Gregory E. O’Malley. Final Passages

In this rigorously-argued and well-sourced volume, Gregory E. O’Malley establishes himself as being on the cutting edge of scholarship with regards to the complexities of the transatlantic slave trade. He shows that enslaved people endured much more beyond the Middle Passage during their journey. O’Malley tracks the final sea-born passages experienced by Africans as British slave markets expanded in the eighteenth century, bringing captives from West Africa first to ports like Jamaica or Barbados, there to face transshipment to Virginia, Boston, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cartagena de Indias, or Campeche and Veracruz. He initially focuses on private ventures in African captives to fill under-served markets and then goes on to describe the rise of powerful government-sponsored conglomerates like the Royal African and South Sea Companies in building plantation capitalism in Jamaica and other sites, which also paradoxically led to a boom in smuggling. O’Malley works to track changing concentrations of enslaved people among different regions/”ethnicities” along the African coast, some of which led to the specialized “marketing” of Africans to buyers with different preconceived notions about ethnic groups’ qualities as slaves, but also sometimes helped to foster cultural persistence—as in the well-known case of Senegambian rice cultivators in the Carolina lowcountry. Despite the complexity of the data, O’Malley leads readers methodically (and without excessive bloat) through each of his conclusions to render this a powerful first monograph. For numbers junkies, the author includes an informative Appendix, in which he discusses the method behind each chapter’s calculations and offers estimates on the scale of the intercolonial trade when he knew the available data to be incomplete.

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