Keeping Score

This volume of collected essays grew out of papers presented at a 1988 conference entitled Atlantic Slave Trade: Who Gained and Who Lost? Later, several of them appeared in less-expanded form as part of a recent issue of Social Science History. The relatively wide dissemination of these essays, however, most certainly does not detract from the scholarly importance and usefulness of this volume, which contains thirteen selections by a distinguished group of scholars including Martin A. Klein, Jan Hogendorn, Paul E. Lovejoy, Joseph C. Miller, Patrick Manning, Joseph E. Inikori, Ralph A. Austen, Woodruff D. Smith, Ronald Bailey, William Darity, Jr., Johannes Postma, David Barry Gaspar, Kenneth F. Kiple, Brian T. Higgins, Thomas W. Wilson, Clarence E. Grim, and Seymour Drescher. Professors Inikori and Engerman have organized a very diverse and, by the specific content of each article, only tangentially connected assortment of essays. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, the book presents a surprisingly cogent commentary on history's winners and losers in the Atlantic slave trade. The question of gains and losses constitutes one of the most widely discussed issues in current scholarship. This volume is a very welcome and important addition to that literature even though its basic conclusion is not surprising; namely, that Western Europe and America were the winners in the slave trade, while Africa emerged as the loser. In supporting this conclusion, the various essays are clustered around three main subthemes. Essays in the first section address the impact that slavery and the slave trade had on both Africa and the Western Hemisphere as component parts of an integral system. Several provocative essays in this regard focus on the social costs that Africa paid because of the migration forced by the slave trade. A second section assesses the impact that slavery had on the economic

Economics · International economics · International trade · Political science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade

• The trans-Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa

  Open Access•Nonso Obikili•The Economic History Review•2016

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