'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