Customer Reviews

The Diligent: Worlds Of the Slave Trade

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The Individual who has read AFRICA AND AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1400-1800 by John Thornton & THE SLAVE TRADE: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 by Hugh Thomas will likely find THE DILIGENT: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade to be a welcome addition to their reading material while the individual for whom this is a introduction to the subject will likely find the work both stimulating and informative.

Nominally, THE DILIGENT is a history of the 1731 -32 journey of the slave ship THE DILIGENT from the Ile aux Moines near the port of Vannes, in Brittany, France to the Guinea Coast, then to Martinique and back to Vannes. It is, however, much more than that. The reader is treated to a rather informative economic and social history (especially as it relates to the slave trade) of France at the beginning of the 18th century, including the "reforms" of John Law. It is also a brief history of the involvement of the European powers with the native peoples of the Gold Coast, a much more detailed history of Whydah and Dahomey (for the slightly gory origin of the name see Harold Courlander's A TREASURY OF AFRICAN FOLKLORE) and the effects of the slave traders on those States, a brief history of the status and struggles of free blacks under mulatto control in Principe and Sao Tome (focusing on the life of the black Archdeacon Pinto during this period), a study of daily life for both crew and human cargo on a slave ship - especially during the arduous Middle Passage, and a brief look at the struggles and dangers facing slaves and, to a lesser degree, coca and coffee growers in Martinique. The work finishes off by examining the questionable benefits of the various parties (including the financiers, suppliers and the officers of the ship) from the slaving voyage.

This is an excellent work (aside from a couple editing errors which aren't worth mentioning but, going by reviews written elsewhere, may be greatly exaggerated by some future detractor of the work) and should be read by any serious student of slave trade.

Robert Harms took on a wide-ranging, difficult task in writing "The Diligent, A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade". He writes in great detail of the journey of the French ship on its only slave trading voyage from the coast of Brittany to Martinique in the New World. Relying of the shipboard journals of Robert Durand, a young First Lieutenant, Harms gives us an account of the political, economic, and social worlds of the European empires, of the African societies, and the new plantations of the Americas. We read brutal accounts of pirate ships, of crew mutinies, of slave uprisings aboard ships.

Profit was the motive, of course, and when the Diligent returned home to Vannes, a smallish French city with a rising merchant class, the ship owners, the Billy brothers, sued the captain, Pierre Mary, for cheating them on the profits of the voyage. Bad luck, weather, illness, and mismanagement no doubt all played a role in the low profits of the first voyage. The Diligent never made another slave-run into the West Indies.

Written in fairly dry, fairly academic prose, this book will not be a best-seller, but you will find it profitable reading of those harsh times and places not so distantly removed from our own.

Harms adds a valuable contribution to the literature on slavery.
However, he neglects the larger context of slavery in Africa, that being an unbroken history of trading in Black Africans by Islamic arab slave traders who removed as many as 11 million Black Africans from their homes by force between 650 and 1900. This slave trade was fully in place centuries before the Atlantic trade began and continued for centuries after the Atlantic trade was abolished. Its longevity was reinforced by the endorsement of human slavery by Islamic scripture. Saudi
Arabia did not abolish slavery until 1964. For those who insist that Islamic slavery was more benign, please consider the routine practice of castrating all males slaves. Males were routinely conscripted for military service and lost their lives in battle for their masters. Females became life long sexual slaves whose children were not their own. African language and culture was suppressed in Arabia by the practice of castration of men and assimilation of the children of slave women.

As a history of one voyage of one French ship in the 18th century slave trade, this is an easy to read, insightful book. The book is based upon the journal of First Lieutenant Robert Durand, a member of the crew. The journal only surfaced in 1984. The reader will be richly rewarded, not only with insight into an important moment in history, but also into the contemporary academic mind. Consider these two sentences of Mr. Harms in the preface, "Robert Durand's journal tells the story of a great crime. It began with the departure of a converted grain ship from the French city of Vannes on May 31, 1731 and ended with the trial of The Diligent's captain, Pierre Mary, in the Admiralty Court of Vannes in February, 1733." The context makes it clear that Mr. Harms uses the word "crime" in the first sentence to refer to the slave trade. And the second sentence conveys the impression that this is the "crime" for which the ship's captain was put on trial. But as the reader later learns the captain was tried for commiting fraud upon the ship's owner, not for his role in the slave trade which, at that time, was legal everywhere in the world. This sentence and others throughout the book indicate that the author's purpose is not merely to give an account of this particular episode in the slave trade, but also to condemn it with modern moral sensibilities. My only complaint is that a wiser professor would understand that each generation has an infinite capacity to rationalize its own behaviors and customs. Mr. Harms' practice of constantly reassuring us that he does not personally approve of slave trading is of no help to our historical understanding. We don't approve of slave trading either. We all suspect that the world might be better today if slavery had ended about 1000 years earlier than it did. But we would like to know what happened, what those at the time thought about it, and its impact on later times. So long as Mr. Harms keeps his eye on that ball, it is a great book. I suppose that any member of the faculty of a university would have to inject a certain amount of moral condemnation in a book on the slave trade in order to assure continued invitations to cocktail parties. Too bad.

This is the best book on the slave trade I have read. Based on an account written by a French mariner, it traces one ship's sailing from France, to Africa, to the French colonies in America and then back to France.

It places the slave trade in an economic perspepctive while showing the evils of this barbaric trade. The section on the Middle Passage is especially noteworthy.