Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Abstract

Research inspired by Philip D. Curtin’s pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) has made the African slave trade to the Americas the best-documented migration before the mid-1800s. A tremendous contribution to the understanding of the trade’s overall importance and of its temporal and geographical variations has come from the compilation of a massive database of slaving voyages, the first version of which was published by Cambridge University Press on CD-ROM in 1999. This volume of essays interprets the greatly expanded second edition (or TSTD2 ), which is now freely accessible on the Internet at www.slavevoyages.org. As the essays demonstrate, the nearly 35,000 slaving voyages in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shed new light on almost every aspect of the trade.Readers of this journal will find the TSTD2 and this guide of special interest because, as the editors point out, because 60 percent of the new data concerns the trade to Brazil and Spanish America, which were the greatest importing regions. Of the 10.7 million slaves who reached overseas destinations, 45 percent landed in Brazil and 12 percent in Spanish colonies. Moreover, it is now clear that more slaving voyages originated in Brazil than in Europe.As the editors point out, the value of the database is not just in estimating with great accuracy the overall dimensions of the trade but also in understanding changes over time and the connections between particular regions in Africa and the Americas. Besides David Eltis and David Richardson’s masterful introduction, the volume includes focused chapters, many by younger scholars, exploring these aspects of the slave trade. The essays and accompanying tables are especially useful in explaining how the database is able to estimate the total volume of the trade on various routes from the known voyages.Several of the essays are devoted to Brazil. Daniel Barros Domingues da Silva and David Eltis provide the first overall estimate of the dimensions of the slave trade to Pernambuco and its African sources, demonstrating that this region was Brazil’s second most important receiver of slaves from West Central Africa (after Rio de Janeiro), and that the port of Recife originated more slaving voyages than all French ports combined. In a parallel essay, Alexandre Vieira Ribeiro explores the trade to Bahia, “one of the most important branches of the transatlantic slave trade” (p. 148), which is now the best-documented Brazilian destination during the peak centuries of the trade. Focusing on slave voyages that ended at Rio de Janeiro between 1790 and 1830, Manolo Florentino sketches a broad transatlantic picture linking the forms of enslavement in Africa, the goods Africans received from the Atlantic, European profits, and family life among slaves in the Rio hinterlands, the latter based on marriage and birth statistics.Another group of essays studies the slave trade in Latin America. Using archival sources to supplement the TSTD2, António de Almeida Mendes reassesses the understudied early trade to Iberia and the Spanish Americas. In another chapter Oscar Grandío Moráguez uses the database to reassess the African origins of the more massive and better documented trade to Cuba after 1789. A complementary chapter by Philip Misevich details ethnic origins of slaves sent to Cuba from the Upper Guinea Coast in the early nineteenth century.Other studies profile the national carriers and African sources of slaves. The editors join James Pritchard in describing how the French (like the Spanish) failed to expand their involvement in the transatlantic slave trade as fast as the demand for slaves in their Caribbean colonies increased. In contrast, Jelmer Vos, Eltis, and Richardson examine the Dutch slave trade, which considerably exceeded the needs of Dutch colonies, though the focus of the chapter is on subtler and lesser known aspects of the Dutch roles. An essay on northern German participation by Andrea Weindl illuminates how even small states without American colonies successfully participated in the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roquinaldo Ferreira surveys the suppression of the slave trade from Angola, showing the importance of local factors in retarding the trade’s end.In a very interesting final chapter, Eltis and Paul Lachance use the database and other evidence to reexamine the negative rate of population growth in the West Indies, a topic raised by Curtin in his 1969 volume. Using the much improved import statistics from the TSTD2 and enhanced information on subsequent slave movements among colonies, the essay is able to demonstrate that depletion rates in the 1700s were nearer 1.5 to 2.0 percent per year rather than the 3 percent Curtin had proposed. However, the essay is unable to remove the anomalously higher rate in British colonies, which the authors suggest may partially be due to more unregistered reexports. Although the authors’ urging of additional research echoes Curtin’s earlier injunction, this volume amply demonstrates how far slave trade studies have advanced.