Was abolition of the U.S. and British slave trade significant in the broader Atlantic context?

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 66, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 717-736

  Eltis, David ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77949787142     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. For reservations about the celebrations, see Hakim Adi, "Reflections on the Bicentenary: Celebration, Commemoration, 'Wilberfest'?" (paper given at the "Routes to Freedom: Reflections on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a Conference sponsored by the Government of Ontario and the University of Ottawa," Mar. 14, 2008, Ottawa, Ontario)
2. For the paradigms, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944)
3. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975)
4. For descriptions of the extensive incidence of modern manifestations of slavery and the slave trade, see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, Calif., 1999)
5. For the argument that the abolition of the slave trade was associated with greatly increased slave use in sub-Saharan Africa, see Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York, 1983)
6. For nonelite participation in abolition, see Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 (New York, 2006)
7. Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, La., 2006)
8. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007)
9. Rediker asks the question, "Might the term 'shipmate' have been generous and big-hearted enough to allow the oppressed to show humanity to the very people who had presided over their enslavement aboard the slave ship?" (Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (ibid., 352)
10. For the interactive database, see Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
11. For a summary of the new estimates of the size and direction of the slave trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, "A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. Eltis and Richardson (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 1-60
12. See Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, "The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhão, 1680-1846: Volume, Routes and Organisation," Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 4 (December 2008): 477-501. The Portuguese delivered slaves through two separate trading networks: one rooted in the Iberian Peninsula that supplied the early Spanish Americas and Amazonia, and a second, much larger, network based in Brazil, which brought slaves directly from Africa to northeast Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. Portuguese and Brazilian merchants together accounted for just less than half of all slaves transported from 1519 to 1867
13. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom= 1501&yearTo=1866, then activate the "Timeline" tab
14. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom= 1808&yearTo=1866
15. Laird W. Bergad, "American Slave Markets during the 1850s: Slave Price Rises in United States, Cuba, and Brazil in Comparative Perspective," in Slavery in the Development of the Americas, ed. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (New York, 2004), 219-35
16. For the descriptive impact of abolition of the slave trade on the British plantation sector, see Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1977)
17. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 3-16
18. For British pressure on the Dutch, see Pieter C. Emmer, "Abolition of the Abolished: The Illegal Dutch Slave Trade and the Mixed Courts," in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison, Wis., 1981), 177-92, esp. 180-86
19. For the Portuguese, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/ estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo=1866&flag=2 and click on the "Timeline" tab
20. To compare the Portuguese profile with the pattern for all other national carriers in the slave trade, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/ estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo=1866&flag=4.6.1.3.7.5 and again click on the "Timeline" tab
21. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and David Richardson, "The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World," Economic History Review 54, no. 3 (August 2001): 454-76
22. The distribution on the Voyages Web site of 566 voyages that experienced slave rebellions during the whole slave trade era indicates that rebellions peaked in the third quarter of the eighteenth century before dropping off markedly thereafter. For possible reasons, David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and David Richardson, "The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World," Economic History Review 2001): 54, no. 3 454-76. ibid
23. For the percentage of voyages starting from Upper Guinea (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast) that experienced a slave revolt, known as a "rate of resistance" statistic, see http://slavevoyages.org/tast/ database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1866&mjbyptimp=60100.60200. 60300
24. For the rate of resistance for all other African regions, see http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo= 1866&mjbyptimp=60400.60500.60600.60700.60800.60900.80000
25. David Eltis and David Richardson, "Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 4 (October 1995): 465-84. In the nineteenth century, an additional factor decreased the incidence of shipboard resistance. From the final quarter of the eighteenth century to the last quarter century of the transatlantic slave trade, the proportion of children carried on slave ships doubled from 18 to 36 percent. Again the reasons are unclear, but the consequences for slave rebellions scarcely need to be spelled out
26. David Eltis, Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, Calif., 2002), 22 ("migration regimes")
27. For the rapid expansion of the Río de la Plata traffic in the late eighteenth century, see Alex Borucki, "The Slave Trade in the Making of the Late Colonial Río de la Plata," Slavery and Abolition (forthcoming)
28. For the timelines for slave arrivals in the United States, the British Caribbean, and the Danish Americas, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/ assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo=1866&disembarkation=309. 305.304.203.600.310.306.303.204.311.205.302.201.307.301.202.308
29. For the timeline of arrivals in the rest of the Americas, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom= 1501&yearTo=1866&disembarkation=803.100.501.801.405.401.703.502.705.900. 804.704.402.805.701.403.802.702.404
30. For a discussion of U.S. involvement in the slave trade after 1807 and the recent literature on the topic, see David Eltis, "The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644-1867: An Assessment," Civil War History 54, no. 4 (December 2008): 347-78
31. Eltis, Economic Growth, 210-11
32. See also Matthew Mason, "Keeping Up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World," in "Abolishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations," ed. Scott E. Casper, Christopher Grasso, and Joseph C. Miller, special issue, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 66, no. 4 (October 2009): 809-32
33. For an overview of Africans liberated from slave vessels after 1807, see David Eltis, "Liberated Africans in Time and Space" (unpublished paper)
34. See for example Jenny S. Martinez, "Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law," Yale Law Review 117, no. 4 (January 2008): 550-641. But these articles ignore the central point that British antislavery policy was most successful when it was most illegal. The treaty systems and naval initiatives that remained on the right side of international law would not, by themselves, have ended the slave trade
35. The emergence of the U.S. whaling fleet is the subject of a classic study of the growth of a new industry in the federal period. See Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Teresa D. Hutchins, "Call Me Ishmael - Not Domingo Floresta: The Rise and Fall of the American Whaling Industry," in The Vital One: Essays in Honor of Jonathan R. T. Hughes, ed. Joel Mokyr (Greenwich, Conn., 1991), 191-233
36. For steamers, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces? yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1866&rig=28
37. For the U.S. role in the Río de la Plata slave trade, see Borucki, "Slave Trade in Rio de la Plata."
38. For the Montgomery Convention, see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000)
39. The nineteenth-century internal slave trades of Brazil and the United States were a direct result of abolition of the transatlantic business, a connection that recent studies have ignored. See for example most of the essays in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, Conn., 2004)
40. The relative productivity of slave and free workers was one of the most intensely debated issues in the historiography of slavery of the 1970s and 1980s, taking up as many pages in the American Economic Review as in the leading historical journals. See Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective (Baton Rouge, La., 2003)
41. For research confirming the productivity advantage of enslaved peoples, see Elizabeth B. Field-Hendrey and Lee A. Craig, "The Relative Efficiency of Free and Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum United States: A Stochastic Production Frontier Approach," in Eltis, Lewis, and Sokoloff, Slavery in Development of the Americas, 236-57
42. Bales, Disposable People, 240 ("27 million people"), 9 ("more slaves alive today")
43. For Frederick Douglass's position on the differences between chattel slavery and other forms of exploitation, see David Roediger, "Race, Labor and Gender in the Languages of Antebellum Social Protest," in Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Stanley L. Engerman (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 168-87, esp. 177