Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 1997
In a recent article David Richardson revised estimates of the volume and African regional distribution of the eighteenth-century British slave trade. Richardson calculated that British slave vessels sailing between 1698 and 1807 – to the year of Abolition – embarked 3,052,509 slaves on the African coast. This figure falls at the midpoint between lower-bound estimates made by Curtin in 1969 and upper-bound estimates published by Inikori seven years later. Further, Richardson provided historians with the first extended year-by-year series of British slave exports; and he separated the trading data of the three principal British slaving ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol, which comprised 50, 28 and 18 per cent of the trade, respectively.