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A recent crop of books aims at countering the influence of the database. Interestingly, three of them began life as history dissertations at Duke: Stephanie Smallwood's "Saltwater Slavery," Vincent Brown's "The Reaper's Garden," and Alexander Byrd's "Captives and Voyagers." To these I would add Marcus Rediker's "The Slave Ship" and Eric Taylor's "If We Must Die." All of these authors accept the conclusions of the slave trade database and appreciate the immense achievement of the project. But many of them worry that the fixation on numbers pushes the human history of the slave trade into the background. In different ways they are all trying to recover the subjective dimension of the experience. I mention this neither as an endorsement nor a condemnation of these books. They are all very different, and different readers will no doubt respond to them in different ways. And it has to be said many of the scholars closely associated with the database--Klein, Eltis, Postma, et al--have all written important books that take the numbers as a starting point for much broader analyses of the slave trade. Nevertheless, it does strike me as historiographically noteworthy that so many historians are consciously attempting to move beyond the database as a way of understanding the slave trade. James Oakes Ph.D. Program in History CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 Tel. (212) 817 8430 email: joakes@gc.cuny.edu
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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