Epidemiology and the Slave Trade

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Historians have begun to show a new interest in the slave trade. Recent developments in historical demographv, economic history, and the history of Africa have solved some of the old problems and posed new ones. The mere passage of time makes it possible to go beyond the largely humanitarian concerns of the nineteenth-century writers, concerns that arose out of the great debate over slavery as a question of policy. We can now accept the trade as an evil and move on to the problem of why and how it took place for so many centuries and on such a scale. The recent trend toward a world-historical perspective and away from parochial national history also calls for a new approach to the broad patterns of Atlantic history. Social and economic development on the tropical shores of the Atlantic was a single p. -cess, regardless of the theoretically self-contained empires of mercantilist Europe. From the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, the central institution was the plantation, located in tropical America, worked by slave labor from tropical Africa, but directed by Europeans and producing tropical staples for European consumption. The broader patterns of society and economy were much the same in all the plantation colonies, regardless of metropolitan control. These patterns were not only different from those of Europe; they were also different from those of European settlements in temperate North America, the Indian Ocean trading