|
|
|
The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment
David Eltis
| SINCE work on The
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM began in the
late 1980s, questions about it have fallen overwhelmingly into two
categories: does the dataset have names of African individuals or
groups, and by how much will it change estimates of the number of
people forced into the traffic. The answer to the first question—no—is
easier to give than the answer to the second. Paradoxically, the
new data will probably modify currently accepted estimates of the
size of the trade less than it will change knowledge of most other
aspects of the trade.1
Links between Africa and the Americas, deaths of both slaves and
crew on the voyage, the age and sex of slaves, national participation
in the trade, almost any organizational question, ownership patterns,
and many other topics will draw on the new collection to a much
greater degree than will the long debate over how many Africans
arrived in the Americas between 1519, the likely date of the first,
and 1867, the probable year of the last transatlantic slave voyage
direct from Africa.2
Nevertheless, the data do support a revised aggregate estimate,
and, more important, they provide the basis for more accurate assessments
of who carried the slaves, from which part of the African coast
they embarked, and where in the Americas they were taken. What follows
is the first report of a full-length independent reassessment of
the size and distribution of the traffic currently in preparation. |
1 |
| This
reassessment of the volume and structure of the transatlantic slave
trade is a culmination and extension of the work of others. Philip
Curtin and Joseph Inikori built on a combination of estimates of
people who lived through the slave trade era, aggregated shipping
data, and population projections of recipient regions in the Americas,
and Paul Lovejoy consolidated the conclusions of scholars who had
recovered more new data from the archives after Curtin published
his findings; the present reassessment, by contrast, is based on
individual voyages for the busiest parts of the trade, nearly half
of which have only recently become known.3
For the most part, this work uses voyage-by-voyage shipping data
rather than the estimates of then-contemporaries and historians
derived from those data. As information becomes available and as
assumptions underlying the estimates are refined, the conclusions
offered here will change. Moreover, the new estimates have yet to
be tested systematically against the known demographic data, a process
that also leads to some revision.4
|
. . . |
There are about 14460 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
