¹ ‘The impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa: a review of the literature’, J.Afr. Hist., xxx (1989), 365–94.Google Scholar

² Mettas, Jean, Répertoire des expeditions négrières fracçaises au XVIII^e siècle (Paris, 2 vols., 1978–1984)Google Scholar, henceforth referred to as Catalogue; Lovejoy, ‘The impact of the Atlantic slave trade’, 369. Becker, Charles, ‘Note sur les chiffres de la traite atlantique française au XVIII^e siècle’, Cahiers d'études africaines, XXXVI (1986), 665–8Google Scholar; Richardson, David, ‘Slave exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: new estimates of volume and distribution’, J. Afr. Hist., xxx (1989), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ To reduce confusion I have been putting the Catalogue into machine readable form over the past two years. The resulting data set is available to interested scholars.

⁴ My own procedures are as follows: where the Catalogue lists more than one figure for slaves embarked, I have sought corroborating evidence from data on voyage mortality and slave arrivals. If no corroboration exists, I have selected the middle figure where three or more figures are listed and the higher figure where only two figures are listed. I have excluded slaves taken to the Mascarenes, ignored ships that definitely failed to take on board slaves, derived totals for slaves departed from slaves disembarked (or sometimes, slaves sold) where necessary on the basis of an assumed 15 per cent shipboard mortality when voyage mortality is missing, and assumed that slaves shipped from Africa are the same as slaves purchased, where the actual counts of slaves alive on the day of departure are unavailable. If, after all these adjustments are made, no estimate of slaves embarked has been generated, then I have supplied a figure of 334·7, which is the mean of the known data (n = 1,416).

⁵ Becker, , ‘Note sur les chiffres’, 668.Google Scholar

⁶ Becker, , ‘Note sur les chiffres’, 665–8.Google Scholar Robert Stein and Herbert S. Klein assembled records of 500 voyages for Nantes independently in pursuing their own work on the topic (letter from Herbert S. Klein). All but 22 of these are to be found in the Catalogue.

⁷ An appendix to volume 2 of the Catalogue lists these same 52 ships, which because they cannot be identified from the port records, do not merit a separate entry.

⁸ Allowing 1 tonneau de mer = 0·5 last, slave-per-ton arrivals in the Americas averaged 1·88 on Dutch ships, 1730–1802, and 1·67 on French ships, 1720–79. The difference is not statistically significant at the 1 per cent level (calculated from the Postma ‘Dutch Free Trader’ data set and the Catalogue). Moreover, the difference between slaves embarked per ton (in Africa) and slaves disembarked per ton (in the Americas) from the same French ships averages 0·142 of the embarkation ratio—or about what we would expect given voyage mortality in the range of 10–15 per cent. This suggests that if slaves disembarked were underreported, so also were slaves embarked.

⁹ Becker calculates percentage differences between Catalogue counts and only three of the four documents that he cites. For the fourth—the estimate of slaves arriving in St Domingue, 1738–44, in Archives Depart. Loire Atlantique, Nantes, C 740, fo. 61—I have computed the number of slaves arriving in St Domingue in that period according to the Catalogue. The C 740 estimate is 20 per cent greater than the direct Catalogue count.

¹⁰ Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), 211Google Scholar; Richardson, ‘Slave exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810’.

¹¹ The 1981 estimates are in ‘The direction and fluctuation of the transatlantic slave trade, 1844–1867’ (paper presented at the African Studies Association meetings, at Bloomington, Indiana, 1981), which was a supplement to an earlier paper, ‘The export of slaves from Africa’, Journal of Economic History, XXXVII (1977), 409–33.Google Scholar Estimates for the 1811–20 decade were computed and circulated privately in 1981.

¹² Eltis, David, ‘The nineteenth century transatlantic slave trade: an annual time series of imports into the Americas broken down by region’, Hispanic American Historical Review, lxvii (1987), 109–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ On the latter point see most recently my ‘Fluctuations in mortality in the last half century of the transatlantic slave trade’, Social Science History, XIII (1989), 314–40.Google Scholar

¹⁴ The major recent contribution is Geggus, David, ‘Sex ratio, age and ethnicity in the Atlantic slave trade: data from French shipping and plantation records’, J. Afr. Hist., XXX (1989), 23–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ The data set is described in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Gender and age in migration to the Americas down to the mid-nineteenth century: the slave trade in comparative perspective’ (forthcoming). The core of the data is taken from the Catalogue, the T 70 series in the British Public Record Office, and the sources described in Eltis, David, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 399–404.Google Scholar Joseph Inikori, Johannes Postma, and Herbert Klein have generously made available data from their own extensive researches.

¹⁶ For the period 1700–1809, weights were derived from Richardson, ‘Slave exports from West and West-Central Africa’, Table 7; for 1810–67, weights were calculated from Eltis, Economic Growth, 250–2. Cf. Geggus, David, ‘Sex ratio and ethnicity: a reply to Paul Lovejoy,’ J. Afr. Hist., XXX (1989), 395–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Total exports for 1672–1867–the period covered by age/sex data set—are taken at 10.223 million: 0.817 million, 1672–99, 6.667 million for 1700–1809, and 2.739 million, 1810–67. The weighted mean male and child ratios, 1672–1867, are calculated from column 7 in Table 1 using weights derived from this distribution of total volume.

¹⁸ Eltis and Engerman, ‘Gender and age in migration to the Americas’.

¹⁹ ‘In almost every part of Africa for most of the century, enslavement was rampant. Slaves were generated on a scale previously unknown…’; Lovejoy, ‘Impact’, 390.

²⁰ Prices may have been very low in Africa, as Lovejoy asserts, but the main point here is the trend over time. In Atlantic coastal markets prices did fall between the first and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.

²¹ Ralph Austen shows an increase in trans-Saharan volumes between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; ‘The trans-Saharan slave trade: a tentative census’, in Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan S. (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), 39.Google Scholar

²² Eltis, David, ‘Pre-colonial western Africa and the Atlantic economy: an African centered assessment’, in Solow, Barbara (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar