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a wide range of topics where one country took the other as an example, includingcontributions on the influence of French spiritualism on Conan Doyle, on thecollaboration and rivalry between France and Britain in the study of ancientEgypt, and an interesting essay on the rivalry in the building of stations betweenLondon and Paris. A final, and less interesting, cluster highlights the lives ofsome individuals with an affinity for both France and Britain, such as ThomasCarlyle, the family Barrère and Georgina Weldon.

This book, as a result of its wide range of well-documented contributions, isrecommended reading for both academics and postgraduate students. There are,however, some minor points of criticism. A first point is that the fine balancebetween French and British historians of the first cluster of essays is not as wellmaintained in the following four clusters. In these latter clusters, French histori-ans have provided the majority of contributions and the comparative perspectiveis as a result less pronounced. In order to map the interaction between the trans-national and national contexts a comparative perspective is essential. Further-more, a number of essays in the last four clusters tend to be more descriptive innature, seem to fit less with one another or could equally have been placed in adifferent cluster. Partly as a result of this, the reader’s task to draw conclusionson how models of transfer and exchange exactly worked between France andBritain in the nineteenth century is made more difficult. The volume gives anexhaustive overview of exchanges, but does not offer some clear-cut generalconclusions on the nature of these exchanges. Despite these criticisms, thisvolume definitely provides a stimulating and enjoyable read.Royal Holloway, University of London and Ghent University PIETER FRANÇOIS

The Slave Trade. By Jeremy Black. The Social Affairs Unit. 2006. 160pp. £10.00.This publication is typical of the short, synthetic history books published by

the Social Affairs Unit. A historian takes a broad, controversial theme that hasgathered a place in modern public history, provides sufficient information forthose with no prior detailed understanding of the theme, and then presents anargument that challenges received orthodoxies. The result is often a lively,idiosyncratic probing of accepted positions and a book well suited to the chat-tering classes. Jeremy Black’s The Slave Trade fits these prescriptions rather well.Though no expert on the slave trade, he has read widely on the topic and bringsto bear contextual matters on which he has expertise – notably military historyand European foreign relations – to cast the overall development of the slavetrade in an illuminating light. At one level the book is an interesting briefintroduction to the international slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenthcenturies. In a series of short chapters Black reviews the growth, developmentand abolition of the slave trade and slave-based societies in the Atlantic world;links transatlantic slaving to the slave traffic across the Sahara and the IndianOcean; relates the demand for black Africans to the coerced labour of indige-nous peoples and transplanted bonded servants; and outlines the shifting powerrelations between European states in acquiring slaves. The pace is so fast, andthe space so limited, that no room is available for explaining the medical causesof heavy slave mortality in the Caribbean, for example, or the power relationsfound on tropical plantations.

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The book can also be read at another level, however, combining scholarshipwith polemical drive. Black categorically condemns the immorality of slave trad-ing. Yet he attempts to rescue slavery and the slave trade from those who wishto place most of the moral blame for international slave trafficking on Europeancommercial expansion; from those who compare slavery with the Holocaust orother forms of genocide; and from those demanding reparations from Europeannations for their involvement in slavery. He underscores the fact that Africansand Arabs were as deeply implicated in the supply of slaves as Europeans. Heargues that it is wrong to equate the Atlantic Middle Passage with the Holo-caust or other historical examples of genocide; they were quite different inintent. He thinks that reparations are too narrow and selective in their projectedtargets. The ‘cult of apology’ (p. 132) is, he suggests, really part of the polemicsof modern public history rather than something justified on historical grounds.These conclusions will prove contentious, but they are honestly stated and theydeserve debate. Such debates will need to separate historical facts about theconduct of the slave trade from the collective memory of black suffering – a verydifficult task. This short book will help to remind historians and the educatedpublic of the parameters that should be brought to bear on those debates.Brunel University KENNETH MORGAN

‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery.By J. R. Oldfield. Manchester University Press. 2007. x + 193pp. £14.99.

This is an excellent study of how anti-slavery has been remembered and rep-resented from the era of abolition and emancipation to the recent preparationsfor the bicentennial of abolition. After a useful preliminary discussion of someof the features of historical memory, its functions at local, group and nationallevels and how they may change, Oldfield focuses in the body of the book on bothforms of representation and three chronological phases of commemoration.Initially he traces the story of the composition of Benjamin Robert Haydon’spainting The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840 and its history introducing themestaken up later: the position and valuation of black people in anti-slavery, continuityin local memory, fluctuations in the intensity of national commemoration. Thesecond chapter examines the controversy over the relative significance of Clarksonand Wilberforce in the history of anti-slavery initiated with the publication ofthe Wilberforce sons’ biography of their father in 1838 and their dismissal ofClarkson’s 1808 History as a distortion that slighted their father. Contestationover memory in this and related forms, interwoven with the themes of chapter 1,structure the rest of the book across the three phases of commemoration Oldfieldhas identified. An initial phase, crystallizing in the 1870s, was dominated by adiscourse of anti-slavery as an imperial humanitarian intervention. A nationalisticcelebration of Britain as a centre of Christian civilization followed at the time ofthe centennial celebrations of emancipation in the 1930s but was coming underchallenge. The period since 1983 has manifested an agenda for commemorationincreasingly shaped by the changing character of the nation, the articulation ofAfrican, Caribbean and diasporic perspectives, and the internationalization ofissues of historical representation through UNESCO and other bodies.

The book weaves its themes through examinations of abolitionist monumentsfrom plaques to plinths to water fountains to statues. Until recently the focus on