There are some themes in the study of history that must never be forgotten. The Atlantic slave trade is one of those that require consistent efforts from the part of historians and history teachers to keep the discussion alive. It is thus a stimulating event to have another recently published book that manages to shed light on new angles of a theme that has rightfully received a large amount of attention. Joseph Dorsey's Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition is also particularly interesting because it addresses the subject during one of its least documented periods, the nineteenth century, and in one of the less studied Caribbean regions, Puerto Rico. The “Age of Abolition” in Puerto Rico, states Dorsey in his thoughtful conclusions, was made out of less enlightened contents than its name suggests.

Based mainly on diplomatic evidence, Dorsey undertook the task of presenting a detailed account of slave traffic after it was internationally abolished and became a clandestine activity. He introduces a much more nuanced version than the diplomatic saga in Arturo Morales Carrión's classic work (Auge y decadencia de la trata negrera en Puerto Rico (1820–1860). Río Piedras: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe–Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1978). The story is presented by decades, from the 1820s through the 40s and 50s, when Puerto Rico's slave imports finally ceased. Dorsey describes several of its more intense moments, mostly as they appear on the British Foreign Office accounts. A contemporary estimate of the dimensions of the illegal trade states that for every ship captured, 20 managed to escape; it can thus be surmised the implications of the 29 aborted attempts to land Africans in Puerto Rico between 1834 and 1859. (p. 122) The British abolition campaign was fraught with ambiguities and likely to bend easily in the face of higher diplomatic concerns, especially with Lord Aberdeen as foreign minister in the 1840s. The fact that the nation states that had Caribbean possessions agreed to halt the trade would not be an obstacle for private French and Dutch parties on the West African coast to continue smuggling Africans out of the continent.

In its more attractive and innovative parts, the author presents the island's role in the extension of the “odious commerce” in close connection to its West African side. Despite British diplomatic efforts to halt the extraction of Africans from still active distribution centers of the Western regions, roughly from Guinea to Nigeria, traders managed to evade the law. Internal supply was maintained and coexisted with other local economic activities of the chiefdoms and states, such as export agriculture. The British crusade was inspired not only by the humanitarian quests of the abolitionists, but by specific policies of African penetration.

Puerto Rico relied heavily on slave supplies brought by French, Dutch, and Danish traffickers, many times using their Caribbean islands as entrepôts. Dorsey reads attentively the nuances of the 1817 treaty between Great Britain and Spain for the prohibition of the trade. The Spanish colonial government found in it the loophole created by its failing to mention specifically that inter-Caribbean trade was also abolished, thus pretending that slave ships arriving in Puerto Rico's ports brought Caribbean or Creole slaves, when it was really Africans coming in via the foreign island's ports. Most of the innovative and thus attractive arguments of this book rest on fragmentary, albeit convincingly woven evidence. I do not consider this reliance on circumstantial evidence a defect. Rather I find this one of its most enjoyable traits. Previously hard to imagine internal interests in Africa come to life in Dorsey's minute and imaginative construction of a story in which chiefdom politics intertwines with peculiar landscapes of marshes and multiple rivers that served as hiding places for smugglers. The effects of Islamic conversion in certain African areas are contradictory and multiple.

The contrasts with Cuba are tantalizing; Cuba was able to keep a stable and direct supply of slaves, mainly Yoruba, strongly tied to their African traditions. Puerto Rico depended on the lesser suppliers, more surreptitiously bringing out other African ethnic groups. The author seems to want to point to the consequences of this fact for the islands, either in the forms of slave experiences or in the political cultures. This argument remains rather obscure and undetermined. Understandably, the subject is complex and out of reach for the scope of the book. But the author would have benefited by framing these ideas in the experience of Puerto Rican slavery and the workings of slave owners in the plantations of the Puerto Rican seaboard. Slaves coming in through the port of Mayagüez, which Dorsey so well contextualizes and explains, were seemingly scattered individually or in small groups (perhaps as a result of cash shortages) throughout distant plantations of the island coastal fringe, to judge from the examples seen in the north.