Notes on Slave-Trade Historiography

On the causes of the African Slave Trade

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans. Second, and of most relevance for present-day development outcomes, why was the overwhelming majority of ...

TRADE LIBERALISATION Lecture Notes

Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply

The comment by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and David Richardson brings to the fore issues about productivity growth in slave-based economies, and about broader interpretations of those societies and their successor economies. Their assessment confirms that prices derived from probate inventories behaved like those derived from market transactions, suggesting that rich data available in probate in...

The African diaspora: mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic slave trade.

Between the 15th and 19th centuries ad, the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the forced movement of approximately 13 million people from Africa, mainly to the Americas. Only approximately 11 million survived the passage, and many more died in the early years of captivity. We have studied 481 mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of recent African ancestry in the Americas and in Eurasia, in an attempt to ...

Volume and Direction of the Atlantic Slave Trade , 1650 - 1870 :

This article presents methods and results in the application of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis to a problem in missing data. The data used here are from The Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTDB), 2010 version, available online. Of the 35,000 transatlantic slaving voyages known at that time, original data on the size of the cargo of captives exist for some 25 percent of voyage emb...