186 Hubert Gerbeaucivilizations, in other words an approach to the 'total history' of which
Michelet dreamed, the task becomes more significant. There is then the twofold
obligation of broadening the field of investigation and of using working tools
with which the historian is not always familiar. It will no longer suffice to
date the cargoes and count the men and the piastres ; he must think in terms
of cooking, religion, magic, dancing, music, population, social organization,
agricultural practices and cultural themes. The historian will have to be an
archaeologist, an ethnologist, a specialist in oral traditions, a biologist, a
linguist and perhaps a psychiatrist. These research techniques should not be
excluded on the assumption that the history of the slave trade is but the study
of a certain type of transportation, that the human being traded does not
concern us before his departure or after his arrival. To limit the subject thus
would be like trying to reduce the history of nutrition to the analysis of food :
foodstuffs are first of all living substances and they are ingested by human
beings who will assimilate this or that nourishment from them. The history of
nutrition would be futile if it were not rooted in economics and did not include
its social aspects. In my opinion, it is not irrelevant to the subject of the slave
trade to inquire into the life of the man who is leaving and of the one who has
arrived. This history should be anchored in the history of Africa and the
countries concerned, and should go so far as to include the slave society. Its
subject, however, remains specific, and is not to be confused either with general
history or with the history of slavery.
If the historian of the slave trade were to be refused this scope for his
study, he would still be forced to broaden his field and the range of the tools
at his disposal. This second requirement springs from his ignorance of many
facts concerning the slave trade. When there are no records concerning a
large-scale transport of slaves, must he resign himself to a blank page, or can
he formulate hypotheses with supporting arguments? I shall return to this
point which concerns the research to be undertaken.
Having suggested a certain conception of the history of the slave trade
and of the man-object to which it applies, and having drawn a distinction
between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean approaches, I can now turn to two
corollaries which will give rise to a number of associated problems. The first
concerns the slave trade and the 'Indian Ocean' unity, and the second is an
attempt to delimit periods or make a classification outline.
Disruption and violence wrenched the traded slave out of the traditional
world in which he lived, often as a free man, and placed him in a new world
which was to him a psychological and physical shock. This transition some-
times took him as far as the New World when the ships carrying captives from
West Africa to the Indian Ocean and those sailing from the 'Indian Ocean'
area towards the Atlantic passed one another while rounding the Cape. But
this extreme uprooting was unusual. As a general rule, the slave taken to the