THE SLAVE TRADE: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.<i> By Hugh Thomas</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 910 pp., $37.50</i>

The story of the Atlantic slave trade with Africa has remained a gruesome horror of loss and cruelty ever since it groaned to a reluctant halt some 130 years ago. But for a lot of folk in the slaving ports of northern Europe, even in my now very modern city of Bristol, the grim old presence has stayed somewhat closer than that. As a little boy going to school across the Bristol Downs, I had Thomas Clarkson’s alarm bells, rung when the great abolitionist in the 1770s was riding down to seek out sailors who had gone on slaving voyages, still reverberating unforgotten: Would he afterward get out alive, and if he did, would he be allowed to tell his tale?

Across those Downs, today as it was then, you come to the brink of a hill that falls away to the crowded streets below, and this is still called Black Boy Hill in memory of some long-forgotten fugitive. Had that black boy escaped the pelting mob of his pursuers? My nanny was reassuring (for we had nannies in those days), but I could see that she had her doubts. For she also knew that Black Boy Hill leads down directly into the White Ladies Road: and then what?

All this echoes from long ago, and yet the old story of the slaving centuries barely fades. Many have told it, and will again, for it is a story of abysmal pain beyond belief, yet having to be believed. Here we have it in a new version from a well-known conservative Englishman lately ennobled by Margaret Thatcher when prime minister. Hugh Thomas gives it with an admirable care for detail. This seems all the more praiseworthy in that he shows no evident interest in Africa’s history or in Africans; but the slave trade saga nonetheless gets hold of him and will not let him go. And the captured reader, however disgusting the story in itself, is carried along with him.

The bones of the drama tend to get lost in the detail that Thomas capaciously provides. Two dates were crucial. The first came after 1450, when the maritime Portuguese began to deliver Berber nomads, kidnapped along the margins of the western Sahara, to buyers inside Portugal; and the second a little later in 1510, when the Portuguese and Spanish began to export such captives to their new settlers in the Caribbean. But the difference was not in the actual destination. Far more tellingly, the difference was in the condition of the captives. Those sold into Portugal, at the beginning, simply joined the ranks of existing servants in one or other degree of customary servility and were slaves in the old medieval sense: they were “domestic” or “house” slaves in European cultures in which individual freedoms still possessed a limited reach. As the excellent Californian historian S.D. Goitein has explained, medieval house slavery was a “personal service in the widest sense” and one that attracted economic advantage and even social prestige. Such persons could and did become kings and leaders of society if their luck fell that way; and was there not a succession of eight slave kings in India through the 13th century? In short, these Africans sold into Europe by the Portuguese were in no sense chattel slaves.

All this changed completely when slaves seized in Africa began to be shipped to the Americas. Auctioned on arrival to settlers in the Caribbean and later elsewhere, huge numbers of captives were sold into chattel slavery of the most brutal kind. Robbed of their personalities as well as of their persons, these chattels in the brief time they could stay alive were used as mere material objects. Whenever they rebelled against their miseries, they were killed without mercy. Thomas makes all this very clear even while he fails, rather unfortunately as I find it, to explain the crucial difference between chattel slavery and the “domestic” kind. As it was and in any case, the immediate and amazingly high profits to be got from Atlantic ventures stifled all protest in Portugal and Spain. Making money even before 1500, the slave markets across the ocean stayed that way. “Slaves are something that is always valuable,” the chronicler Resende was noting as late as the 1550s, “and will triple your investment.” He was preaching to the well converted. By this time, everyone who was anyone had got himself or herself into the trade, and they took its brutalities for granted. Christian readers might (or might not) become loud in their denunciations of the trade, but it made no difference. The profits spoke for themselves, and early justifications, in any case, soon came to hand. From a harsh slavery in Africa, it was argued by those who had never been there, the captives were merely “transferred” into a mild trans-Atlantic slavery with the blessings of baptism. What more could a Christian conscience want?

And as this trade increasingly governed the attitudes of the Western world (with much of the Eastern world limping along behind), so the self-excusing mythology and gossip crawled with it. These countless cargoes of prisoners, it began to be affirmed, were being taken, mercifully, from a bottomless reservoir of already existing slaves inside Africa itself, and so it must be a work of civilizing merit to persist in this most Christian trade, safeguard its profits and protect it from its critics. And so it was accepted. Not even the heart-rending reports of the British antislavery patrols, which were organized after the Napoleanic Wars, made any dent in that acceptance: The rate of profit continuing to be highly satisfactory with risks comparatively small, greed saw to it that the trade should continue. Naval officers might report with scalding revulsion on the “hellish nurseries” that carried countless children across the Atlantic and on the mortal sufferings of men and women forced to endure this “Middle Passage” across the seas, as Thomas unsparingly and always convincingly shows; but for decade after decade this brought no jot of mercy.

The overall numbers tell this horrific tale in its wastage of life. Just how big was this wastage? “So far as the Atlantic trade is concerned”--not counting, that is, the still large but considerably smaller export of African captives across the Indian Ocean eastward--”it appears reasonable to suggest that in one way or another, before and after embarkation, the trade cost Africa at least fifty million souls,” and, of these, about 12 to 14 millions, from first to last, were landed alive in the Americas. But on better information since 1961, when I first published these guesses, I now think that the overall figure of 50 million is too low. For the killing pressures of slaving raids and ravages on the African mainland did indeed induce a deep demoralization in the culture and society of the victimized peoples; and Professor J.E. Inikori, writing in 1982, is surely right in proposing these killing pressures as a principal cause of collapsing population levels in near-coastal tropical Africa at any rate after about 1700. The captives who were eventually landed alive, however unlikely it must have seemed to them, were indeed the lucky ones.

This is what the evidence combines to show, although Thomas, in a brief statistical appendix, has other figures. He finds that some 11 million captives were “transported,” of whom 11,328,000 were “delivered,” whereas the total number “leaving African ports for trans-Atlantic crossings” was, he thinks, about 13 million. Having myself toiled among these dreadful statistical guesses, I am not surprised at his discrepancies. They do not really matter. For the enduring damage went far beyond these or any other figures. It lay, where it still lies today, in the racist stereotypes that were stamped ever more deeply into Western culture by the trade and its consequences. Color prejudice has been an ancient factor in the attitudes of one set of human beings to another, and strange versions of this prejudice certainly existed from remote times. Even before the slave trade with Africa had taken hold of European minds, the trans-Saharan caravan trade had been circulating fantasies about the distant but otherwise unknown peoples who lived to the south of the great desert in lands not yet visited by Europeans. Reporting in 1447 on the caravan gossip of the great internal oasis of Tuat, a know-all Florentine traveler called Malfante affirmed that these peoples were “in carnal acts like the beasts: the father has knowledge of his daughter, the son of his sister,” and their women “bear up to five at a birth. Nor can it be doubted that they are eaters of human flesh,” and this last accusation, of course, was just what many Africans would soon come to believe of many Europeans.

Recorded in a variety of early memoirs, the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa is full of this kind of mythology, above all of the cannibalism that must occasionally have occurred (as where else not?), and Thomas swallows it with an eager gusto. Of the notorious Jaggas in the 18th century, well enough known in Congolese history as the imbangala, he adds to their hopeless barbarism in that, he says, they were inveterate palm wine drinkers: bad enough, even if palm wine in my experience is far less intoxicating than Scotch whiskey or Welsh gin. Somewhere else he finds that the notable Songhay emperor, Sonni Ali, was “ruthless,” rather as though, surprisingly, other emperors were not; and yet Sonni Ali, by other accounts (above all, non-Muslim accounts), was little given to imperial mayhem. The Moroccan invasion of Songhay in 1591 is represented as a disaster, and yet it can be powerfully argued that the great Songhay defeat at Tondibi was a relief to neighboring peoples whom the Songhay armies had previously subjected. Thomas, in short, has no curiosity for Africa’s history and simply lifts the slave trade from that history as though it had no bearing on the matter. This is now an old-fashioned attitude, even among conservative writers, and compares painfully with the author’s keen and accurate attention to Iberian matters.

However fatal to the demographic and moral well-being of much of Africa, tropical or otherwise, the slave trade remained to the end extremely profitable to its promoters and investors; and so how could it be brought to a close? The answer lies in changing times: partly in the sudden expansion of a European industrialism based on coal and steel, that was independent of slavery though not of sweated labor; and then partly by reason of the rapid development of sugar produced from beets and not from cane and therefore easily producible in nontropical latitudes. With that, and with a few other useful things such as British rivalry with France, the primacy of West Indian profits was undermined and the reign of King Sugar came near its end. Nobody has explained this so well as the eminent and as yet unsurpassed Caribbean historian Eric Williams, here somewhat sneered at by Thomas as by earlier conservative historians.

In his memorable polemic, entitled “Capitalism and Slavery,” Williams showed how “the commercial capitalism of the 18th century developed the wealth of Europe by slavery and monopoly” but in doing this also “helped to create industrial capitalism of the 19th century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery and all its works.”

The antislavery humanitarians deserved every credit, and Williams gave it to them. But without those great economic changes, the humanitarians could no more have succeeded in burying the Atlantic slave trade than, in our own time, the anti-apartheid campaigners could have succeeded in burying apartheid, so rescuing South Africa from its acute racism, without being able to draw on the pressures of financial sanctions applied by American banks and their depositors. When the last oceanic slaving smugglers were harried from the seas, the infamous trade was at last brought to a stop. Now quite a long time ago--but the evil that men do lives after them, and in our modern racism, wherever it is found, we are still having to meet the costs of the slaving centuries.