David Eltis
Biographic Data
| ID | 159663 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Eltis |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Eltis |
| SIGNATURE | ELTIS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5500-0388 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 139 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 966 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 128 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 11 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. In this extraordinary book, two leading historians have created the first comprehensive, up-to-date atlas on this 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion. It features nearly 200 maps, especially created for the volume, that explore every detail of the African slave traffic to the New Wor…
The Roots of Portuguese Domination over the Transatlantic Slave Trade
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Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades
In this comprehensive work, David Eltis offers a two-thousand-year perspective on the trafficking of people, and boldly intervenes in the expansive discussions about slavery in the last half-century. Using new and underexplored data made available by slavevoyages.org, Eltis offers compelling explanations of why the slave trades began and why they ended, and in the process debunks long-held assumptions, including how bilateral rather than triangul…
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery, by Ana Lucia Araujo
In Memoriam: David Richardson
The Origins and Destinations of Captives from the Bight of Biafra, 1807–1843: New Evidence from the Identification of African Names and Languages
Between 1807 and 1843, British naval officers liberated more than thirty thousand Africans from slave vessels that embarked enslaved people along the Bight of Biafra. Large ledger books display these Liberated Africans' names, sexes, ages, and other characteristics. The names, many of which are easily recognizable today, provide clues about individuals pulled into the transatlantic trade and reveal a range of experiences that shaped the lives of …
Is the SlaveVoyages database useful for scholars of slave trading in the wider Indian Ocean World
Assessing the differences between scholarly collaboration on slave trading in the Atlantic World, on the one hand, and similar activities in the wider Indian Ocean, on the other, needs to begin with an assessment of the relative importance of slave trading in the two oceans. Both oceans saw a maritime slave trade that drew heavily on sub–Saharan Africa. But while almost all captives arriving in the Americas came from Africa, in the Indian Ocean W…
Fluctuations in sex and age ratios in the transatlantic slave trade, 1663-18641
The determinants of the age and sex composition of the transatlantic slave trade have long been a source of historical discussion. Contemporaries, including participants in the trade, analysed and debated the causes of the patterns they observed, as well as the consequences for the demographic, economic, and social developments both of Africa and of the Americas. A number of major economic and social issues related to Africa and the Americas are …
Slavery in the Medieval Millennium
General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The …
The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500-AD 1420
Medieval slavery has received little attention relative to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome and in the early modern Atlantic world. This imbalance in the scholarship has led many to assume that slavery was of minor importance in the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice of slavery continued unabated across the globe throughout the medieval millennium. This volume – the final volume in The Cambridge World History of Slavery – covers the period betw…
Memorializing the Middle Passage on the Atlantic seabed in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction
More than 12.5 million Africans were held captive on 40,000+ voyages during the transatlantic slave trade. Many did not survive the voyage and the Atlantic seabed became their final resting place. Exploration for mineral resources on the international seabed (the “Area”) in the Atlantic Basin is already underway, governed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Member Stat…
Digital Resources: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
The Slavevoyages website completed ten years of successful operation in 2018. Drawing on four decades of archival research on five continents, a revolution in computer-processing costs, and the more recent explosive growth of the worldwide web, the site currently offers public access to several databases on slave trading in the Atlantic World. The two most important of these are first, a database of 36,000 slave-trading voyages between Africa and…
Iberian Dominance and the Intrusion of the Northern Europeans Into the Atlantic World: Slave Trading as a Result of Economic Growth
The British, French and, eventually, the Americans attract a disproportionate share of scholarly attention in the history of the Atlantic World before 1800. The impact of the St. Domingue revolution, British power in the nineteenth century, and the dominance of the American economy in the 20th and 21st centuries have ensured that historians fail to recognize the continued influence of the two Iberian nations in the three centuries after Columbian…
Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks-the most iconic of these illustrations-fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded…
Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
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 question…
The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades
The Dutch in the Atlantic World: New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851
The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4, AD 1804-AD 2016
Slavery and coerced labor have been among the most ubiquitous of human institutions both in time - from ancient times to the present - and in place, having existed in virtually all geographic areas and societies. This volume covers the period from the independence of Haiti to modern perceptions of slavery by assembling twenty-eight original essays, each written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in their respective fields. Issues discussed inclu…
The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century
Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues t…
Between Blood & Gold: The Debates over Compensation for Slavery in the Americas
More than profits? The contribution of the slave trade to the Dutch economy: Assessing Fatah-Black and Van Rossum
We assess Fatah-Black and Van Rossum’s analysis of the Dutch slave trade by detailing six 1750s voyages of the Middelburg Commercial Company. The costs of transporting captives from Africa to Suriname are explored along with their relation to the Dutch economy. We also examine the implications of the concept ‘gross margin’, which is central to Fatah-Black and Van Rossum’s work. We find that, given the nature of the transport costs, the impact of …
Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America
The Diaspora of Africans Liberated From Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century
This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the 'disposal' of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkatio…
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
Why were the countries with the most developed institutions of individual freedom also the leaders in establishing the most exploitative system of slavery that the world has ever seen? In seeking to provide new answers to this question, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas examines the development of the English Atlantic slave system between 1650 and 1800. The book outlines a major African role in the evolution of the Atlantic societies be…
The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment
David Eltis, The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1, New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Jan., 2001), pp. 17-46
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Wide Area Network Licence)
Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men
Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men? That adult males accounted for the major share of the transatlantic slave traffic forms one of the few unquestioned givens that the newer historiography of slavery shares with the old. Because the historical record provides such abundant support for this view, it is scarcely surprising. In the British case, Long stated that not a sixth part of all the slaves shipped were women, and as early as the mid-sevente…
Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era
Slave prices, the African slave trade, and productivity in the Caribbean, 1674-18071
We draw wide-ranging implications about slave productivity change by making use of newly collected data on the prices paid for nearly 230,000 slaves as they arrived in the Americas from Africa between 1674 and 1807. Prices for the product that most slaves were destined to produce-sugar-are also available. Together the comprehensive series allow us to derive annual measures of average slave productivity and to compare productivity trends across di…
Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas
Broadly speaking, two contrasting models dominate interpretations of Atlantic history. One draws on Old World influences to explain the nature of societies and cultures in the Americas, while the other assigns primacy to the New World environment. One stresses continuities, the other change. The polar extremes are persistence and transience, inheritance and experience. An emphasis on inheritance prioritizes the cultural baggage that migrants brou…
Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
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 racial…
The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World
The Diaspora of Africans Liberated From Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century
This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the 'disposal' of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkatio…
Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
This book examines the various essays based on the transatlantic slave trade database that contains 34,850 voyages, well over half of which contain information which was unavailable in 1999. A reassessment of the transatlantic slave trade is based on new information and interpretations for branches of the trade that have received less attention than they should. A new database to identify the coastal origins of vessels that were captured and cond…
Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era
Journal Article Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era Get access David Eltis, David Eltis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lawrence C. Jennings Lawrence C. Jennings Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue 4, October 1988, Pages 936–959, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.4.936 Published: 01 Oc…
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 death per slaves embarked/voyage length in days × 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 experience…
The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region
OR historians of slave societies in the Americas, the nineteenth century assumes a particular importance. Although slave labor had been virtually synonymous with European settlement in much of the Americas, it was only in the few decades before the end of slavery that the collection of economic and demographic statistics increased in both scope and reliability. Usable trade statistics, census counts, and business records are much more abundant fo…
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas
Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862
Between 1808 and 1862, officers primarily from the British navy liberated approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans from transatlantic slavers. Information on more than half of this group has survived in bound ledger books. Based on the assessment of extant data for more than 92,000 Liberated Africans whose information was copied in at times duplicate and triplicate form in both London- and Freetown-based registers, this essay explores the pitfalls…
The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa
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Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663-1864
r 1he determinants of the age and sex composition of the transatlantic slave 1 trade have long been a source of historical discussion. Contemporaries, including participants in the trade, analysed and debated the causes of the patterns they observed, as well as the consequences for the demographic, economic, and social developments both of Africa and of the Americas. The persistence of such debates over the course of three centuries makes further…
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…
Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation
The Traffic in Slaves between the British West Indian Colonies, 1807-1833
Accounting for the Traffic in Africans: Transport Costs on Slaving Voyages
Relying mainly on the manuscript records of the Royal African Company, we explore the factors that contributed to the large gap between slave prices in Africa and the Caribbean. Twenty-two voyages from the mid-1680s are analyzed. These were conducted with hired ships and the payments to the shipowners and captains were recorded. In addition to transport costs, mortality and morbidity had a big effect on slave prices; while the earnings from the t…
The Traffic in Slaves between the British West Indian Colonies, 1807-1833
The Export of Slaves from Africa, 1821–1843
This article presents annual slave export figures for western Guinea, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Congo North, Angola, and southeast Africa. The sum of exports from these regions yields exports from Africa as a whole. The series are derived from imports into the Americas and thus include estimates of the African origin of slave imports into Cuba, Brazil, and the French Caribbean, estimates of slave mortality on the transatlantic crossing, an…
Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica
The British Contribution to the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade
T HE literature on the nineteenth-century slave trade pays much more attention to the efforts of the British to suppress the traffic than to their participation in it. The sequence of events is reason enough for this. After carrying well over two and a half million slaves across the Atlantic, perhaps a third of them in the quarter-century preceding I807,2 the British not only abolished their own trade but also in the same year sent two warships t…
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa and the Americas
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas
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 racial…
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas
Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons
Journal Article Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons Get access David Eltis David Eltis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue 2, April 1983, Pages 251-280, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/88.2.251 Published: 01 April 1983
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease and Racism
Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies
African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the context of the Atlantic slave trade / Walter Rodney -- The role of slavery in the economic and social history of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa / Claude Meillassoux -- Kayor and Baol / Charles Becker and Victor Martin -- The import of firearms into West Africa, 1750 to 1807 / J.E. Inikori -- Slavery and the slave trade in the context of West African history / J.D. Fage -…
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 death per slaves embarked/voyage length in days × 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 experience…
Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834
Fluctuations in the age and sex ratios of slaves in the nineteenth‐century transatlantic slave traffic
Slave Departures from Africa, 1811-1867: An Annual Time Series
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America
Journal Article Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America. By David W. Galenson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 230 pp. $34.50.) Get access David Eltis David Eltis Algonquin College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 4, March 1987, Page 1014, https://doi.org/10.2307/1904075 Published: 01 March 1987
The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region
OR historians of slave societies in the Americas, the nineteenth century assumes a particular importance. Although slave labor had been virtually synonymous with European settlement in much of the Americas, it was only in the few decades before the end of slavery that the collection of economic and demographic statistics increased in both scope and reliability. Usable trade statistics, census counts, and business records are much more abundant fo…
Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era
Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era
Journal Article Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era Get access David Eltis, David Eltis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lawrence C. Jennings Lawrence C. Jennings Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue 4, October 1988, Pages 936–959, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.4.936 Published: 01 Oc…
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
This study is the first to consider the consequences of Britain's abolition of the Atlantic slave trade for British imperial expansion and the world economy. It argues that the British led the way in ending that trade just when it was beginning to be important for the world economy, when there was a great need for labour around the world, and shows that Britain's control of the slave trade and great reliance on slave labour had played a major rol…
African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean
Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Colonialism, slavery, and trade (113 works) · History (97 works) · Political science (68 works) · History (65 works) · Geography (55 works) · Economics (39 works) · Law (37 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (36 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (33 works) · Sociology (31 works)