Course materials for/by Peter L.
Patrick. May contain copyright material used for educational
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Materials for LG449
by Prof. Peter L. Patrick
How many people died in the
Atlantic Slave Trade?
Some quick
answers scholars given over the years:
Philip Curtin, 1969, The
Atlantic slave trade: A census
·
conservative figure of about 9
million
Joseph E. Inikori, 1976, “Measuring the Atlantic slave
trade”:
·
15 million
Patrick Manning, 1998, W.E.B. DuBois Institute Data Set
of Slaving Voyages.
·
12 million transported with 10.5 million
arriving alive in the
More radical critiques extend beyond the number of people
taken from African coasts in slave ships, e.g.:
·
start with a number, e.g. 11 million
·
then estimate (very roughly!) that for each person who ‘arrived
alive’, between 2 and 5 others died
o
in the sea passage,
o
in holding-prisons on the African coast,
o
or in the process of capture and transport from the
interior to the coast
·
giving a range of deaths due to the slave trade of anywhere
between
o
22 million
o
and 55 million,
·
not to forget the numbers who dued
in the ‘seasoning period’ after arrival in the
[These estimates, references and
comments were partly gleaned from discussion on H-CARIBBEAN in 2001. As I am
not a historian of slavery, I have taken the various words of several
well-known historians and put them together here for us to think about.]
But how did people arrive at these counts? How can they
differ from each other so much? Isn’t there bias behind any estimate? And most
of all, why should an
outsider to thisdebate accept one estimate
rather than another?
It’s now possible for anyone (that is, who has a few spare
hours to learn about demographic modelling and simulation!) to visit the World
History Network Migration Simulation project:
http://www.worldhistorynetwork.org/migrationsim/index.html
and select the Atlantic Slave Trade
data-set:
http://www.worldhistorynetwork.org/migrationsim/afrsim/atlanticafr.html
where you canlearn
to:
·
Simulate constraints on the Atlantic Slave Trade
mathematically
·
Vary 5 typical conditions of enslavement to see different
results
·
Even prepare your own data files and simulate all conditions.
This is harder than it sounds, but even stumbling blindly
through it for 10 minutes will give you a rough sense of:
·
How complicated the questions are,
·
How much we don’t know,
·
How many plausible guesses exist,
·
How different their outcomes are, and most of all,
·
How staggering the numbers are, under any reasonable
guess.
A Brief Bibliography
Curtin, Philip
D. 1969. The Atlantic slave trade: A
census.
Eltis, David. 2000. The rise of African slavery in the
Eltis, David, and David Richardson, eds. 1997. Routes to slavery: direction,
ethnicity and mortality in the transatlantic slave trade.
Eltis, David, Stephen D. Behrendt,
David Richardson, & Herbert S. Klein, eds. 2000. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database
on CD-ROM.
Inikori, Joseph E. 1976. Measuring the Atlantic slave trade: An assessment of Curtin and
Anstey. Journal of
Inikori,
Joseph E. ed. 1982.
Forced Migration: the
impact of the export slave trade on African societies.
Inikori,
Joseph E., and
Lovejoy, Paul
E. 1982. The volume of the Atlantic slave trade: A synthesis. Journal of African Studies
22.
Lovejoy, Paul
E. 1983. Transformations in slavery: a history of slavery in
Manning,
Patrick. 1981. The enslavement of Africans: A demographic model. Canadian Journal of African Studies 15(3): 499-526.
Manning,
Patrick. 1990. Slavery and African life:
Occidental, Oriental, and African slave trades.
Stannard, David
E. 1992. American holocaust: The conquest of the New World.
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