Since 1999, intensive research efforts have vastly increased what is known about the history of coerced migration of transatlantic slaves. A huge database of slave trade voyages from Columbus’s era to the mid-nineteenth century is now available on an open-access Web site, incorporating newly discovered information from archives around the Atlantic world. The groundbreaking essays in this book draw on these new data to explore fundamental questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findings—that the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and more—challenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research. For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org.
Author(s): David Eltis, David Richardson
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 400
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
List of Abbreviations......Page 14
Map of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1501–1867, follows page......Page 15
1. A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade......Page 18
Part I: Origins and Destinations......Page 78
2. The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries......Page 80
3. The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851......Page 112
4. The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Bahia, 1582–1851......Page 147
5. The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century......Page 172
6. The African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba, 1789–1865......Page 193
Part II: National Slave Trades......Page 220
7. The Significance of the French Slave Trade to the Evolution of the French Atlantic World before 1716......Page 222
8. The Dutch in the Atlantic World: New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic......Page 245
9. The Slave Trade of Northern Germany from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries......Page 267
Part III: Some Wider Consequences and Implications of the New Data......Page 290
10. The Slave Trade, Colonial Markets, and Slave Families in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, ca. 1790–ca. 1830......Page 292
11. The Suppression of the Slave Trade and Slave Departures from Angola, 1830s–1860s......Page 330
12. The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades......Page 352
List of Contributors......Page 382
A......Page 384
B......Page 385
C......Page 386
E......Page 387
G......Page 388
L......Page 389
O......Page 390
S......Page 391
V......Page 393
Y......Page 394
