Start Reading The Diligent: A Voyage Through The Worlds Of The Slave Trade Written And Illustrated By Robert W. Harms Released As Bound Copy

of tangents but interesting In this largely narrative history, Harms uses a ship diary to recreate the slavetrading voyage of the Diligent from France to West Africa to the French Caribbean.
Harms contends that "there was no overarching 'global' context to the voyage, only a series of intersecting local contexts," and so the reader is treated to a series of microhistories of each place and the events that created the current circumstances in the various "worlds" in which the Diligent.
Though at the time he was reacting against worldsystems theory, Harms

is also arguing the the "Atlantic world" is only comprehensible as a geographical category of inquiry if one recognizes that, unlike the imperial structures of the early modern period, the Atlantic world was made up entirely of a periphery.
There was no metropolitan center and therefore to speak of the Atlantic world as a single entity misses its key feature.


I am highly sympathetic to thinking about the Atlantic world in this way as, too often, the Atlantic as a geographical category of inquiry seems to simply be either forced or laid over more disparate histories, leaving its use as an analytical or even geographical category in doubt for some of the work that claims to be Atlantic in scope.
Nevertheless, saying this story has no "overarching global context" somehow "feels" wrong, Also, Harms's focus on localities is slightly ironic in that early modern historians have sought to complicate the "narrow" national narratives of societies along the Atlantic basin through a shift to the broader geographical category of an "Atlantic world," but Harms is seeking to further complicate the Atlantic perspective by returning to an even more narrow geographical focus on localities.
This book was wellwritten history describing the slave trade focusing on the actors both European and African that were facilitating the slave trade.
As the author acknowledges in the afterword there were no source to describe or contextualize the experience of the enslaved people who brought from West Africa to Martinique.
I thought the book was lacking when the author attempted to explain experiences of the enslaved peoples.
He was constrained but constantly just asking questions felt seemed to repetitive where there was no sources.
On specifically the experience of the enslaved peoples, the banality of the reports about their condition or even some ideal management of slavery brought out true horror.


The author is a strong, economic historian and this book is about how black people came to subjugated in a racial caste system to facilitate European cloth, gunpowder, and fine goods to Africa in exchange for Europeans to receive cotton and sugar.
As the author states the slave trade were for the purpose of the European elite to consume sugar.
Once again the horror is laid out in the banal economic reality that was at play inth century commerce.
The Diligent is a microhistory of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, seen through the eyes of First Lieutenant Robert Durand on his voyage aboard a slave ship from Europe to West Africa to the Caribbean and back.
Relying on Durands journal as the essential primary source for this book, and by providing additional context at each stage of the slave ships journey, Harms is able to demonstrate the international nature of the slave trade from a local perspective.
What is also noteworthy about Harms book is that it illustrates how slavery in the eighteenth century Atlantic world was an established, common, and accepted part of society Africans sold other Africans to European traders, freed slaves in the Caribbean went on to own slaves themselves, slave sales were a business and slaves were treated like commodities in every sense of the term, and for some involved in the trade, morality was never a consideration.
For a granular narrative of the slave trade that exposes the reader to the sights, sounds, smells, and grotesque horrors of the slave trade, The Diligent is an excellent resource.
A historical novel about the slave trade, The nitty grade of the business, Chillingly fascinating. I enjoyed reading "The Diligent" more than any other book this semester, which is odd, since it is about the slave trade.
You would think that the subject matter would make it an unpleasant experience, and I can totally understand if some people just want to avoid books on this topic.

But I have already read a decent amount on the slave trade, and this is really very well done.
Essentially, this is a microhistory, Harms has one great source to use as a jumping off point: the diary of an officer on a French slaving voyage of the early eighteenth century.
He can then use that voyage as scaffolding around which to build a history of the “series of intersecting local contexts” that made up the slave trade.
As the ship Diligent is docked in France, loading up with goods, Harms can tell the history of the French economy of the period and the ways French people were beginning to construct rationalizations of slavery.
Then as the ship nears the African coast he can move on to explanations of the mixed race societies of the Canary and Cape Verde islands, before dealing with the complex relations between European traders and African communities on the mainland.
Harms is a historian specializing in Africa, so he brings in a lot of African history, Each stop on the journey involves delving into a new collection of sources, but the book never strays far from its microhistorical center.
One problem that often crops up in microhistories is the question of relevancy does the subject adequately illustrate a larger whole, or is it really more of an outlier But I think it would be difficult to attack Harms in this way.
The voyage of the Diligent was not particularly odd it can serve to illustrate the trade as well as any other.
And it allows the reader to experience the trade in a more immediate and personal way,
And it reads really well, I stopped taking notes after the first couple of chapters and just read the book normally, Harms does a great job trying to get you into the heads of these sailors and the enslaved men and women.
What were they thinking Were the slavers even bothering to justify this to themselves Did the enslaved people understand where they were going, or why Did the people living at each stop on the route ever stop and consider their role in the whole process A lot to ponder in this book.
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