Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700-1810

During the past two decades historians have made major advances in reconstructing the volume and coastal distribution of slave exports by American and European traders from the west coast of Africa during the eighteenth century. According to Lovejoy’s calculations, Curtin’s original estimate of slave imports into America and the Atlantic Basin between 1451 and 1867 was only about 2 per cent lower than the figure implied by later research. During the peak years of the trade from 1701 to 1810, when perhaps over half the slaves exported from Africa to America reached the New World, Curtin, on Lovejoy’s figures, actually overstated American slave imports from Africa by some 314,000 or about 5·5 per cent. Historians working on the eighteenth-century French slave trade owe an enormous debt to the late Jean Mettas whose collection of material on French slaving voyages between 1700 and 1793 has recently been published under the editorship of Serge and Michele Daget

Ancient history · Debt · Distribution (mathematics) · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History