ABSTRACT
In the preface to his recent survey of the transtlantic slave trade, Herbert Klein remarks on a curious paradox: in spite of the obvious importance of the transatlantic slave trade in world history, it 'remained one of the least studied areas in modern Western historiography until the past quarter century.'1 According to Klein, two factors have given rise to this paradox: the reluctance to deal with a morally difficult problem having so close an association with European imperialism, and a lack of methodological tools to properly analyse the complex and massive quantitative data available to historians. Barry Unsworth, in a review of Philippa Gregory's 1995 novel of the British slave trade from the port of Bristol, A Respectable Trade, makes a similar point about imaginative writing: 'Considering the impact of this terrible traffic between the Old World and the New, not much British fiction has been devoted to it.' Unsworth explains this state of affairs by evoking the conflict between the sheer enormity of the transatlantic slave trade and 'the natural ground for fiction, [which] lies in individual lives, specific involvements and relationships'. Unsworth proposes several solutions to this dilemma. He advocates transforming the transatlantic slave trade by making it symbolic, situating the trade in a contemporary context, or demonstrating a continuing pattern of man's exploitation and oppression of man by making the trade itself into a protagonist.2 Unsworth reproaches Gregory for making the transatlantic slave trade a mere device for precipitating action instead of a protagonist.
