Important scholarly insights to our collective understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and, more broadly, Atlantic slavery, continue to arrive with increasing frequency each year. Few, however, are as likely to provide such major quantitative contributions and qualitative insights as Greg O'Malley's exemplary first book, Final Passages.

One challenge facing all historians of slavery, but in particular those writing about the slave trade, is to keep the enslaved people, rather than the numbers abstracted from their real experiences, at the heart of the process. O'Malley carefully crafts a powerful balance that seeks to understand some of the complicated trading dynamics seen from the point of view of the merchants, slave-traders, and buyers. He also details the experiences of those enslaved Africans who lived, worked, and died in these “final passages.” As he rightfully documents, the forced transportation experiences of enslaved Africans did not end upon arrival at major Atlantic entrepôts. Many experienced reshipment and further forced movement to other islands in the Atlantic and to the hinterlands of British North America. Such massive relocations provide the impetus behind the book's title, but O'Malley's own evidence suggests that they were not necessarily final passages.

Anchoring the book is O'Malley's impressive and exhaustively researched database on British intercolonial slave voyages. Using all surviving Naval Office Shipping Lists (port records) for all British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, O'Malley models his own intercolonial database on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org). He supplements these port records with various other primary sources, including newspapers, merchant correspondence, and government documents.

His writing is crisp, focused, and engages the reader throughout. Moreover, O'Malley carefully and thoughtfully discusses his use of evidence along with providing an exemplary thirty-one page appendix, “Estimating the Scale of the Intercolonial Slave Trade,” to further discuss the important details structuring the data and his database. In addition, the book contains seven useful maps, eleven figures, and twenty-six tables. In an especially welcome addition, there are footnotes instead of endnotes, which makes scholarly tracking of O'Malley's evidence much easier and is an especially useful characteristic that makes this book important as both as a teaching tool and model of research clarity. Unfortunately, while there is an index, there is no bibliography.

A book built around quantitative data might easily become an overwhelming display of numerical prowess but from the first lines of his introduction through the last line of the epilogue O'Malley carefully constructs a human history that includes a wide array of speculators, privateers, pirates, plantation owners, slave ship captains, and of course the enslaved Africans constantly commodified through their many passages.

In his discussion of the forced transportation of enslaved Africans after landing at various Atlantic entrepôts, O'Malley successfully connects the “the backcountry and the Atlantic economy” by showing the specific and particular economic transactions behind these intercolonial slave trades. For the historiography and master narrative about the United States he reveals the mechanisms by which an earlier phase of the movement of slaves within colonies predated the later, more widely known interstate slave system of nineteenth-century America. In the Caribbean, constant movement across imperial borders began in the seventeenth century and then intensified during the latter half of the eighteenth century when British slave traders tried to increase their slave sales to French and Spanish buyers in the islands.

By emphasizing the extensive trading networks in operation after the “middle passage,” O'Malley reveals a massive Atlantic network of economic activity that was central to the development of capitalism. However, he relegates to the footnotes his engagement with the contentious debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism, claiming his work “resonates” with some of the wider arguments of Eric Williams and his contemporary advocates concerning the impact of slavery and economic development. While clearly attentive to both the current and long-standing debates about the relationship between capitalism and slavery, this is one area that O'Malley might have extended the implications of his own evidence to directly engage more in this crucial and ongoing conversation. Nevertheless, this outstanding book will find many appreciative readers and hopefully generate further inquiries into many of the issues raised by O'Malley's evidence and arguments.