American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865 by Sean M. Kelley (review)

Reviewed by: American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865 by Sean M. Kelley Joshua D. Rothman American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865. By Sean M. Kelley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023. 495 pages. Cloth, ebook. American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade has long been something of a lacuna in the history and historiography of slavery. English slave traders brought most of the captive Africans sold in mainland North America, a fact that American revolutionaries played up even as they often alleged that unreasonable parliamentary policies made them into "slaves" of the British Empire. Indeed, when Thomas Jefferson completed his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included a clause that deflected responsibility for the colonial slave trade onto King George III, and though that clause did not make it into the document's final version, the sentiment lingered.1 Historians may no longer deny American participation in the transatlantic slave trade, but relatively few have taken the time to assess exactly what that participation looked like.2 Particularly in recent years, scholars have instead centered the domestic slave trade in the United States when considering the commerce in human beings, with the roles played by American shippers, merchants, captains, and sailors in the transatlantic trade treated as comparatively insignificant.3 In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley demonstrates that if we think Americans only engaged nominally with the transatlantic slave trade, it is because we have been looking at the wrong things and asking the wrong questions. Americans may not have built, owned, sponsored, or sailed on the majority of the "ships coming in" (2) that delivered roughly four hundred thousand Africans as enslaved people to North America from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. But Americans did play crucial roles in the passage of more than two thousand "ships going out" (2) whose voyages originated in the colonies and the young United States, and End Page 449 brought more than three hundred thousand Africans within the Western Hemisphere. Acting both within and outside the boundaries of the law over the course of more than two hundred years, Americans conducted a trade that, despite being rendered relatively invisible in our historical accounts and our imaginations, was at times integral to the devastating global exchange of goods for people. Kelley begins his story in the 1640s, when a small number of American ships sailed from Massachusetts across the Atlantic to Senegambia. New Englanders saw long-distance trade as a path for developing their economy beyond subsistence farming and a way to pay off their debt, but their early African ventures were "marked by amateurism and improvisation" (21). Although regional merchants and ship owners had acquired some maritime and financial knowledge, capital, and connections to Atlantic trade networks thanks to the burgeoning fishing industry, they had neither any experience trading in Africa nor any trade goods that Africans particularly wanted. Moreover, their voyages were illegal in light of monopolies the British government granted to chartered companies such as the Royal African Company. The voyages from New England to West Africa in the seventeenth century were thus "irregular and small in scale" (34). Some of them delivered small numbers of enslaved people to Caribbean colonies such as Barbados, and Kelley argues that glimpses of more systematic trading structures could be seen by the end of the century. By and large, however, the sporadic journeys of American slavers in this era were complicated, experimental, speculative, and often more trouble than they were worth. New Englanders were not the only American slavers of the era, and slave trade voyages to Madagascar in the late seventeenth century arranged by merchants based in New York were somewhat less haphazard than those originating farther north. Still, they were quasi-legal at most, and they frequently involved risky partnerships with pirates, both of which limited the reliability and sustainability of the networks needed to make the forays functional and profitable. Then, in the eighteenth century and especially in the decades after 1730, American engagement in the transatlantic slave trade expanded substantially. Whereas Americans transported perhaps 4,000 captive Africans across the Atlantic in the...