Atlantic Cataclysm
Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades

A major intervention in traditional interpretations of the Atlantic slave trades, using new and underexplored data, that debunks established narratives.

David Eltis (Author)

9781009518970, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 February 2025

442 pages
23.6 x 16.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.73 kg

'The product of more than thirty years of research, David Eltis has produced a provocative and carefully argued set of findings on the slave trade using new data and reinterpreting older material. It will likely be the starting point for future discussion of the nature and impact of the trade on Africa, the Americas and Europe.' John Thornton, Boston University

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.

Preface
1. Atlantic slave trading and world history
2. The Americas and Atlantic slave trading: the Iberians and the rest
3. Europe and Atlantic slave trading
4. The Portuguese system
5. Africa, Africans, and the slave trade
6. Abolition: metropolitan reservations, peripheral pressure
7. Freedom?
Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]