African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic

Abstract

HE gender and age structure of the transatlantic slave trade is critical to T understanding the development of societies of the Atlantic rim. From the broad perspective of contact between the Old World and the New, two salient characteristics of that structure have emerged from the recent literature. First, as is now well known, males predominated in the Atlantic slave trade, though compared to other branches of pre-nineteenth-century migration, both coerced and free, females and children were well represented. Second, the proportion of African women and children carried across the Atlantic was far from constant or uniform; sex and age ratios varied strongly by region and over time.1 Attempts to explain these broad patterns have generally focused on the economic functions of slaves on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially the requirements of the plantation complexes of the Americas, without which a transatlantic slave trade would not have existed. Even though New World planters demanded men, they quickly discovered that enslaved African women had a high work rate.2 Planters forced black men and women alike to labor in the fields, and the price differential between males and females was generally much lower in the Americas than in Africa.3