The Allotment of Space for Slaves aboard Eighteenth-Century British Slave Ships

Bibliographic Data

ID3489764
AuthorsCharles Garland (corresponding author), Herbert S Kein (0000-0002-2239-2784), Herbert S Klein
Year1985
Volume42
Issue2
Pages238
Publication date1985-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1920430
OpenAlexW2317467304
LanguageEN
Citations received12

HE field of slave trade studies has made rapid advances in the last two decades as scholars have begun to analyze the records of slave voyages available from the archives of Europe and America. Among the many issues on which these records shed new light is the old question of how slaves were transported across the Atlantic.1 Eighteenth-century critics of the slave trade generally charged that a policy of tight packing was normal, and some historians have maintained that captains sought profit by loading as many Africans as they could, deliberately accepting heavy losses in transit.2 The much-published picture of the accommodation for human cargo on the slave ship Brooks, showing slaves lying crowded together on narrow pallets under low overheads, has been frequently cited in support of that argument. While new statistical evidence does not contradict the common view that slaves had the worst accommodations of any humans ever transported across the Atlantic, neither does it lend credence to the hypothesis of deliberate acceptance of high mortality. None of the studies to date has found a correlation between slave mortality aboard ship and the number of slaves carried in relation to a ship's size (tonnage). Studies of the eighteenth-century slave trades of major European nations clearly show that there was a limit to the number of slaves that captains were willing to carry in relation to the capacity of their ships. In view of newly compiled evidence on the high costs of slaves purchased in Africa and the normal profits to be made in the trade, this should not be surprising.3 But even if

Allotment · Archaeology · Economics · Space (punctuation) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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