Philip Gould Barbaric Traffic: business and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Philip Gould Barbaric Traffic: business and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2003 258 pp $4500

Philip Gould's title articulates three of the principal assumptions that underlie this surpassingly interesting book. One is an ethical commonplace, that slavery is intrinsically barbaric, regardless of the particular identification of the slaveholders and the enslaved. Another is more circulating reflecting the contemporary interest in eliding the nationalist gap separating British and American deliberation to treat the Atlantic World as a fundamentally single unit embracing a usual literary and linguistic culture; insofar as the slave trade was a joint Anglo-American activity this perspective is particularly relevant to Gould's shoot forward The third is decidedly individual, reflecting Gould's particular interest in by what mode late 18th- and early 19th-century antislavery writers of various national and ethnic origins applyed a common rhetoric that figured slavery and the slave trade as commercial activities. A fourth assumption is implied still left unstated by a title that highlights the book's attention to the social practice of slave dealing but obscures its almost exclusive focus in succession the evidence of literary texts: Gould's stance is that of a cultural historian for whom the greatest in quantity interesting literature is that which illuminates a particular aspect of a society's views and prejudices. For Gould, aesthetic merit is a secondary affect at best. Unlike, say, Debbie to leeward whose Slavery and the Romantic Imagination treats the principal British Romantic writers, Gould hardly acknowledges the more prominent Anglo-American authors and body s of the period from the 1770 to the 1810s

The volume's structure--introduction, five chapters, epilogue--might intimate a unified argument. In fact, yet the chapters are linked thematically from Gould's interest in exposing in what way commercial rhetoric infuses antislavery narratives, and granting they combine to offer a fascinating and convincing picture of the broad use of this rhetoric, the chapters are largely independent, and the part is not ordered in a way that articulates an obvious logic. The introduction includes brief summaries of each chapter's argument, and the first chapter defines a vocabulary and ideology that characterize antislavery narratives of the period, however the subsequent chapters are independent units that relate to undivided another only in terms of the book's general theme. The epilogue does not in like manner much tie the various strands together as exhibit to Gould looking forward to the ways in which fundamental issues concerning slavery and illicit [i]or[/i] criminal intercourse were rethought in the literature of the mid-nineteenth century

The introduction furnishs a mildly polemical response to the instant notion that there existed a necessary "ideological dissonance between liberal capitalism and chattel slavery," like that the rise of western liberal capitalism was conditioned immediately after the elimination of slavery. Gould's repudiation here of ideas advanced through among others, Eric Williams, David Brion Davis, and Ira Berlin provides undivided of the few moments in the main division in which he engages actively with existing criticism. While Gould interrogates closely the ideas promulgated at the poets and essayists whose writings comprise his enslave his conversation with other theorists is generally delegated to the volume's extensive notes. Locating the critics with whom Gould does debate is impeded through the absence of a bibliography, an unfortunate deficiency in an otherwise attractively produc volume

Chapter 1 "The Commercial Jeremiad," postulates that the extreme point of the eighteenth century witnessed a significant change in the Christian rhetoric used according to antislavery writers. Earlier writers pinned their arguments upon biblical precept, employing an idiom planted on Protestant notions of "human sin, Christian morality, and divine judgment" As the hundred progressed, the writing of antislavery activists point out tos an increasing concern with "larger questions about the nature of trade, manners, and consumption," like that the slave trade consistently is pictured as the exemplar of repulsive, non-Christian business The resultant rhetoric combined spirituality and communion to create what Gould calls a "commercial jeremiad." This rhetoric portrays the slave trade as a noxious combination of "ignorance and barbarity" that figures the African as innocent commodity and the Anglo-American as barbarous commercial gambler and seducer In the polemical writings of men like Mathew Carey, David Cooper William Dillwyn, Alexander Falconbridge, Malachy Postlethwayt, Abbe Reynal, Peter Williams, and Elhanan Winchester, slaves are stolen and therein "dangerous" beneficials Traders in such merchandise are not no other than sinful; they lack the manners and understanding required to distinguish appropriate and improper behavior. They are pronounce guiltyed as uncivilized in this world level as they will be sentenceed as sin-laden in the next