Preliminary Programme

This paper focuses on the Iberian slave trade from the 15th to the 17th century, with particular attention to the interaction between the Mediterranean and Atlantic economies. Based on archival sources integrated into the new Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, I will analyze the volume, composition (gender distribution), and the direction of the Iberian trade. With regard to the latter, the paper highlights the regions of origin of the African slaves (Senegambia, Benin, and Congo) and their arrival ports in both Europe (Lisbon and Seville) and the Americas (Cartagena, Vera Cruz, and Saint-Domingue). Finally, I will elaborate on the overall costs and benefits of the trade. (Show less)

The Atlantic slave trade from Angola peaked at the age of abolition. Therefore, the origins of slaves leaving Angola cannot be better traced than in the nineteenth century. Abolitionists all around the Atlantic basin sought to record the fate of Africans rescued from slave vessels by British anti-slave trade cruisers, or who were in potential risk of being sold into Atlantic markets. The new Transatlantic Slave Trade Database allows the tracking of these vessels from Africa to their intended destination in the Americas. Lists made by mixed-commissioned courts in Sierra Leone and Cuba, between the 1820s and 1840s, provide data from which the origins of liberated Africans from Angola can be inferred. Registers made by Portuguese colonial officials in Africa during the 1850s prevented slaves of being sold across the Atlantic, but they have also left traces of their origins in the Angolan interior. Abolitionism inspired and created tools to suppress the Atlantic slave trade but, in the process, it left valuable records for recovering the origins of those leaving the African coast as slaves. (Show less)

The expanded on-line version of the transatlantic slave trade database has made possible the discovery of new patterns of slave trading in the Atlantic World, as well as greatly facilitated the presentation and interpretation of the data that were already published in 1999. This paper describes the expansion of information since the publication of the CD-ROM, summarizes the broader implications of what we now know, and describes how scholars and teachers may use the new interface. Topics include the size and direction of the overall slave trade, cross-Atlantic connections, and how these new findings allow us to look at some of the larger questions in Atlantic history in a new way. (Show less)

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the prices of newly-arrived slaves in the Caribbean were between four and six times the average prices paid for slaves in Africa. Using the records of the Royal Africa Company as laid out in the transatlantic slave trade database, we break down the sources of the price differential. Preliminary work, based on a small sample of ships, would suggest that in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the price differential was due mainly to slave mortality and morbidity on the voyage. But a large part of the differential also represented the cost of supplies for the voyage, the payments to the ship owner, and the commission to the ship’s captain. It appears that ships which also traded in other goods significantly reduced their net cost of transporting slaves. Much of this cost reduction appears, however, not to have increased the profitability of the trade to the Royal African Company. Rather, due to the competitive nature of the trade, it led to higher prices of slaves in Africa in those regions, such as the Gold Coast or the Loango Coast, where a trade in gold, dyewood and ivory served to offset the other costs. The data on which the cost estimates are based include the outbound accounts of the ships from England, which document the supplies and funds on board. Also used, where available, are the accounts of the trades in Africa, which include the prices paid for slaves. The detailed records of the slave sales in the Caribbean, and the related transactions are central to determining the effect of mortality and morbidity, as well as some other costs. Finally, the inward-bound reports allow us to complete the picture of how the voyage costs related to slave prices on both sides of the Atlantic. This last set of accounts is central to explaining how transporting gold, ivory and other goods helped reduce the cost of transporting slaves. (Show less)