Enfilade

New Book | Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Posted in books by Editor on November 13, 2026

With the first edition having appeared in 2010, the second edition was released earlier this year:

David Eltis, David Richardson, and Philip Misevich, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300278552, $65. Foreword by Toyin Falola and David Brion Davis, afterword David Blight. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

A monumental cartographic history of the African slave trade, updated and expanded in a new edition.

In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics. In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries. With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages (www.slavevoyages.org), with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.

David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University. His prizewinning books include The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
David Richardson (1946–2023) was the director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. His final book was Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition.
Philip Misevich is associate professor of history at St. John’s University. He is the author of Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s.

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