Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Research Articles

Accounting, slavery and the slave trade: A multi-continental perspective

As in other disciplines, the Atlantic slave-trade and New World slavery have assumed an increasingly contentious role in accounting history. In her Accounting for Slavery, Rosenthal has recently located many current business practices in the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery. Other accounting historians have explored slave-trading ventures from Africa, the role of accounting and slavery in New World colonisation, and in accounting and managerial practices in the slave-estates of the Americas. Absent from the extant literature are studies that explore the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery from a multi-continental perspective that considers Atlantic slavery as an integrated whole. This study, by drawing on the Trans-Atlantic Slave-trade Database, seeks to fill this gap, examining the correlations between Atlantic slavery and African demographic and social regression, European prosperity and New World accounting and managerial practices. In doing so, it argues that accounting played a fundamentally different role in the slave economy to that which it undertook in emerging systems of industrial capitalism.

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition by David Richardson

For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist” tradition, as initiated by Williams.1 The humanitarian version argued that the abolition in 1807 was the product of a sea change in mentalities, both elite and popular, that reached critical mass in the late 1780s; the materialist version argued that that abolition occurred largely because the old colonial system had become an obstacle to a newly industrializing Britain, which was developing a strong commitment to free trade by necessity. These debates unfolded between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, before getting bogged down in sterile binaries of economics versus morality and of self-interest versus altruism. The 2007 bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition, when Richardson was Director of wise in Hull, re-ignited earlier debates about the fundamental nature of abolition, stimulating work by a new generation of scholars—notably Brown and Ryden—that raised fresh possibilities and pointed the way toward a potential synthesis, without themselves establishing it.2 Hence the opening for Richardson.The new volume, however, does not deliver fully on its potential. Organized in three sections—”Trade,” “Opinions,” and “Politics”—it proceeds from a brilliant summary of the slave trade to a survey of antislavery ideas in the eighteenth century and then to an account of the Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary campaigns from 1788 to 1807. It thus spans economic, intellectual, cultural, and political history in an unusual way that balances accounts of the slave trade with accounts of abolition. It recognizes that the economic and political structure of Britain in 1807 was different from that of 1707 or 1757, revealing how antislavery was intertwined with urbanization and the emergence of the professional and manufacturing middle class that redistributed political power. It effectively registers the role of Black resistance to the slave trade by both captive and free Africans. But, in the end, its treatment of abolition remains firmly within the humanitarian tradition, viewing abolition as the victory of decent ordinary people over powerful entrenched interests—an uncomplicated early mass movement for social justice and human rights. Moreover, its treatment of individuals reflects an earlier uncritical tradition. In the brief introduction, for example, Richardson characterizes Clarkson as working “tirelessly” for fifty years, overlooking his withdrawal from the struggle in the late 1790s and early 1800s, his marginalization both in 1807 and 1834, and his final demoralizing conflict with Wilberforce’s sons over the roles and responsibilities of the early abolitionists.The book falls short of the much-needed synthesis for three reasons. First, rather than seeking to understand Williams’ scholarship, it oddly rejects it from the outset as “narrow-minded cynicism,” an extraordinary position to adopt in a book published in 2022. Second, given that the book has its origins in lectures given in 2007, it references subsequent works but does not fully absorb them into the argument. Third, the book tends to treat the abolition of the slave trade as the end of the process, leaving only its final three pages to deal with the abolition of slavery itself thirty years later (for which the humanitarian and materialist explanations largely converge). Future scholars will need to build on Richardson’s new book and to draw from his life’s work in order to complete the task at hand.

Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896

Nearly 50 years since Robert Conrad's pathbreaking article on the emancipados of Brazil—published in this journal (volume 53, issue 1)—the history of the Africans liberated from slave ships as the result of measures for suppressing the slave trade has taken a global turn. Yet the scholarship produced as part of this trend has tended to focus on the Anglophone Atlantic.This collection of essays on liberated Africans organized by Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy, two historians of Africa and the African diaspora, brings together for the first time studies covering groups settled in territories of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires as well as independent Brazil and Liberia. Treated as a special and somewhat extraneous group in national histories until the early 2000s, liberated Africans gained renewed attention after the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Then a number of conferences on the circumstances surrounding and conflicts over abolition in various regions counteracted the excessive focus on British actors and events and highlighted the importance of considering the continuation and transformations of the slave trade after 1807. As the unexpected byproduct of the trade's suppression, recaptive Africans settled or resettled in Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, Saint Helena, the British Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, Brazil, Angola, or Indian Ocean territories had similar statuses that stemmed from legislation or treaties aimed at abolishing the slave trade, which required them to serve for a certain period before attaining full emancipation. Liberated Africans stood out as the ideal category for comparing and evaluating the abolitionist campaign's effectiveness.The collection unites some longtime specialists on liberated Africans, many newcomers to the subfield, and others for whom the theme is marginal to their research agendas. The 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections organized according to a mix of chronological, geographical, and thematic approaches: “Origins of Liberated Africans,” “Sierra Leone,” “Caribbean,” “Lusophone Atlantic,” “Liberated Africans in Global Perspective,” and “Resettlements.” In the introduction, Anderson and Lovejoy set the collection within the context of the current debates on the British campaign for the slave trade's abolition and the growing importance of digital humanities initiatives for studying the African diaspora. To be sure, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/), particularly its section on the liberated Africans' names, and the extensive digitization of the Sierra Leone archives have greatly affected recent scholarship. Anderson and Lovejoy estimate that 200,000 men, women, and children were “liberated” during the Atlantic and Indian Ocean phases of the suppression campaign, from 1808 to 1896; the coeditors present a fair overview of how many African recaptives were settled and resettled, where, and on what legal bases. In Latin America, the 11,000 africanos livres of Brazil and 27,000 emancipados of Cuba were included in the editors' count, but smaller groups in Puerto Rico and Martinique were not.British records have been fundamental for this collective endeavor, given the centrality and ubiquity of British institutions and bureaucracy, scattered all over the world, in the abolition campaign. The fairly regular series of documents allow for panoramic, comparative, and also microhistorical approaches. There is a mix of those in this volume, with essays covering the seizure and adjudication of ships in vice admiralty courts, mixed commission courts, or local legal venues as well as the disposal of the Africans for their compulsory terms of service, their daily lives amid slavery or postemancipation and also their resettlement, following intra- and interimperial policies. An integrated history of the slave trade's abolition is taking shape in which the people who were the campaign's object appear at the forefront, their collective experience becoming comparable and in turn giving a new perspective to policymaking and trends in labor, citizenship, migration, gender, international law, cultural transformations, and many other aspects of nineteenth-century history. The great reliance on British archives in this collection is both a strength and a weakness. The book includes chapters on recaptives in Liberia, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, and the Indian Ocean that draw from other documentary collections and reveal the imbalance: outside the British Empire, the continuation of the slave trade well into the 1850s and 1860s made for developments not sufficiently integrated into the narrative of abolition, which is still centered on the British Atlantic. The initiative to compile such a volume is to be praised; it is hoped that the debate will surpass the tunnel vision that frames it for now.This collection will be useful for scholars of the African diaspora, abolitionism, and global history, and a number of the essays will be of keen interest to those studying British diplomatic engagement in Latin America.

The profits of the Portuguese–Brazilian transatlantic slave trade: challenges and possibilities

ABSTRACT Together, Portugal and Brazil were the second biggest players in the transatlantic slave trade. However, we still know little about the profits generated by the slave trade and by the activities carried out by slaves within the Portuguese Empire – in particular in the Atlantic world. In other words, who were the various groups benefiting from those profits and where was the capital obtained invested and/or reinvested? In this article, we present preliminary estimates of gross profits generated by the Portuguese Brazilian participation in this business and discuss the methodological challenges faced to calculate the net profits of Portuguese–Brazilian participation in the slave trade as well as in assessing the weight of slave-based produce in the economies of Portugal, and Brazil. The first part of our study relies mainly on the data available in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, evidence gathered from several Portuguese archives, and the slave prices’ series built by David Richardson and David Eltis et al for West and West Central Africa and the Brazilian slave prices series built by Laird Bergad. The second part will be based on the vast body of literature and source materials available in Portuguese, English and other languages on the topic.

Towards an Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia Slave Trade Database: An Exploration of Concepts, Lessons and Models

While over the last three decades the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD) has mobilized an astounding scholarly energy, the history of the slave trade in Asia has so far remained underdeveloped. Although numerous scholarly articles have indicated the widespread presence of slavery and the slave trade throughout maritime Asia from the early modern period well into the 19th century, estimates for the slave trade in the Indian Ocean are still tentative, and tend to focus especially on the (western) Indian Ocean region. Since 2015 an international group of researchers has come together to work towards consolidating research on the slave trade in Asia and East Africa. This article discusses a core activity of this group, namely the development of the Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia Slave Trade Database (ESTA) which is hosted at the International Institute of Social History in close collaboration with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Linnaeus University and ENS Lyon. We explore and evaluate the applicability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to the Asian context. We subsequently identify the specificities of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago sources and patterns of slave trading, and their implications for possible datamodel designs. The article further underlines the importance of the ESTA database for comparative research reaching across colonial powers, local and global systems of slavery, across wider-ranging and more strongly defined ‘regions’ within the Indian Ocean Maritime Asia world, and even beyond to the transatlantic slave trade. A vital aim in the construction of a comprehensive Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago database is the recording and reconstruction of the slave trade, especially in light of the entanglements of global long-distance slave trading with local systems of slavery and forced labour. The article identifies several challenges in the exploration of the historical and historiographic contexts and proposes and evaluates two database models, concluding with the advances made and the challenges ahead.

SOCIABILIDADES NEGRAS NA PARAÍBA OITOCENTISTA: SOCIEDADE, ECONOMIA E RESISTÊNCIAS

This article aims to present a synthesis of how the slave society in Paraiba was organized between the 18th and 19th centuries. Recent slavery studies have expanded and allowed to identify some aspects related to trafficking in enslaved people, to the experiences of forming captive families and to communities formed by fugitives and fugitives from captivity. In this work, we highlight socio-demographic and economic traits, as well as some experiences of life and resistance built by Africans and their descendants in the territory that, from the 16th century on, became known as Paraiba. For this, we used several sources, such as separate documents from the Overseas Historical Archive (AHU/PT/BR) digitized by the Rescue Project, baptism records from the parish of Nossa Senhora das Neves, wills and inventories in the Note Book of the city of Paraiba, in addition to the data systematized by the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD) and the bibliography on the topic. Thus, we exposed some cracks of freedom of this social group and its social relations in an adverse context.

Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas

According to historical records of transatlantic slavery, traders forcibly deported an estimated 12.5 million people from ports along the Atlantic coastline of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, with global impacts reaching to the present day, more than a century and a half after slavery’s abolition. Such records have fueled a broad understanding of the forced migration from Africa to the Americas yet remain underexplored in concert with genetic data. Here, we analyzed genotype array data from 50,281 research participants, which—combined with historical shipping documents—illustrate that the current genetic landscape of the Americas is largely concordant with expectations derived from documentation of slave voyages. For instance, genetic connections between people in slave trading regions of Africa and disembarkation regions of the Americas generally mirror the proportion of individuals forcibly moved between those regions. While some discordances can be explained by additional records of deportations within the Americas, other discordances yield insights into variable survival rates and timing of arrival of enslaved people from specific regions of Africa. Furthermore, the greater contribution of African women to the gene pool compared to African men varies across the Americas, consistent with literature documenting regional differences in slavery practices. This investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, which is broad in scope in terms of both datasets and analyses, establishes genetic links between individuals in the Americas and populations across Atlantic Africa, yielding a more comprehensive understanding of the African roots of peoples of the Americas.

Amazonia and North-East Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade: an assessment of the Brazilian slave trade North of Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT Brazil was the most important destination for enslaved Africans forced into the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Rio de Janeiro became the country's leading slave port, the regions north of Rio were no small players in the business. This article uses the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to analyze the evolution of the traffic to Amazonia and Northeast Brazil. It provides an assessment of its volume, orientation, and organization. Rio may have eventually dominated the traffic, but the participation of its northern neighbors laid down the foundations for this most notorious trade.

Por Virtud del Asiento: The naval logistics of the slave trade to the Spanish Indies (1604-1624)

From 1595 up until 1640, the slave trade to the Spanish Indies was under the asiento system, monopolized by Portuguese new-Christian traders. This paper analyses the naval logistics of this specific transatlantic slave trade from 1604 to 1624, based on documentation in the Archivo General de Índias in Seville. In accordance to the data available, it is possible to present tendencies about this specific slave trade, the typology of the ships involved, and the crews’ age and provenance. The new data presented in this paper is a complement to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, as it is based solely on evidence from the Archivo and has a different focus, specifically its naval logistics. Although it was a monopolized trade, it was only made possible by a multitude of participants.

DB or not DB: Writing the history of the slave trade to North America in the era of the database

AbstractSince the publication of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (now known as Voyages) in 1999, it has occupied an important place the study of the North American slave trade. Some historians, particularly those interested in the African Diaspora and African American culture, have embraced its ability to elucidate the specific connections between Africa and North America over time. While most historians have accepted the validity of the database, some have criticized the database's tendency to privilege quantitative abstraction over a more “human” narrative. A smaller number still have rejected the estimates offered by the database specifically regarding the number of Africans disembarked in the United States after 1808, but most scholars in the field have accepted the Voyages estimates. There are now plans to link the Voyages database with a number of other slavery‐related digital history projects, which suggests that the era of the database is here to stay.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston

Reviewed by: Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." by Zora Neale Hurston Randy J. Sparks Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Amistad, 2018. 208 pp. $24.99. ISBN 978-0-0627-4820-1. Once largely forgotten, Alabama native Zora Neale Hurston is now widely regarded as a "genius of the South," as writer Alice Walker put it, and her best-known works are now featured on college syllabi across the country. A new book by her is a major event, and Barracoon is sure to join Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on any list of her most important works. The book grew out of a series of interviews she conducted in 1927 with Cudjo Lewis or Kossola, as he was known in his Yoruba homeland. Lewis was a survivor of the Clotilda, the last African slaver to arrive in the United States, which landed outside Mobile in 1860. When she completed the manuscript in 1931, Viking Press expressed interest, but only if she rewrote Cudjo's distinctive English to make it more palatable to white readers, something she refused to do. She shopped it around to other publishers, but none were willing to publish it without those revisions. As a result, the manuscript went unpublished and remained in Hurston's papers until now. There can be little doubt that Hurston was right to refuse those publishers' demands, for Lewis's voice is a powerful one and fundamental to the book's success. Lewis was not an easy subject—sometimes he was willing to talk, but other times he was more reticent, more interested in weeding [End Page 246] his garden than in taking questions from Hurston who bribed him with cured ham and other treats. His story is a remarkable one. Even though over twelve million Africans crossed the Atlantic as victims of the international slave trade, firsthand accounts of African captivity and the Middle Passage are extremely rare, making Lewis's narrative an invaluable historical document. He was captured during a bloody military conflict between the kingdom of Dahomey and the Isha, a small sub-group of the Yoruba to which he belonged. Once the Dahomey army captured his hometown, he and the other captives were marched to the coast and sold from the port of Ouidah, located on the Bight of Benin, a major entrepot in the illegal slave trade of the nineteenth century. United States shippers played an important role in that trade, but primarily in voyages to Cuba and Brazil. There are only thirty recorded voyages to the U.S. mainland from the closing of the trade in 1808 until 1860 when the Clotilda landed its human cargo. The expedition was the brainchild of the three Meaher brothers, Jim, Tim, and Burns, who operated a shipyard on the Alabama River, and a business associate, Captain William Foster, who was listed as the ship's owner. After a difficult voyage Foster arrived at Ouidah and negotiated for the purchase of 130 captives, equally divided between men and women, but he was forced to sail with only 116 onboard (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives a lower number of 110 captives). He narrowly avoided capture by British naval cruisers and successfully crossed the Atlantic without a single loss of life. When the ship arrived in Mobile Bay, it sailed to an isolated located where it was burned and the captives were transferred to a steamboat and taken up the Alabama River to a plantation. (After years of searching, the remains of the ship were discovered in May 2019.) Some of the enslaved Africans were sold, the rest divided between the Meahers and Foster. According to Hurston, the Meahers were tried and convicted in federal court and fined for their role in the expedition, though in fact they and Foster were tried and acquitted. When Kossola, renamed Cudjo, and the other enslaved Africans learned that they had been freed in 1865, they dreamed of [End Page 247] returning to Africa, but lacked the means to do so. They demanded land from Meaher, who scoffed at that demand, but agreed to...

Comparative Analysis of Reparations for the Holocaust and for the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This article provides a legal and economic comparison of proposed reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade and already realized German Holocaust reparations. Neither injustice was legal at the time according to international common law. This line of legal reasoning was successfully applied at the Nuremberg trials but did not lead to Holocaust reparations. Instead, representatives of the perpetrator side reached out to representatives of the victimized side. Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is used to determine the amounts the primarily European countries who participated in the slave trade would owe if the same per-victim reparations rate were applied, both uncompounded and compounded over time. After controlling for differences in the number of victims and the passage of time, Transatlantic Slave Trade reparations demands resemble German Holocaust reparations payments. Thus, German Holocaust reparations may serve as a blueprint for eventual Transatlantic Slave Trade reparations.

Tracing the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans in Grenada

ABSTRACTThe southeastern Caribbean island of Grenada has been excluded from studies concerned with the demographics of the trans-atlantic slave trade and its impact on the formation of African diasporic identities and cultures. Using Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, plantation lists, newspaper advertisements, and the multi-ethnic danced ceremony, Nation Dance, this article focuses on the demographics of the slave trade between 1669–1808 and the ethno-linguistic composition of Grenadian slave society. It demonstrates that various groups of enslaved Africans over time forged neo-African ethnic identities that remained visible in Nation Dance and archival material. In Nation Dance, inter-African blending and borrowing is evident, illustrating the complex ways whereby enslaved Africans and their descendants reconstructed their identities and cultures in the Atlantic world. Additionally, this article considers the limits of the Voyages Database and suggests ways in which other evidence may be used to understand the ethno-linguistic backgrounds of enslaved Grenadians.

Windows of global exchange: Dutch ports and the slave trade, 1600–1800

In 2008, Pierre Gervais contended that social and economic developments in the Atlantic were to be ascribed to an overwhelming European intervention in West Africa and the Americas. This article questions Gervais’s assumption by stressing how Europeans, West Africans and Americans – individuals and states – mutually influenced urban hierarchies and distributive hubs across three different continents, while arguing that these interactions and interconnections should be seen within a context of entangled histories. This contribution re-examines the Dutch experience of slave trade and shipping to assess the extent to which slave trading and shipping activities influenced port hierarchies in Europe, determined the organization of port hubs in West Africa and helped develop port structures in the Americas. This assessment is anchored in the data provided by the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the collections of the Dutch West India Company and the Middleburg Commercial Company, and the notarial archives of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 by Leonardo Marques

Reviewed by: The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 by Leonardo Marques Mary Draper The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867. By Leonardo Marques. ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 313. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-21241-9.) The involvement of the Portuguese, British, and French in the transatlantic slave trade is more well known than that of the United States. Drawing on the vast data of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Leonardo Marques's The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 chronicles the "deep transformation in the nature of US involvement in the transatlantic slave trade between the American Revolution and the Civil War" (p. 3). During those nine decades, "[a]pproximately five million enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas" (p.11). And, despitethe United States formally abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, American participation in transatlantic slaving voyages endured throughout the nineteenth century. Marques uncovers this American collusion, weaving an international, interimperial narrative that integrates the North and South Atlantic. In doing so, Marques demonstrates the importance of viewing the United States from not only an Atlantic perspective but also a hemispheric one, even in the nineteenth century. In each chapter Marques traces slave traders as they strategically adapted to the changing legal, economic, and geopolitical landscapes of the Atlantic world. He begins in the early republic. The years between the American Revolution and the Slave Trade Act of 1807 saw the rapid growth of U.S. slave trading. Tied to a burgeoning maritime sector, slave trading linked American ports such as Bristol, Rhode Island, to Africa, the U.S. South, Brazil, and—of particular importance after the Haitian Revolution—Cuba. Following passage of the 1807 and 1820 anti–slave trade laws, which outlawed the transatlantic slave trade and made involvement in slave trading into piracy, Americans sold their expertise. They worked as captains, crew members, and agents on Spanish and Portuguese slaving vessels destined for the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. Naturalized U.S. citizens were particularly desirable. In the event of capture, they could evade punishment better than native-born Americans. In other instances, American expertise was material; U.S.-built vessels, usually clippers from Baltimore, became a hallmark of the nineteenth-century transatlantic trade. In myriad ways, Americans continued to profit from and be complicit in the transatlantic slave trade decades after condemning it. The American Civil War effectively eradicated the transatlantic slave trade by galvanizing Spanish and Cuban elites to suppress the remaining traffic after the abolition of slavery in the United States. [End Page 442] Those interested in the history of the American South will find the region largely absent from Marques's book. Southern planters, as complicit as they were in the domestic slave trade, were less active in the transatlantic trade. The book's geographic scope, however, is one of its most valuable assets. Attuned to political, economic, and agricultural developments in England, the United States, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and Brazil, Marques admirably writes a sweeping yet nuanced history that captures the extensive, shifting ties between Americans and their southern neighbors. Developments in Africa, however, are overlooked. Methodologically, Marques's scholarship underscores the immense value of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Peppered with statistics and charts, the book exhibits empirical rigor. Yet even with this plethora of numbers, Marques incorporates ample narrative as he traces ships and slavers throughout the Atlantic. That narrative takes readers from the High Court of Admiralty to the shores of Cuba and Brazil and the sea lanes in between. In each of these locales, Americans and others debated what constituted legal involvement in a business that many, including some Americans, saw as a crime against humanity. Mary Draper University of Virginia Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

The gun-slave hypothesis and the 18th century British slave trade

The Gun-Slave Hypothesis is the long-standing idea that European gunpowder technology played a key role in growing the transatlantic slave trade. I combine annual data from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and the Anglo–African Trade Statistics to estimate a Vector Error Correction Model of the 18th century British slave trade that captures four versions of the Gun-Slave Hypothesis: guns-for-slaves-in-exchange, guns-for-slaves-in-production, slaves-for-guns-derived and the gun-slave cycle. Three econometric results emerge. (1) Gunpowder imports and slave exports were co-integrated in a long-run equilibrium relationship. (2) Positive deviations from equilibrium gunpowder “produced” additional slave exports. This guns-for-slaves-in-production result survives 17 placebo tests that replace gunpowder with non-lethal commodities imports. It is also confirmed by an instrumental variables estimation that uses excess capacity in the British gunpowder industry as an instrument for gunpowder. (3) Additional slave exports attracted additional gunpowder imports for 2–3 more years. Together these dynamics formed a gun-slave cycle. Impulse-response functions generate large increases in slave export in response to increases in gunpowder imports. I use these results to explain the growth of slave exports along the Guinea Coast of Africa in the 18th century.

The slave trade and the development of the Atlantic Africa port system, 1400s–1800s

Scholarly work on the transatlantic slave trade has tended to focus on the volume, conditions and the profits of this hideous commerce and its demographic, economic and social impact on the coastal areas of Atlantic Africa. Much has therefore been published about the history of specific ports and coastal regions, but still little is known about the contribution of the slave trade to the overall formation and shaping of the Atlantic Africa port system and its regional port sub-systems, the links between various ports, their commercial struggles, and the variable factors that conditioned changes in their role within the system. This study will partly address these issues by examining how the slave trade, in conjunction with other local, regional and international economic and political dynamics, contributed to the rise and fall of ports in Atlantic Africa and helped shape its port system. In doing so, the analysis is based on shipping information gathered from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and on the specific literature on various slave ports in Atlantic Africa.

Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 by Gregory E. O'Malley

Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, by Gregory E. O'Malley. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 416 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). Gregory O'Malley has written a book that is sure to be required reading for students and scholars of the slave trade in the colonial British Atlantic World. Building on scholarship of the Atlantic slave trade and the material in Voyages: A Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, he extends the study of the Atlantic slave trade to what he terms final passages: the voyages of the intercolonial slave trade. The book deftly combines material from the author's database of intercolonial slave trading voyages, records, and correspondence of merchants and colonial officials, and the limited available testimony of captives in the slave trade to provide an impressive overview of this understudied aspect of Atlantic slavery. Final Passages traces the course of the intercolonial slave trade from its origins with pirates and the grey market to supplying underserved colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and redistributing captives in the second half of the eighteenth century. O'Malley's conviction that historians must understand that the human drama of the victims and the cold calculus of the traders went in hand informs the book from start to finish (349). The opening chapter discusses captives and their experiences, and the author is careful to show that while understanding the logic of traders is central to comprehending the mechanics of the trade, such an approach can highlight, rather than obscure, the testimony from captives that appears throughout the book. In explaining why traders forced slaves to particular destinations on board smaller ships, Final Passages shows how the experiences of slaves in the intercolonial trade could differ markedly from the experience of captives in the Atlantic trade. One of O'Malley's many surprising insights is that the mortality rate of the intercolonial slave trade may have been comparable to that of the deadly Middle Passage. Despite conditions that were in many ways less horrific--captives were less likely to be shackled or held below decks and shorter voyages meant less risk of dehydration or starvation--other factors, such as piracy and prevalence of sick and weakened individuals, may have made the intercolonial trade similarly dangerous for captives. The fifth chapter, covering the North American periphery of the intercolonial trade from the Caribbean, is perhaps the most original section of the book. In the chapter, O'Malley explains how captives from the Caribbean ended up in North American ports, forced to labour on North American plantations. The many strengths of the book are on full display as the text guides the reader through the complex machinations that drew slaves to busy colonial ports like Charleston and backwater colonies like North Carolina. The analysis brings together a wide array of factors--from the limited reach of the Atlantic trade in North America to the desire of Caribbean slave traders for profitable markets for captives undesirable in the West Indies--to explain not only why captives were forced to North America, but also how these additional voyages and destinations took a toll on captives. …

Using the R Package geomnet: Visualizing Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of Africans, 1514-1866

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, hosted by Emory University in Atlanta, GA, contains information about nearly 35,000 voyages of slave ships from Africa to Europe and the Americas between th...