David Eltis

The trans-atlantic slave trade : a database on CD-ROM

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The volume and structure of the transatlantic slave trade: a reassessment.

Period Portuguese British French Dutch Spanish United States Canada Danish* All nations 1519-1600 264.1 2.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.

The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World

V iolent resistance by Africans forced on board slave ships in the VAtlantic and Indian Oceans has received far less attention than has the same phenomenon on plantations-the ultimate destinations of those vessels. In the last third of the twentieth century, in which perhaps 95 per cent of the total scholarship on slavery has appeared, there have been published just five articles on the topic, to which might be added a few obligatory descriptive pages on slave revolts in each of the general histories of the slave trade from Mannix and Cowley in the 1960s to that of Thomas in the late 1 990s.1 Resistance by slaves in the Americas, by contrast, has provided the focal point of whole scholarly careers. Given the fact that slaves spent an average of 11 weeks on a vessel and the rest of their lives in bondage in the Americas, this may at first sight seem appropriate, but some new data, collected as a spin-off from a much larger project on the transatlantic slave trade, in fact suggest the opposite. What happened on board transatlantic slave vessels now appears to have been central to the shaping of the early modem Atlantic world and warrants much closer attention. The article is divided into three sections. Section I briefly describes the data on which the article is based, explores key features of shipboard slave revolts, and investigates possible explanations of them. Some aspects of revolts, notably variations in the incidence of revolts by African region of embarkation of slaves, are difficult to explain and require further research. In section II insurance and shipping records are drawn on in an attempt to calculate the impact of shipboard resistance by Africans to enslavement on the cost structure of slaving voyages. Section III then sets resistance in the wider contexts of the costs of coerced labour in the Americas and of Euro-African power relations in pre-colonial Africa. It also estimates the impact of African agency on the number and coastal origins of slaves carried across the Atlantic and thereby on the location and size of slave systems of the Americas.

The Antislavery debate : capitalism and abolitionism as a problem in historical interpretation

This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The center of controversy is the emergence of the antislavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to this development. The essays delve beyond these issues, however, to raise a deeper question of historical interpretation: What are the relations between consciousness, moral action, and social change? The debate illustrates that concepts common in historical practice are not so stable as we have thought them to be. It is about concepts as much as evidence, about the need for clarity in using the tools of contemporary historical practice. The participating historians are scholars of great distinction. Beginning with an essay published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Thomas L. Haskell challenged the interpretive framework of David Brion Daviss celebrated study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. The AHR subsequently published responses by Davis and by John Ashworth, as well as a rejoinder by Haskell. The AHR essays and the relevant portions of Daviss book are reprinted here. In addition, there are two new essays by Davis and Ashworth and a general consideration of the subject by Thomas Bender. This is a highly disciplined, insightful presentation of a major controversy in historical interpretation that will expand the debate into new realms.

The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain

John Stuart Mills comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.

Nutritional trends in Africa and the Americas: heights of Africans, 1819-1839.

Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, I8I9-I839 Recent attempts to understand differences in the development of slave societies in the Americas have generated a number of studies on the growth patterns and stature of the progenitors of modern Afro-Americans. Such work provides important insights into the living conditions, demographic performances, and, through these, the basic cultural parameters of black and racially mixed societies. Some recent studies have pointed to significant differences between African-born slaves and Creoles, and data from some of the British colonies are sufficiently detailed to permit a breakdown of African-born slaves by region of embarkation. The focus of this work, however, has necessarily been on the Americas. Many in the African-born groups would have crossed the Atlantic as children or adolescents and, in consequence, their growth patterns and even their final stature may have been influenced by their new environments. The literature has long recognized the importance of both genetic and environmental factors on human growth, acknowledging that the interaction between the two is complex and imperfectly understood. As part of a long campaign to suppress the slave trade, the British negotiated treaties with several foreign countries to provide for the establishment of courts of mixed commission to adjudicate cases involving suspected slave ships. The data for this study come from copies of the records of the courts at Sierra Leone deposited at the Public Record Office in London. Between I819 and I845 British cruisers landed almost 60,000 Africans at Sierra Leone, most of whom had been recaptured while en route to the Americas or to islands off the African coast. The age,

Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage: New Evidence from the Nineteenth Century

New data on mortality and voyage length in the nineteenth-century slave trade make possible further testing of hypotheses on why slaves died during the middle passage. Mortality rates (defined as [deaths] per slaves embarked/voyage length in days x 1000) were higher in the nineteenth century than in earlier centuries and varied markedly between regions of embarkation. In the high mortality regions all ships in the sample appeared to have experienced a higher death rate suggesting that epidemics were not of prime importance. Mortality rates do not appear to have fluctuated very much during the voyage nor does the slaves-per-ton variable have much explanatory power. The major explanation is probably endemic disease. (EXCERPT)

Slavery in the development of the Americas

Part I. Establishing the System: 1. White Atlantic? The choice for African slave labor in the plantation Americas Seymour Drescher 2. The Dutch and the slave Americas Pieter C. Emmer Part II. Patterns of Slave Use: 3. Mercantile strategies, credit networks, and labor supply in the colonial Chesapeake in trans-Atlantic perspective Lorena S. Walsh 4. African slavery in the production of subsistence crops, the case of Sao Paulo in the nineteenth century Fransisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein 5. The transition from slavery to freedom through manumission: a life-cycle approach applied to the United States and Guadeloupe Frank D. Lewis Part III. Productivity Change and Its Implications: 6. Prices of African slaves newly arrived in the Americas, 1673-1865: new evidence on long-run trends and regional differentials David Eltis and David Richardson 7. American slave markets during the 1850s: slave price rises in the US, Cuba, and Brazil in comparative perspective Laird W. Bergad 8. The relative efficiency of free and slave agriculture in the antebellum United States: a stochastic production frontier approach Elizabeth B. Field-Hendrey and Lee A. Craig Part IV. Implications for Distribution and Growth: 9. Slavery and economic growth in Virginia, 1760-1860: a view from probate records James R. Irwin 10. The poor: slaves in early America Philip D. Morgan 11. The North-South wage gap, before and after the Civil War Robert A. Margo The writings of Stanley L. Engerman.

The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana

Europe and the Americas have long dominated studies of transatlantic exchanges and much more is known about European participation in the Atlantic world than of its African counterpart. Current knowledge of how those parts of Africa located a few miles away from the African littoral contributed to the early modern Atlantic World is particularly sparse. This is despite the fact that the slave trade was the largest branch of transatlantic migration between Columbian contact and 1870, and that it is becoming apparent that Africans and indigenous Americans helped shape the new political and economic power structures, as well as the post-Columbian worlds of culture and labor. Assessments of the impact of any group on the global stage must begin with the nature of the group itself, and thus efforts to raise the African profile in Atlantic scholarship and to focus on the agency of Africans must quickly face the contentious issue of ethnicity. From the broadest perspective, it is odd that the way the ancestors of the Atlantic World defined themselves should have become so much more contentious among Africanists and Afro-Americanists than among those scholars who study Europe and Europeans overseas. At the outset of the repeopling of the Americas, the European state existed in nascent form in only Spain, Britain, and France. The predominance of the nation-state in the way the world is organized in the twenty-first century—rather than its status in 1492—has perhaps led scholars to stress the contrasts between Africa and Europe on issues of early modern nationhood, and, more generally, human identity.

The Cambridge world history of slavery

1. Dependence, servility and coerced labor in time and space David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman Part I. Slavery in Africa and Asia Minor: 2. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era Ehud R. Toledano 3. Slavery in Islamic Africa Rudolph T. Ware III 4. Slavery in non-Islamic West Africa, 1420-1820 G. Ugo Nwokeji 5. Slaving and resistance to slaving in west central Africa Roquinaldo Ferreira 6. White slavery in the early modern era William G. Clarence-Smith and David Eltis Part II. Slavery in Asia: 7. Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420-1804 Kerry Ward 8. Slavery in early modern China Pamela Kyle Crossley Part III. Slavery among the Indigenous Americans: 9. Slavery in indigenous North America Leland Donald 10. Indigenous slavery in South America, 1492-1820 Neil L. Whitehead Part IV. Slavery and Serfdom in Eastern Europe: 11. Slavery and the rise of serfdom in Russia Richard Hellie 12. Manorialism and rural subjection in east central Europe, 1500-1800 Edgar Melton Part V. Slavery in the Americas: 13. Slavery in the Atlantic islands and the early modern Spanish Atlantic world William D. Phillips, Jr 14. Slavery and politics in colonial Portuguese America: the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Joao Fragoso and Ana Rios 15. Slavery in the British Caribbean Philip D. Morgan 16. Slavery on the colonial North American mainland Lorena S. Walsh 17. Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1635-1804 Laurent Dubois 18. Slavery and the slave trade of the minor Atlantic powers Pieter Emmer Part VI. Cultural and Demographic Patterns in the Americas: 19. Demography and family structures B. W. Higman 20. The concept of creolization Richard Price 21. Black women in the early Americas Betty Wood Part VII. Legal Structures, Economics and the Movement of Coerced Peoples in the Atlantic World: 22. Involuntary migration in the early modern world, 1500-1800 David Richardson 23. Slavery, freedom and the law in the Atlantic world, 1420-1807 Sue Peabody 24. European forced labor in the early modern era Timothy Coates 25. Transatlantic slavery and economic development in the Atlantic world: West Africa, 1450-1850 Joseph E. Inikori Part VIII. Slavery and Resistance: 26. Slave worker rebellions and revolution in the Americas to 1804 Mary Turner 27. Runaways and quilombolas in the Americas Manolo Florentino and Marcia Amantino.