The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 is a book by Toby Green that examines conditions in Iberia and West Africa in the 14 th and 15 th centuries that set the stage for the subsequent complex interactions between Europeans and Africans. Despite the title, the book mostly focuses on 1460 to 1589, when Cape Verde Islands hosted most of the trade. The book will interest Atlantic explorers and the general public curious about European expansion and maritime trade (Shumway 731). However, it may not be the most accurate predictor of the subsequent historical events. Green thoroughly analyzes Cape Verde as becoming a place where European colonizers shipped, traded, and used enslaved Africans for agricultural cultivation. He then portrays the settlers from Iberia, mostly New Christian Jews, arguing that their prior exposure to violence and exclusion in Europe influenced how they based a new society on slavery and the slave trade in the new location. The narrative then compares the African situation with other slave trades, including Islamic slave-owners engaged in the trans-Saharan trade, Mandinka diaspora, and early slave trade from Upper Guinea by Portuguese. Drawing on archival sources in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, most of the narrative focuses almost exclusively on coastal and island locations of the Iberian trade. Additionally, inland Africa and places in Europe and the Americas connected to Cape Verde by sea trade are occasionally mentioned. Green covers the earliest European maritime activity and settlement phase in the Cape Verde Islands and the West African coast between the Senegal River and Sierra Leone. The last part of the narrative states that colonizers then used the slave trade experience in West Africa in the Americas to suppress the Native American population.
The author’s overarching aim in comparing worldwide slave trades is to state that many of the historical numbers have been underestimated. However, this argument does not address a still highly uncertain number of enslaved Africans taken out on slave ships, and thus the quantitative methods to estimate the volume of trade will likely refute this interpretation. Moreover, Greene rejects that African gold was more important than slaves to the first generations of European traders in Africa, a generally supported historical view (Shumway 730). Lastly, Green fails to see the global picture: for instance, the Upper Guinea slave trade before 1589 represents only 1-2 % of the total slave trade. Greene’s desire to ‘redefine’ the entire transatlantic slave trade and emphasize the dominant role of Cape Verde and Upper Guinea discredits the extant historical work of on the early slave trade from West-Central Africa. Furthermore, the exaggerated claim about Atlantic colonization impacted by the African slave trade habits calls for additional analysis. While the narrative certainly contributes to a historical understanding of the Atlantic world formation, it doubtfully advances one’s understanding of later world histories, such as the colonization of Africa and economic globalization (Shumway 730). Moreover, Green claims that historians have failed to appreciate the impact of the extermination of the Native American population on the subsequent forced migration of Africans to the Americas. Such a claim is untrue – there is prevailing acknowledged information on America’s labor shortage and its’ impact of increased colonists’ demand for slaves in public education (Shumway 730). Overall, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 contributes to the historical understanding of the beginning of the European slave trade in Africa and places the Cape Verde Islands at the center of its history.