Robert H. Gudmestad. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xii + 246 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2884-8, $59.95 (cloth); 0-8071-2922-4, $21.95 (paper).

From the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe to J. T. Randolph, slavetraders stalked the pages of antebellum fiction and antislaveryliterature. Yet of the many facets of slavery that scholarshave examined in the past three decades, the one topic thathas been consistently understudied has been the internal slavetrade. Compared with other subjects deemed worthy of monographs—fromslave religiosity to rebelliousness to family structure—theinternal traffic in humans of the early to mid-nineteenth centuryhas been curiously ignored. The few exceptions include     

Erik Gilbert. Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. xiii + 176 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1557-3, $49.95 (cloth); 0-8214-1558-1, $26.95 (paper).

It took a tsunami at the end of 2004 to alert the world to whatErik Gilbert could have told us well in advance—that theIndian Ocean’s edge and the people on it are intimatelyintertwined. Building from a rich grounding in one particularplace, Gilbert tells the story of the intersections betweenthe world of dhows and British colonial economic policies inthe Zanzibar islands. Zanzibar today is a semi-autonomous ifcantankerous partner with the former Tanganyika