The Diligent

In 2002, the historian and Africanist scholar Robert Harms published the microhistory The Diligent, a book tracing the slave trade around the Atlantic Ocean in the 1730s. Instead of giving his readers a zoomed out picture of generalized statistics, Harms examines a single slaving voyage, building historical context around it. Moreover, Harms specifically argues that studying the minutiae of local events is a better way of understanding the history of the period than trying to find a global, far-reaching context for each slaving voyage.

Although historians have so far uncovered documentation on more than 17,000 slaving ship voyages throughout the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, almost none of them contain any information about the ins and outs of daily life on such a ship – or its human cargo. Instead, most are commodity manifests and schedules. However, in this case, First Lieutenant Robert Durant of the French ship Diligent spent his time aboard keeping a detailed journal, complete with descriptions and more than fifty sketches of trading stations and other interesting sights. Durant was angling for promotion to captaincy, as evidenced by his rather one-sided portrayal of the Diligent’s overbearing captain. But Harms combines Durant’s journal with a large quantity of other primary source material to create a vivid picture of a typical slaving ship and its travels.

The book is organized in an unusual way. Rather than relying on chronology, like most histories, Harms, instead, follows the route of the Diligent, diving into the microhistory of each place where it lands and each port where it trades. Instead of one overarching view of world history at the time, we get a sense of three distinct “worlds”: France, the kingdoms of the West African coast, and the Caribbean islands, especially Martinique. Harms paints each separately, but through the Diligent’s voyage, we can see how these places will eventually be interlinked, paving the way to a view of the Atlantic rim as its own place – an argument advanced in books such as The Black Atlantic. Here, Harms’s result reads more like an eventful story than a dry textbook, making the book just as suitable for a lay reader as for a specialist scholar.



The basic outline of the Diligent’s path in this voyage starts in the port of Vannes, a city in the Brittany region of France in May 1731. The ship sailed to West Africa, where it sold its goods and bought 256 slaves. From there, it crossed the ocean to sell these people in Martinique, where they were destined for the sugar plantations. In the islands, the Diligent, in turn. bought barrels of sugar, which it brought back to Vannes in September 1732. This structure allows Harms to explore the immediate situation at each of the locations where the Diligent stops.

For example, as French goods are loaded onto the ship, he gives us a macro view of the French economy during this period of history, highlights the arguments French merchants made to the government in order to be allowed to transport slaves, and describes how these, at first, narrow trade arguments were generalized into rationalizations of slavery. Then, when the ship gets to the coast of West Africa, Harms portrays the complex politics of warring African kingdoms, each trying to monopolize its access to the European slave trade; shows the results of long-term European and African connections through the mixed-race populations of the Canary and Cape Verde island chains; and explores the surprisingly low status of European representatives whose job was to negotiate for the enslaved labor their colonies demanded.

In between these forays into local history and context, Harms circles back to daily life aboard ship. Nothing remarkable happened to this ship during this voyage. Through accounts of other slave traders, Harms demonstrates the dangers of sea-going in those days. The Diligent could easily have encountered storms or pirates; it could have been beset by a terrible accident; life aboard could have been turned on its head via a slave mutiny or an unhinged captain. Instead, because the trip is typical, the monotonous cruelty and barbarism of transporting humans as commodities is front and center. We see firsthand the endlessly humiliating and dehumanizing ways in which the crew would secure, feed, and mistreat the African people who had been enslaved – who were packed into a tiny, unaired space where they couldn’t stay clean or get their bearings. Harms does his best to point out that for the most part, we simply do not have access to their thoughts and feelings – all the records he uses throughout the book are from the point of view of the Europeans who benefit from the Africans’ capture and enslavement.



This unusual history book was praised upon publication as a thoroughly researched piece of scholarship that would, nonetheless, appeal to the general public. As Thomas Ingersoll put it in his article for the scholarly journal Humanities & Social Sciences Online: “Imaginatively constructed, deftly and engagingly written, a model of research, the book takes the reader deep into the tragic heart of the eighteenth-century Atlantic.”