the people victimized by the trade. However, the book gives the reader a sense of their suffering. Walvin compensates for this as well as other nuances of the slave trade by providing a guide to further reading for the topics surrounding each chapter. However, I would also add to his list Vincent Brown’s Tacky’s Revolt The Story of an Atlantic Slave War about a slave uprising in Jamaica, Rebecca Shumway’s Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which highlights the rise of the Atlantic slave trade along West Africa’s Gold Coast, and Sandra E. Greene’s West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana, which shares the experience of those who experienced slavery.

A World Transformed provides a much-needed explanation of how the transatlantic slave trade operated and the world powers involved. As a valuable synthesis of existing scholarship on the subject, the book is an excellent reference and introductory text for scholars and graduate students whose work intersects with any aspect of the transatlantic slave trade.

[1] Walvin, A World Transformed, xv.

[2] Walvin, A World Transformed, 45.

[3] Walvin, A World Transformed, 45.

[4] Walvin, A World Transformed, 10.

[5] Walvin, A World Transformed, 36.

[6] Walvin, A World Transformed, 43.

[7] Walvin, A World Transformed, 70.

[8] Walvin, A World Transformed, 74.

[9] Walvin, A World Transformed, 106.

[10] Walvin, A World Transformed, 144.

[11] Walvin, A World Transformed, 268-29.

[12] Walvin, A World Transformed, 315.

[13] Walvin, A World Transformed, 335.