Philip D. Curtin

Epidemiology and the slave trade.

Historians have begun to show a new interest in the slave trade. Recent developments in historical demographv, economic history, and the history of Africa have solved some of the old problems and posed new ones. The mere passage of time makes it possible to go beyond the largely humanitarian concerns of the nineteenth-century writers, concerns that arose out of the great debate over slavery as a question of policy. We can now accept the trade as an evil and move on to the problem of why and how it took place for so many centuries and on such a scale. The recent trend toward a world-historical perspective and away from parochial national history also calls for a new approach to the broad patterns of Atlantic history. Social and economic development on the tropical shores of the Atlantic was a single p. -cess, regardless of the theoretically self-contained empires of mercantilist Europe. From the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, the central institution was the plantation, located in tropical America, worked by slave labor from tropical Africa, but directed by Europeans and producing tropical staples for European consumption. The broader patterns of society and economy were much the same in all the plantation colonies, regardless of metropolitan control. These patterns were not only different from those of Europe; they were also different from those of European settlements in temperate North America, the Indian Ocean trading

The slavery hypothesis for hypertension among African Americans : the historical evidence

The slavery hypothesis for hypertension has stated that the high blood pressures sometimes measured in African Americans are caused by one or more of these conditions: first, salt deficiency in the parts of Africa that supplied slaves for the Americas; second, the trauma of the slave trade itself; third, conditions of slavery in the United States. A review of the historical evidence shows that there was no salt deficiency in those parts of Africa, nor do present-day West Africans have a high incidence of hypertension. Historical evidence does not support the hypothesis that deaths aboard slave ships were caused mainly by conditions that might be conductive to hypertension, such as salt-depleting diseases. Finally, the hypothesis has depended heavily on evidence from the West Indies, which is not relevant for the United States. There is no evidence that diet or the resulting patterns of disease and demography among slaves in the American South were significantly different from those of other poor southerners.

Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.

The Archives of Tropical Africa: a Reconnaissance

As African governments have become richer of late, they have become more interested in their past, and the outside world has become more conscious that there is an African past worth investigating. Out of all these tendencies, colonial governments and newly-independent states alike have begun to put their government documents in order and to open them for historical research. This process of creating regular archives in tropical Africa has moved fast in the last decade, and it is time to begin assessing the consequences—in terms of documents now physically available, and with a view to their possible value as sources for African history.

African health at home and abroad.

In the nineteenth century, annual reports of European military medical authorities usually carried some such title as “The Health of the Army at Home and Abroad.” Though historians have recently studied the health of slaves in transit and the demographic patterns of slave populations in the New World, they have not paid much attention to these military data. For the West Indies they begin in 1803, for West Africa in 1810. After 1819, it is possible to trace the disease patterns of West Indian and West African populations in the last decades of the slave trade and on into the early twentieth century. These records help to show what happened epidemiologically to populations of African descent that crossed the Atlantic in both directions.

African Enterprise in the Mangrove Trade: The Case of Lamu

The mangrove trade between east Africa and the Persian Gulf has been curiously neglected by contemporaneous reporters--and by historians. It is mentioned in several of the pre-Portuguese Arabic texts, and Neville Chittick believes mangrove poles were an important element in east Africa trade to Arabia from its beginnings. Yet many European authors dealt in romantic images of gold, slaves, and tortoise shell, to the neglect of a mundane product with no European demand. Nineteenth-century visitors like Owen, Guillain, and Fitzgerald say nothing at all about mangrove exports. Fitzgerald, indeed, noted that they were cut in the vicinity of Lamu on the Kenya coast but explicitly denied that they were exported in the 1890s. Yet, by 1901-02 the Kenya government export figures indicate an exported value of ? 3,500, implying an export of about 400,000 individual poles (see Appendix). At a typical dhow load of around 6,000 poles, considerable fleets must have been involved. No trade of this size could

Cross-Cultural Trade in World History.

A single theme is pursued in this book - the trade between peoples of differing cultures through world history. Extending from the ancient world to the coming of the commercial revolution, Professor Curtins discussion encompasses a broad and diverse group of trading relationships. Drawing on insights from economic history and anthropology, Professor Curtin has attempted to move beyond a Europe-centred view of history, to one that can help us understand the entire range of societies in the human past. Examples have been chosen that illustrate the greatest variety of trading relationships between cultures. The opening chapters look at Africa, while subsequent chapters treat the ancient world, the Mediterranean trade with China, the Asian trade in the east, and European entry into the trade with maritime Asia, the Armenian trade carriers of the seventeenth century, and the North American fur trade. Wide-ranging in its concern and the fruit of exhaustive research, the book is nevertheless written so as to be accessible and stimulating to the specialist and the student alike.

The African Diaspora

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the plantation aspect of the African diaspora. The most significant recent tendency in the historiography of the African diaspora is the recognition that such a thing existed. Historians wrote about the slave trade and slavery but only in a national context. North American historians dealt with slavery in the United States; British, with the British slave trade to the Caribbean; French, Dutch, and Portuguese, with similar aspects of their own imperial economies. The East African slave trade of the nineteenth century was a minor note in British imperial history, and hardly anyone paid attention to the trans-Sahara trade or to older branches that carried at least a trickle of people from Africa to India and even further east. The plantation aspect of the African diaspora was not confined to the Atlantic. The 18th-century Europeans bought slaves in Africa and settled them on sugar plantations in the Mascarene Islands, especially Reunion and Mauritius, which rapidly took on a West Indian pattern of society.

The Problem of Survival

During the whole of the nineteenth century, the most important problem for Europeans in West Africa was simply that of keeping alive. Until the 1840’s the essential facts about the “climate” remained what they had been in the eighteenth century. Any European activity exacted an appalling price. Every assignment of missionaries or officials, every journey of exploration, every trading voyage or anti-slavery patrol took its toll. Unlike the situation of the later eighteenth century, when men could plan in optimistic ignorance, the facts were now more broadly publicized. Lind and some others had spoken out earlier, but the coastal experiments of the 1790’s brought the image of West Africa as “the white man’s grave” into new focus. The initial death rate for Europeans sent to the Province of Freedom had been 46 per cent. The Sierra Leone Company lost 49 per cent of its European staff, and the Bulama Island Association lost 61 per cent in the first year.1 These figures were not far out of line with the eighteenth-century expectation of a 20 per cent loss from the crew on a slaving voyage to the Coast, but they were something to ponder.

Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century

List of tables, figures, and maps Preface List of abbreviations 1. The mortality revolution and the tropical world: relocation costs in the early nineteenth century 2. Sanitation and tropical hygiene at mid-century 3. Killing diseases of the tropical world 4. Relocation costs in the late nineteenth century 5. The revolution in hygiene and tropical medicine 6. The pursuit of disease, 1870-1914 Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.