Associate Professor of History Greg O'Malley's new book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, has won the Association of Caribbean Historians' Elsa Goveia Award for 2013/2014. This award is given once every two years for the best book (in English, Spanish, French, or Dutch) in the field of Caribbean history.
Final Passages explores an overlooked aspect of forced African migration to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While a rich slave trade historiography of recent decades reveals much about the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic, O’Malley’s research shows that hundreds of thousands of Africans continued their journeys after the ocean crossing. Building on a database of over seven thousand intercolonial slave trading voyages that he compiled from port records and merchant accounts, the book identifies and quantifies the major routes of intercolonial migration. In the process, Final Passages illustrates extensive connections across colonial and imperial lines, as traders and slaves moved between British Caribbean, North American, French, and Spanish colonies.
Professor O’Malley is well-known for teaching popular courses such as “Revolutionary America,” “Atlantic History, 1492-1824,” “Slavery in the Atlantic World: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives,” and “The World, 1500 to the Present,” among others. In 2012 Professor O'Malley received the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for his essay, “Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619-1807” (William and Mary Quarterly, January 2009). This prize is given biennially to the best article to have appeared in the WMQ journal over the past six years, and is awarded by the WMQ editorial board.
