The Slave Trade Killed More People

The transatlantic slave trade was an enormous and protracted crime. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century; approximately 1.8 million died during the Middle Passage; an unknowable but very large number died in the African capture-and-march phase before embarkation; the lives of the survivors and their descendants were marked by intergenerational chattel slavery, with mortality rates and conditions that varied by region and period but were on the whole brutal. The full death toll, broadly construed, is in the order of several million directly attributable to the trade itself, plus the many millions whose lives were curtailed within the slavery system itself. The proper scholarship treats the slave trade as one of the great crimes of modern history. The denier argument is not about whether the slave trade was a crime (it was) or whether its scale was vast (it was). The argument is about what its existence implies for the moral attention given to the Holocaust. The implication is that the Holocaust has been over-attended at the expense of the slave trade, with the further suggestion that this disproportion is itself evidence of a Jewish-controlled cultural agenda. Neither claim survives examination.

The two crimes have different historical contours

The slave trade was a transatlantic economic system that operated for roughly four centuries (approximately 1450 to 1867 for the trade itself; chattel slavery in the Americas continued until 1888 in Brazil, the last major jurisdiction to abolish it). It was the work of multiple European, African and American actors over many generations, with no single moment of decision and no single moment of cessation. Its goal was the extraction of forced labour for plantation and mining economies; the killing was a by-product of the conditions, not the operation’s purpose. Where the trade did kill, it killed through the deliberate calibration of conditions (overcrowded ships, inadequate food, appalling sanitary conditions, brutal punishment regimes), in the same general structural sense in which the Nazi labour camps killed through working-to-death. The deaths were anticipated and accepted, but the deaths were not the product the system was designed to produce.

The Holocaust was a six-year operation aimed at the deliberate elimination of the Jews of Europe. Its goal was the killing itself; the labour use of some prisoners was secondary; the operation continued and accelerated as it became clear that Germany would lose the war and could derive no further military or economic benefit from the killing. The structure was different from the slave trade in this central respect: killing was the goal, not a by-product of an economic system.

The two crimes can be morally compared in various ways, and historians have done so. The standard comparative scholarship on slavery and the Holocaust includes Yehuda Bauer’s Rethinking the Holocaust (2001), which addresses the question, and the body of work by historians of slavery (David Eltis, Marcus Rediker, Stephanie Smallwood, Trevor Burnard) that has rebuilt the scholarship of the slave trade since the 1970s. The proper comparative work treats both crimes seriously, identifies their structural differences, and does not require either to be downplayed in order to recognise the other. The denier move is not the proper comparison; it is the rhetorical use of one crime to diminish the recognition of the other.

The “moral attention” question

The deniers’ specific claim is that the Holocaust has received disproportionate moral attention compared to the slave trade. This is empirically contested. The historical scholarship of slavery has, particularly since the 1960s, been a major area of historical research, with multi-decade work by African American historians, African historians and a wide international scholarly community. The institutional commemoration of slavery includes the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington (opened 2016), the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the major archive at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the Whitney Plantation museum in Louisiana, the slave-trade memorials in Bordeaux and Nantes, and many others. The moral attention given to slavery in the modern public sphere is substantial; arguing that it is dwarfed by Holocaust memorialisation is to ignore most of the relevant institutional record.

It is also true that Holocaust memorialisation has institutional resources, museum networks and political prominence that the slave trade memorialisation has reached more recently and to a different scale. This reflects the recency of the Holocaust (within living memory until very recently), the wealth and political position of the descendants of the affected community in the West, and the fact that the operation took place in the heart of Europe and was perpetrated by a state with which the West has had to come to terms. None of these features is a reason to diminish either the Holocaust’s memorialisation or the slave trade’s. The proper response is to expand the recognition of slavery, which has been happening, rather than to contract the recognition of the Holocaust.

The implicit further claim

Some versions of the denier argument include the implicit further claim that the disproportion in attention reflects a Jewish-controlled cultural agenda. This is the antisemitic conspiracy theory that runs through several of the leaves on this section. The claim that Jews control the media, the academy, or the cultural memorialisation industry is the standard antisemitic libel restated in modern form; it is not a serious argument and the empirical scholarship of cultural production does not support it. Black scholars, museums and political activists have built the modern memorialisation of slavery; Jewish scholars, museums and political activists have built the modern memorialisation of the Holocaust; the two communities have generally supported each other’s work and have repeatedly been allied in civil rights and historical memory campaigns since the 1950s. The deniers’ attempt to weaponise the slave trade against the Holocaust is a manoeuvre that the actual descendants of the slave trade have, in the main, not endorsed.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses one historical crime as a rhetorical instrument against the recognition of another. The two crimes deserve recognition on their own terms and in their own dimensions. The slave trade is among the great crimes of modernity and warrants memorialisation, scholarship and continued examination; this is not in any tension with the recognition of the Holocaust as a different kind of crime warranting its own memorialisation. The denier move is to set the two against each other, with the implicit suggestion that recognition of one comes at the expense of the other. The suggestion is empirically false (recognition of slavery has expanded rapidly in recent decades, alongside continued recognition of the Holocaust) and morally incoherent (the recognition of one crime does not consume the moral resources available to recognise others).

What was the structure of the slave trade compared with the structure of the Holocaust? Where is each commemorated? On what comparison are they to be measured against each other?

---

Sources

• David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press, 2010, with the standard quantitative accounting
• Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, Viking, 2007
• Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Harvard University Press, 2007
• Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World, University of North Carolina Press, 2004
• Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440 to 1870, Picador, 1997
• Slave Voyages database, https://www.slavevoyages.org, the comprehensive academic compilation of transatlantic slave voyage records
• Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, on the comparative dimensions of genocide
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu, with its slavery galleries
• International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/international-slavery-museum
• Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948
• Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Basic Books, 2014