The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade

Abstract

The “numbers game” (Curtin, 1969: ch. 1; Darity, 1985) remains a favorite event in academic jousting over the Atlantic slave trade, not only because unexpectedly detailed quantitative records continue to turn up in archival repositories but also, more recently, because of the suppleness with which scholars have applied data discovered by the first generation of researchers to new, and increasingly more sophisticated, historical problems. Old, relatively formal, analytical categories—decades; large, internally diverse stretches of the African coast; colonial/national aggregates on the American side of the Atlantic—although comparable among themselves, now seem more revealing of the data than of the history of the trade and are very salutarily giving way to questions and issues arising more directly from the experience itself: the causes of slave mortality, the economic strategies of slavers, age and sex distinctions among the slaves, the meaning of slaving for specific regions in Africa, and the trade’s contributions to events in Europe and the Americas. Use of quantitative data now presupposes the discovery of historically relevant categories of analysis and at the same time informs the meaning of the categories employed.