Gregory E. O'Malley has written an important new book on the intercolonial slave trade, a subject that has not received sustained attention from historians. O'Malley's basic thesis is deceptively simple: the intercolonial trade was robust. According to O'Malley, about 300,000 people, or roughly 15 percent of the 2.7 million Africans brought to British American ports, were forced to endure another voyage to a second port in the Americas. This redistribution powerfully shaped enslaved people's experiences and influenced the flow of trade in the Americas.
O'Malley's book is based on a stunning amount of archival research. He compiled a massive database that is modeled on Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://slavevoyages.org). He combed through the Naval Office Shipping Lists—essentially port records—for all British ports in the Caribbean and North America. The result is a dataset for 7,685 individual shipments that carried African captives between ports in the Americas from 1616 to 1818. Most of these shipments went from one British port to another, but there were also shipments to foreign colonies. As O'Malley explains in a substantial appendix, there were gaps and omissions in the records, so he had to supplement the hard data with informed estimates. His explanation seems reasonable but the reader does need to be aware that the numbers provided in the narrative are not as concrete as they might appear. O'Malley uses newspaper accounts and merchant correspondence to supplement the information in the shipping lists and to provide context and explanation for the trade.
The intercolonial slave trade was essentially the equivalent of the capillaries in the human body: it brought African slaves to minor locations in smaller shipments than did the transatlantic trade. For instance, in early 1786, thirty-five slaves from Angola were forced to board the Mars, a small brig. They had recently arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, and now found themselves facing a second ocean voyage. The vessel encountered rough weather, which lengthened the journey and led to the deaths of two female slaves. Eventually the Mars made it to Savannah—where another slave died—and the captain sold his cargo. It was voyages like these that sustained and nourished slavery in British North America. The intercolonial slave trade was crucial for colonies that did not have enough of a labor demand to justify a direct trade with Africa. O'Malley demonstrates that much of the intercolonial trade was haphazard and, at least in its early years, depended on pirates and privateers. As the British colonies grew, so did their demand for labor. The intercolonial trade became more regular and Barbados and Jamaica became entrepôts. O'Malley also describes how British ship captains used the slave trade to gain access to foreign markets, particularly within the Spanish Empire. He estimates that between 1661 and 1715, Barbados and Jamaica exported about 41,000 Africans to foreign colonies.
Readers of this journal might be most interested in O'Malley's argument that the intercolonial trade influenced an imperial policy that slowly pushed away from mercantilism and towards free trade. He argues convincingly that the enormous demand for slaves jump-started British Caribbean free trade. In short, merchants did not want to be fettered by what they saw as excessive restrictions and pushed for open trade. The Free Port Act was, at least to some degree, the result of pressure to get African slaves into foreign markets.
O'Malley is also sensitive to the plight of the Africans who were caught in the middle of this trade. Sources from their perspective are extremely limited, but the author is effective in describing the conditions of the trade and speculating how Africans would have been affected. The intercolonial trade made travel for the captives more painful and complicated. Travel on smaller ships—usually with other types of cargo—made voyages at least as cramped as the Middle Passage. Many Africans were smuggled, which also made for problematic complications. Since a number of the ports were at the end of a long distribution network, slaves bound up in the intercolonial trade probably had longer land journeys than those who were part of the transatlantic trade. O'Malley also presents evidence to show that slaves in the intercolonial trade were less likely to revolt than those in the Middle Passage. The author is careful to show how ethnicity interacted with the intercolonial trade; for example, traders in Barbados and Jamaica tended to transship more captives from the Bights of Benin and Biafra.
Final Passages is a useful book for any scholar who studies colonial British North America. The sheer amount of information makes for a slow read, and the book has limited utility in the classroom. The author might have better served readers by making his narrative suppler. But for those individuals who persevere, the book is rewarding.
