Christopher’s Blog for Transatlantic History

Review of The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade

Introduction to Transatlantic History

by

Christopher Woodall

10 September 2008

Robert Harms book, The Diligent, is an engaging book that draws the reader into the world of 18th century slave traders. While this book has been taken to task for its scholarly deficits, its value to the study of Transatlantic history is significant. Though many reviews of this work by Harms lament the lack of a strong academic structure¹, in studying The Diligent’s thesis, organization, strengths, weaknesses and importance, we will be able to see how Harms’ effort in narrative and micro-history both adds to and detracts from this book’s contributions to the study of slavery in the Atlantic world.

Harms’ thesis is clearly stated, if a bit muddled, in the book’s preface. In preparing the reader for a work that will focus intensely on individuals (and 1^st lieutenant Robert Durand above all others), Harms is asserting that individuals can get lost when historians label subjects with names like “the Atlantic slave trade”. Indeed, Harms asserts this quite forcefully when, in describing slaving voyages, he states the following:

Those individual voyages have been lumped together by historians under the label “Atlantic slave trade…phrases that can create the impression that is was a monolithic phenomenon with uniform characteristics. A closer look, however, reveals that the slave trader was really a kaleidescope of diverse national and local endeavors that was constantly changing over time.²

This statement, combined with Harms’ express assertion that there was “no overarching “global” context to the voyage [of the Diligent]”³ seem disingenuous since lieutenant Durand’s voyages were constantly shaped by events far from the localities that the Diligent visited. The intimate link between the Oyo kingdom’s depredations against King Agaja’s lands undermine this overemphasis since the regional hostilities were intimately linked to trade with Europe.⁴ Additionally, Harms’ portrayal of the Cape Verdeans places the blame for the failings of the local economy on Portuguese imperial strictures and the eagerness of the locals to trade with non-Portuguese merchants in contravention to prevalent mercantile theory of the time⁵. While none of these points calls into question Harms’ ideas of change and locality, they do seem to indicate that some larger issues were in fact in play during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It is thus in looking at the thesis of The Diligent that the reader can see one of the book’s greatest weak point.

The Diligent’s organization is not as convoluted or difficult to read as some reviews suggest. After taking the reader through the steps that it took to organize and outfit a slaving expedition in chapters one through three, Harms uses a literary technique in telling the rest of the Diligent’s voyage reminiscent of flashback sequences in fiction. For example, after getting the Diligent and the reader from France to Africa, the narrative steps backward in time to look at the history of Whydah and its greatest son, Assou, in order to explain the back story that Durand and the crew found when they arrived at Whydah. This structure, in fact, along with the very personal narratives of real African historical features is a major strength of the book. The general public will find The Dilligent a very readable book while historians can easily access the endnotes for verification of Harms’ source material.⁶

Another of the book’s strengths is that it effectively illustrates the lack of moral outrage of Durand and others involved in the slave trade at the horrors in which they were participating. One of Harms’ statements is particularly illuminating:

What is especially chilling about Robert Durand’s words is their businesslike, matter-of- fact tone…He gave no indication that he felt any sense of shame or moral ambivalence about his mission…Nor was Durand a hardened slave trader. He was only twenty-xis years old, and this was his first trip to Africa.⁷

This focus on the contemporary stoicism in relation to slavery, especially when Europeans of the time held noble Africans in esteem⁸, would be a line of inquiry that would connect tie the book to the greater academic world and perhaps quiet some of the critics of The Diligent. It is examining Durand’s personality, as well as the personalities of real Africans of the time, that Robert Harms finds his stride and engages the reader in both the narrative as well as the history of the book.

One of the most significant contributions that The Diligent makes to history is in interesting the non-academic public in Atlantic slavery thereby challenging historians to write outside of the normal conventions of style and focus. It is also a book that has received many awards including the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize of Yale’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize awarded by the French Colonial Historical Society. This clearly demonstrates that any denunciation of the book as “non-history” should be mediated by the academic recognition that it has garnered. While many books have been written about the slave trade, few have received as much critical and popular praise as Robert Harms’ The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. In asserting the validity of micro-history while gaining critical respect, Harms advances the study of the slave trade in making the face of that “monolithic slave trade” personal and real, whatever other strengths and weaknesses his book may have.

~ by christopheraw on October 13, 2008.