David Eltis’s Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades is a data‑driven reinterpretation of the Atlantic slave trades that challenges many entrenched narratives about slavery’s place in global and especially Western economic history.abebooks+1
Eltis offers a two‑millennia perspective on human trafficking, insisting that the Atlantic slave trade is one episode in a much longer, global history of enslavement rather than a unique aberration. He uses three large databases from slavevoyages.org (transatlantic, intra‑American, and individual‑level data) to reconstruct patterns of volume, geography, profitability, and participation. Over seven chapters plus preface and conclusion, he marshals this material into at least ten key theses about who traded, who profited, how the system worked, and why it ended.cambridge+1
A central target is the “New History of Capitalism” thesis that Atlantic slavery and the slave trade were decisive drivers of northwestern Europe’s industrial transformation and U.S. capitalism. By contrast, Eltis argues that Iberian powers dominated the trade, that profits were not unusually high compared with other commerce, and that participation was widely dispersed rather than capital‑concentrating.abebooks+1
Continuity of slavery in human history
Eltis situates the Atlantic system within an extremely long history of enslavement, from prehistoric hominin interactions to contemporary forced labor, arguing that virtually every person today has both enslaved and enslaver ancestors. This scale makes it implausible, he contends, that slavery “caused” industrialization once and nowhere else.cambridge
Iberian centrality and bilateral trade
The book shows that Portuguese and Spanish traders, not British or French, dominated the transatlantic trade in volume, profitability, and institutional sophistication. Eltis also contends that bilateral rather than textbook “triangular” voyages were the norm, with non‑slave goods comprising the bulk of Euro‑African trade and terms of trade often favoring African sellers.abebooks+1
Profitability and capital dispersion
Slaving was generally no more profitable than other commercial activities and sometimes less, undermining claims that it uniquely fuelled capital accumulation in northwestern Europe. Participation was broad: investors ranged from grandees to clerks and sailors, voyages sailed from 96 European ports, and on the African side most transactions involved very small lots of enslaved people.cambridge
Demography and global scale of slavery
Contrary to a common impression, Africans and people of African descent were not the majority of the world’s enslaved before the nineteenth century; Eltis estimates they formed about a quarter of the global enslaved population around 1800, with New World slaves only about 6 million of an estimated 45 million total. He further suggests that for much of two millennia Africans were no more likely than others to be enslaved and that the Atlantic trade may not have reduced Africa’s population but rather siphoned off “surplus” in a way that averted a Malthusian trap.cambridge
Abolition, coerced labor, and moral change
Eltis embeds abolition within a broader post‑Enlightenment move against involuntary statuses and physical cruelty (serfdom, debt imprisonment, judicial torture, animal cruelty). He emphasizes that abolition of the Atlantic trade led to substitution into other coercive regimes (indentured labor from India and China, Indian Ocean slaving) and did not end oppression of people of African descent in the Americas.cambridge
The book directly intervenes in current debates over slavery’s role in capitalism and national economic development, challenging influential narratives that tightly link the Atlantic trade to the rise of Britain, the Netherlands, France, and the United States. It also reshapes discussions of global inequality and racialized slavery by stressing Iberian dominance, African agency in trade structures, and the ubiquity of slavery outside the Atlantic world.abebooks+1
For contemporary public history and education, Atlantic Cataclysm encourages a more comparative, less Euro‑ or U.S.‑centric framing, and pushes readers to distinguish between the moral enormity of slavery and claims about its macroeconomic effects. Its use of open databases also models how large‑scale quantitative evidence can revise interpretive orthodoxies in the humanities.cambridge
Deep empirical base: The book rests on near‑population databases of voyages and individuals, carefully contextualized with secondary literature and visual sources, yielding a dense, quantitative reconstruction of the trade.abebooks+1
Revisionary power: Eltis compellingly overturns several popular assumptions, including British centrality, triangular‑trade normativity, and the idea that slave trading was a uniquely high‑return sector.abebooks+1
Conceptual reframing: By embedding Atlantic slavery in a long global history of coerced labor and in a broader wave of anti‑violence reforms, he complicates teleological narratives of Western moral or economic “exceptionalism.”cambridge
Limits of quantification: Some interpretations—especially those using artwork and analogies such as Africa avoiding a “Malthusian trap”—are more speculative than the voyage data and may outrun the evidence.cambridge
Risk of misreading “relativization”: Emphasizing that Africans were a minority of the world’s enslaved and that the Atlantic trade may not have reduced African population can be misappropriated to minimize the distinctiveness of racial slavery in the Americas, even though the book does not endorse such minimization.cambridge
Underplaying cultural‑political causality: While the critique of NHC’s strong economic claims is persuasive, some readers may find that Eltis pays less attention to slavery’s indirect, institutional, or ideological roles in Atlantic capitalism than to direct profit calculations.cambridge
Overall, Atlantic Cataclysm is a methodologically rigorous, provocatively revisionist study that is likely to become a central reference point in scholarship on the Atlantic slave trades and their place in global history.abebooks+1