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Kenneth Morgan, series ed. Robin Law, David Ryden, and John Oldfield, vol. eds. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 1632 pp. Endnotes. Index. 4 vols. £360/$540. Cloth.
For historians of Africa interested in the impact of the Atlantic slave trade there is already a considerable body of primary material available in most major libraries. Besides the many travelers' accounts republished by Frank Cass in the 1960s, we have the invaluable four-volume edition prepared by Elizabeth Donnan seventy years ago, which includes a large number of archival documents in addition to extracts from contemporary books. More recently, Robin Law has published the first two volumes of what eventually will become a four-volume edition of the local correspondence of the Royal African Company's agents on the coast of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. This new publication makes a welcome addition to the existing literature. The texts are on the whole well chosen and representative. Altogether the original texts-facsimiles of contemporary publications-cover about fourteen hundred pages. They are supplemented in each volume by a lengthy introduction and shorter subintroductions to the individual documents (150 pages), endnotes (80 pages) and a thirty-page index to the whole set.
Appropriately, the series begins with Africa itself. Volume 1, focusing upon the operation of the slave...