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Comparative/World
arguments sometimes become submerged in a wealth
of empirical detail and, occasionally, rather convoluted
sentences. More positively, the author provides some
effective illustrations, clear maps, and relevant statistical evidence that provides a firm grounding for her
discussion.
On balance, the strengths of this new study of
gender, reproduction, and slavery outweigh the weaknesses. Morgan rightly points to the paucity of existing
studies and her monograph is a welcome addition to
the historiography in the field, providing illuminating
comparative insights and rich detail about the lives of
African slave women in the earlier period of slavery.
She effectively establishes how African women were
found throughout the early Atlantic world "as forced
and free labourers, wives of traders and settlers [and]
traders and travellers in their own right" (p. 1).
Morgan's book also establishes significant connections
between slavery in the British Caribbean and North
American colonies and will certainly be of interest to
researchers and graduate students working in the fields
of early American, Caribbean, African-American, African diaspora, and women's history.
BARBARA BUSH
Sheffield Hallam University
PHILlP GOULD. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 258.
$45.00.
The eighteenth-century crusade against the slave trade
in Britain, British America, and the United States gave
rise to a wealth of antislavery literature. What has
always been surprising is the extent to which writers
concentrated overwhelmingly on the barbarity of the
slave trade rather than on slavery itself. Philip Gould
argues that this concentration on a branch of commerce that Britain was extremely adept at conducting
was not accidental. He insists, following historians
such as Eric Williams and especially David Brion
Davis, that reformers targeted the slave trade because
the slave trade symbolized the kind of commerce that
did not fit in an emerging capitalist order committed to
"free" trade. He suggests that antislavery writers attacked the slave trade in order to question the compatibility of such "inhuman commerce" with enlightened civilization. Gould's book interrogates the
meaning of liberalism and challenges the ideology of
possessive individualism. He emphasizes that sentiment and capitalism were mutually constitutive rather
than sentiment being merely symptomatic of commercial and industrial capitalism.
I doubt that many historians will find this argument
especially novel or arresting. The famous debate between Thomas Haskell and Davis in this journal nearly
twenty years ago made clear that sophisticated thinkers on the subject saw antislavery thought as suffused
by sentiment, and that they never doubted that the
"free" trade advocated by antislavery reform was
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
different from the laissez-faire ideologies of modern
liberal capitalism. Gould claims too much for the
originality of his thesis. It has been some time, moreover, since historians have taken too seriously C. B.
Macpherson's cultural model of "possessive individualism" as telling us very much about the shared
practices and values of an emerging eighteenth-century commercial society.
What Gould does provide, however, is a series of
penetrating and convincing analyses of a range of
literary texts in which we can see writers worrying
about how to reconcile modern but "barbarous" commercial practices within an Enlightenment discourse of
"manners" and "politeness." It was not just Adam
Smith who saw market mechanisms as a way station
toward moral reform that could also lead to moral
degeneration. So, too, did poets like William Cowper
and Phillis Wheatley, dramatists like Susanna Rowson,
black autobiographers like Venture Smith and Olaudah Equiano, and polemicists like Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey. In chapters on American antislavery poetry, Barbary captivity literature, black
Atlantic autobiography, and the 1793-1794 yellow
fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Gould shows how
writers struggled over the relationship of sentiment to
capitalism and to developing racial boundaries. As a
listing of these disparate topics suggest, the chapters
do not hang together all that well, but separately each
is excellent. Gould's treatment of Rowson and Equiano is especially sensitive. He shows that Rowson's
Slaves in Algiers (1794) needs to be read as less about
the formation of national identity than about the
limitations of national identity. Rowson viewed identity as a function of sensibility rather than of genealogy, as mediated through the politics of Algerian
slavery. Gould's reading of Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) is especially ingenious, seeing the work as
juxtaposing the virtue of Equiano's commercial identity (Equiano himself being implicated in slave trading) with the barbarity of the African slave trade.
Here, most clearly, Gould shows how in important
antislavery texts, "sentiment and commerce work symbiotically, to the point where these categories mutually
enhance one another" (p. 136).
Much of the writing in this book is necessarily
difficult; the connections between sentiment and commercial change are not easy to explicate. But readers
will find it useful to persevere, as the textual interpretations of an impressive variety of antislavery literature
illustrate how pervasive was concern over the aesthetics of commerce. It is these textual readings rather
than the larger thesis that impress and make this book
a welcome and important addition to a developing
discourse around what drove people to write quite so
much and in quite so many genres on the iniquities of
the transatlantic slave trade.
TREVOR BURNARD
University of Sussex
APRIL
2005