Extending the Frontiers : Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

by Edited by David Eltis and David Richardson

• ISBN13: 9780300134360
• ISBN10: 0300134363
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2008-10-07
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

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 questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findingsthat the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and morechallenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research. For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org .

Author Biography

David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University. He lives in Atlanta. David Richardson is director, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, and professor of economic history, University of Hull, England. He lives in East Yorkshire.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of Abbreviations	p. xiii
Map of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1501-1867	p. xiii
A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade	p. 1
Origins and Destinations
The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries	p. 63
The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561-1851	p. 95
The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Bahia, 1582-1851	p. 130
The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century	p. 155
The African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba, 1789-1865	p. 176
National Slave Trades
The Significance of the French Slave Trade to the Evolution of the French Atlantic World before 1716	p. 205
The Dutch in the Atlantic World: New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic	p. 228
The Slave Trade of Northern Germany from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries	p. 250
Some Wider Consequences and Implications of the New Data
The Slave Trade, Colonial Markets, and Slave Families in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, ca. 1790-ca. 1830	p. 275
The Suppression of the Slave Trade and Slave Departures from Angola, 1830s-1860s	p. 313
The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades	p. 335
List of Contributors	p. 365
Index	p. 367
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