Atlantic Cataclysm

David Eltis is Professor Emeritus at Emory University and the University of British Columbia. He is a founding member of www.slavevoyages.org, a publicly accessible transatlantic slave trade database. His three sole authored books have won twelve prizes, including the Frederick Douglass Prize.

• 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.

'A tour de force by the world's leading scholar of the slave trade. Atlantic Cataclysm challenges virtually every popular assumption about the transatlantic slave trade and its consequences for Atlantic and global history. David Eltis has demonstrated in stunningly brilliant detail the indispensable value of deep archival research and big databases for documenting the largest forced migration in human history, and for the important insights these data can yield. Drawing upon a deeply learned and truly commanding comparative approach, Eltis has written the definitive analysis of the slave trade in Africans to the New World.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Harvard University