Explaining the mortality decline in the eighteenth‐century British slave trade

Abstract

decline in mortality on French vessels up to the 1 770s, death rates increased thereafter. On Portuguese ships, death rates in the nineteenth century were extraordinarily high, presumably due to the illegality of the slave trade. It is unlikely that the decline in crude death rates on British ships was attributable to changes in the age and sex composition of the slave population: the new database shows little difference in the loss rates of males and females, and of adults and children (suggesting that very few infants, who were most at risk, were carried). Furthermore, the decline in death rates was not the result of changes in the regional composition of slaves: crude death rates declined on voyages departing from all regions of Africa.3