Measuring The Atlantic Slave Trade

On French-carried slave exports, Philip D. Curtin refers to Captain George Hamilton’s ‘miraculous breadth of knowledge and J. E. Inikori’s trust in it’. It describes the extent of trade carried on by the slave trading firm of which Captain George Hamilton was the resident ‘general manager’. Apart from the stationed ships the firm employed a large number of small vessels in collecting slaves from large parts of the African coast. For the whole period of the venture Captain George Hamilton resided in West Africa. The annual average growth rate of this hypothetical slave population from 1761 to 1780, a period of twenty years, is actually 1.2 per cent. But taking the slave population figures at the beginning and end of the period, and using Curtin’s formula, the annual average growth rate is zero. Curtin’s other comments relate to the annual rate of net natural decrease among the slave populations in the Americas.

Atlantic slave trade · Economic history · Economics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History