Slave Trade

Slave Trade

THE NUMBERS

POLITICAL ECONOMY

MORALITY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The history of most modern societies has involved, in some form or fashion, the use of coerced labor, including the institution of slavery and the exploitation of slave labor. And where slavery existed—defined as a system in which the production process is carried out by human beings owned by other human beings—a mechanism for supplying slaves was necessary. This mechanism is called the slave trade. While slavery and the slave trade as concepts and as practices have an ancient pedigree and global itineraries, their relationship to the history, practices, and realities of modern societies continues to stir considerable concern and controversy. The tools of historians must be combined with tools and insights from economics, political science, and other social sciences to explore how empirical data and theoretical debates have animated our understanding of the slave trade’s global history, especially the transatlantic slave trade.

Slavery was commonplace in many ancient societies, including Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Slaves were forced to work in almost all sectors—agriculture, mining, domestic service, and even as gladiators and soldiers. Many of these slaves were captured in war, but formal mechanisms to supply slaves were also well established. Rome drew its slaves from all over its expanding empire, for example, and at one point there were as many slaves as there were Roman citizens. The slave trade was also a prominent feature of medieval societies, with Africans being enslaved and shipped to the Muslim world across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Scholars have estimated that as many as 19 million people from sub-Saharan Africa were shipped to the Muslim world between 650 and 1890.

Until the fifteenth century, the major destination for the slave trade was the Muslim world, with slaves coming from Africa and from Europe. In fact, the word slave is derived from the word slav, the name for a large ethnic and linguistic group residing in eastern and southeastern Europe, including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, and others. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Africa became the major source of slaves, and the international slave trade was dominated by Portugal, reflecting the development of European colonies in the Americas that needed labor. In the seventeenth century, Britain emerged as the largest carrier of slaves.

THE NUMBERS

There have been three waves of estimates regarding the numbers of Africans who were traded as commodities in the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean. The first wave included estimates ventured by scholars who repeated earlier numbers gleaned mainly from popular writing and not based on systematic analysis—W. E. B. Du Bois’s approximation of 100,000,000 Africans lost to the slave trade was a prime example. Such estimates were the main target of Phillip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), one of the pioneering studies seeking to provide more accurate numbers. The second wave of estimates, to which Curtin contributed, was based on more extensive compilation and synthesis of available data and estimates using statistical inferences based on population changes in importing countries, but not on research into original sources. Curtin provided an estimate of 9,566,100 Africans between 1451 and 1870, concluding provocatively that it was unlikely that new scholarship would alter his estimate by a number greater than 10 percent. Noel Deerr’s The History of Sugar (1949-1950) was an earlier representative of this tradition extended but not initiated by Curtin’s census. The major impact of Curtin’s work was not its originality but its method, comprehensiveness, and timing, appearing at a time when concerns over race and race relations were mounting, and drastically lower estimates of the number of Africans traded were bound to provoke controversy.

Joseph Inikori (1976, 1982) provided one of the earliest critiques of these census efforts. He pointed to his own research and synthesized the work of other scholars as the basis for concluding that Curtin’s estimate required a 40 percent upward adjustment. Most important was his discovery of new shipping data that provided more accurate numbers of slaves carried. Beyond confirming that all such estimates are far from complete or final, the continuing debate underscores the centrality of intellectual history in exploring heated disagreements in historical interpretation where perspectives are shaped by the dynamics of color, class, nationality, morality, disciplinary paradigms, ideological orientations, and claims about objectivity.

A third wave is represented by scholars who have compiled the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD), sponsored by Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute and published in 1999. With data on more than 27,000 slave voyages, TSTD concluded that 11,062,000 Africans were transported from Africa between 1519 and 1867, with 9.6 million landing in the Americas, figures not substantially different from Curtin’s. More than half were carried between 1700 and 1799, and about 30 percent after the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States in 1807. Beginning with Prince Henry’s traders in 1441, Portugal was the major carrier in the trade involving Africans, and 75 percent of all slaves were carried by the Portuguese in the first 150 years of the trade. Overall, however, British citizens transported 46 percent of all Africans, followed by the Portuguese (29.1%), France (13.2%), Spain (4.8%), the Netherlands (4.7%), and Denmark (1%). Only 2.5 percent of all slaves were transported by slave merchants based in the United States and British Caribbean. Up until 1820, more Africans were transported across the Atlantic than Europeans—8.4 million Africans to 2.4 million Europeans.

TSTD enables more detailed attention to the geographical distribution of the origins and destinations of enslaved Africans and the resulting demographic and cultural shape of the “diaspora” in which Africans were dispersed or scattered. Almost 45 percent of all slaves came from the West African coast that is today Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin, and parts of Nigeria, for example. As destinations, 41 percent of enslaved Africans were shipped to present-day Brazil, 27 percent to British America, 11 percent to French territories, and 13 percent to Spanish territories. And there was method in the madness, with European slave traders and slave-purchasing areas in the Americas showing preference for Africans from particular regions (e.g., rice-growing South Carolina preferred slaves from Gambia and rice-growing regions of West Africa).

There have also been substantial updates to TSTD, bearing out earlier and unwelcome insistence that all such estimates were only provisional. A new revised TSTD now includes over 34,000 slaving voyages. It recognizes “major gaps” in the 1999 database, especially with regard to the early history of the slave trade and that of Brazil, the largest importing nation. It adds 7,000 new voyages and provides additional information on more than 10,000 voyages in the 1999 database.

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Political economy generally denotes an approach that focuses on the relationship of economic activity—trade and commerce as well as production—and their interrelationships with the activities of government, politics, and the broader society. To paraphrase Adam Smith’s 1776 title for his pioneering volume in this tradition, the slave trade and slavery’s contribution to “the wealth [and poverty] of nations” was critical. This line of thinking was continued in the next century by Karl Marx, who pondered in Vol. 1 of Capital, “the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins” as an initial source for early investment in capitalist production. The approach is also closely related to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974) and similar discussions by such scholars as J. M. Blaut (1992, p. 206) of “the role played by colonialism in industrial production.”

Meeting the need for labor in the Americas was essential if European nations were to realize the goals of mercantilism—favorable trade balance, increased amounts of precious metals, and the like. Therefore, beyond the issue of how many Africans were taken from the continent into slavery in the Americas—especially the horrendous treatment during the middle passage between Africa and the Americas—and who played what role in enslaving them, is the need to understand the contribution of African labor to wealth production in the various nations that were carriers of slaves and beneficiaries from the economic productivity of slave labor.

Expectedly, sharp differences have emerged as well over this area, generally termed “profitability” of the slave trade, an assessment dependent in part on calculations of the number of slaves traded. For example, Roger Anstey (1975) suggested 9.6 percent as the rate of profit in the British slave trade between 1761 and 1897, calculating profits by using data on the number of slaves landed, slave prices, and other data on cost and revenue. Inikori (1976) provided evidence pointing to underestimations in the number of slaves landed in the West Indies and the average price for which slaves were sold. William Darity (1985) used these corrected figures to demonstrate a plausible increase in the rate of profits from 9.6 percent to 30.8 percent, a figure consistent with the conclusion of Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

Efforts to calculate the contribution of the slave trade to economic development became more controversial when prominent scholars concluded that profits from the slave trade were not large enough to make a significant contribution to British industrialization, a view that diverged from the long-held conventional wisdom about the impact of what had been called “the triangular trade” (Anstey 1975; Engerman 1972; Davis 1984, p. 73). Darity (1990), Barbara Solow (1991), and others highlighted the impact that different definitions, theoretical assumptions and economic models can have in calculating rates of profits, concluding that the slave trade was a relatively important source of industrial capital. Moreover, Ronald Bailey (1986, 1990) has given the term “slave(ry) trade”—activities related both to the slave trade and slavery and closer to the “multiplier effect” concept used by some economists—as the source of profits that should be utilized in calculating contributions to industrialization and not just profits from buying and selling slaves. Substituting profits from the Caribbean trade in place of profits solely from the sale of slaves, he concluded that enough profits could have been generated to finance the British industrial revolution several times over. (As an additional example, the 7,000 new voyages added to the 1999 TSTD database discussed above requires a recalculation of the slave trade’s impact on the expansion of the ship-building and shipping industry.)

In this approach, this contribution from the “slave(ry) trade” would include the important role and economic significance of agricultural crops produced by slave labor in the colonies, including sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, and cotton, as well as profits generated in related shipping, banking and insurance, and manufacturing, a central thesis in Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and argued by Inikori (2002). Importantly, this approach facilitates a sharper focus on the role of slavery and the slave trade in U.S. history, an emphasis admirably treated, for example, by Du Bois (1896) and in the chapter on “Black Merchandise” in Lorenzo Greene’s The Negro in Colonial New England (1942).

MORALITY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Ships in the transatlantic slave trade rarely carried Europeans and were rarely owned and operated by Africans. This color/race and class dynamic helps to explain why the controversy over the slave trade provokes sharp debates over morality and ethics. It is so potent because modern capitalist nations, which early prohibited the enslavement of Europeans, were the world’s leaders in the enslavement and trade of Africans, a legacy related to both poverty and racism that hovers over world history and the history of many nations and peoples. Even more perplexing, the slave trade and slavery were consolidated and expanded at the same time as the rise of the progressive transatlantic philosophical movement called the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, and such practices were enshrined and extended, not abolished, by the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. Edmund S. Morgan, a scholar of early America, was provoked to probe the paradoxical marriage of convenience he called “American slavery/American freedom.”

Ideas about abolition surfaced as early as the late 1600s with the work of the Quakers and other religious groups, but it was not until 1807 that legislation to end the slave trade was enacted in Great Britain and in the United States. It was another eighty years before such practices were finally outlawed by all of the nations whose citizens had been involved as slavers and beneficiaries of slavery. Scholarly debates regarding the root causes of abolition and the slow unfolding of its success have been as intense as those regarding the causes and consequences of slavery and the slave trade, with some scholars emphasizing humanitarian motives and others stressing economic and political dynamics. That the system of U.S. slavery that fueled the transatlantic slave trade necessitated for its abolition a civil war resulting in the deaths of more than 620,000 people will guarantee that discussion and debate will continue in the decades to come.

Two hundred years after the 1807 abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain and the implementation of a similar measure in the U.S. Constitution, the slave trade continues to rest uncomfortably in scholarship and in social memory. In recent times, the controversy has taken the form of calls for and debates over apologies for participation in the slave trade and slavery, and over the payment of some form of “reparations” similar to what was provided to Jews and other victims of the Holocaust and to U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in World War II camps. And there are growing contemporary movements to grapple with new forms of slavery, poverty, and economic coercion in a deepening globalized economy. Research, thinking, and writing about the history of the slave trade should provide a solid foundation for understanding and acting in the present and future.

SEE ALSO Caribbean, The; Cotton Industry; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Engerman, Stanley; Holocaust, The; Immigrants to North America; Incarceration, Japanese American; Inikori, Joseph; James, C. L. R.; Jews; Marx, Karl; Mercantilism; Plantation; Race; Racism; Rodney, Walter; Roma, The; Slave-Gun Cycle; Slavery; Slavery Industry; Smith, Adam; Sugar Industry; White Supremacy; Williams, Eric; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anstey, Roger. 1975. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Bailey, Ronald W. 1986. Africa, the Slave Trade, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Europe and the United States: A Historiographic Review. American History: A Bibliographic Review 2: 1-91.

Bailey, Ronald W. 1990. The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England. Social Science History 14 (3): 373-414; reprinted in Stanley Engerman and Joseph Inikori. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economics, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992.

Blaut, J. M. 1992. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford.

Curtin, Phillip. 1969. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Darity, William, Jr. 1985. The Numbers Game and the Profitability of the British Trade in Slaves. Journal of Economic History 45 (3): 693-703.

Darity, William, Jr. 1990. British Industry and the West Indies Plantations. Social Science History 14 (1): 117-149.

Davis, David Brion. 1984. Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deerr, Noel. 1949-1950. The History of Sugar. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.

Drake, St. Clair. 1987-1990. Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology. 2 vols. Los Angeles: University of California Center for Afro-American Studies.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1896 [1999]. Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Eltis, David. 2001. The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 58: 17-46.

Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein. 1999. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press. The revised database, released February 2007, was sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is accessible at http://www.dataarchive.ac.uk.

Engerman, Stanley. 1972. The Slave Trade and British Capital Formation in the Eighteenth Century: A Comment on the Williams Thesis. Business History Review 46: 430-443.

Greene, Lorenzo. 1942. The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776. New York: Columbia University Press.

Inikori, Joseph. 1976. Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey. Journal of African History 17: 197-223.

Inikori, Joseph, ed. 1982. Forced Migration : The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies. New York: Africana Publishing.

Inikori, Joseph. 2002. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rodney, Walter. 1974. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Solow, Barbara, ed. 1991. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ronald W. Bailey