Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:15:38.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

David Eltis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The slave trade, death, and misery were inseparable long before abolitionist writers took up the slave trade as a subject in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the historiography there has been widespread recognition that Africans entering the trade died not only during the middle passage but during the process of enslavement and travel in the interior, on the African littoral awaiting shipment, and after arrival in the Americas. Europeans directly involved in the traffic were at risk in the last three of these four phases of transition between life in Africa and life in the Americas, and tended to die at rates comparable to their human cargoes. In the shipboard phase, and probably also in other stages of the journey, mortality in the slave trade normally exceeded that in other long-distance population movements. In the nineteenth century this differential widened as rates on other long-distance routes fell (Cohn, 1984; Eltis, 1984; Grubb, 1987; Klein, 1978; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1989, forthcoming). To date, most explanations have focused on morbidity and mortality on board ship; data on the preembarkation phases are no more available to us today than to the abolitionists 150 years ago. For shipboard mortality, overcrowding on the ship, psychic shock, and violence have not fared well as explanations in the work of the last two decades, although the interplay between the first two and resistance to disease suggests further consideration. The present study focuses on shipboard mortality, but it is based on a large and complex dataset. It begins with a discussion and preliminary analysis of the nineteenth-century data. This is followed by a review of the various hypotheses on mortality in the slave trade.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 315 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1989 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, J. (1822) Sketches Taken during Ten Voyages to Africa between the Years 1786 and 1800. London: Hurst Robinson and Co.Google Scholar
British Parliamentary Papers 49 (1845): 593–633.Google Scholar
Buxton, T. F. (1834-40) Papers, British Empire manuscripts, Rhodes House Library, Oxford: S444.Google Scholar
Cohn, Raymond L. (1984) “Mortality on immigrant voyages to New York, 1836-1853.” Journal of Economic History 44: 289–300.Google Scholar
Cohn, Raymond L. (1985) “Deaths of slaves in the middle passage.” Journal of Economic History 45: 685–692.Google Scholar
Cohn, Raymond L., and Jensen, R. A. (1982) “The determinants of slave mortality rates on the middle passage.” Explorations in Economic History 19: 269–282.Google Scholar
Curtin, P. D. (ed.) (1967) Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Curtin, P. D. (1968) “Epidemiology and the slave trade.” Political Science Quarterly 83: 190–216.Google Scholar
Curtin, P. D. (1969) The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Curtin, P. D. (1975) Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Dias, J. R. (1981) “Famine and disease in the history of Angola, c1830-1930.” Journal of African History 22: 349–378.Google Scholar
Eltis, D. (1982) “Nutritional trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819-1839.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12: 453–475.Google Scholar
Eltis, D. (1984) “Mortality and voyage length in the middle passage: New evidence from the nineteenth century.” Journal of Economic History 44: 301–308.Google Scholar
Eltis, D. (1987) Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Forde, D. (1946) “The rural economies,” in Perham, Margery (ed.) The Economics of a Tropical Dependency. Vol. 1, The Native Economies of Nigeria. London: Faber and Faber: 3–120.Google Scholar
Galenson, David (1986) Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behaviour in Early English America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Great Britain, Foreign Office (1819-67) 84/1-1012.Google Scholar
Great Britain, Admiralty (1843-67) 123/1-12.Google Scholar
Grubb, F. (1987) “Morbidity and mortality on the North Atlantic passage: Eighteenth-century German immigration.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17: 565–585.Google Scholar
Kiple, K. F., and Higgins, Brian (forthcoming) “Mortality caused by dehydration during the middle passage.” Social Science History.Google Scholar
Kiple, K. F., and King, V. H. (1981) Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, H. S. (1978) The Middle Passage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, H. S., and Engerman, S. L. (1975) “Shipping patterns and mortality in the African slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.” Cahiers d’études africaines 15: 381–398.Google Scholar
Klein, H. S., and Engerman, S. L. (1979) “A note on mortality in the French slave trade in the eighteenth century,” in Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan S. (eds.) The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
McDonald, John, and Shlomowitz, Ralph (1989) “Mortality on convict voyages to Australia, 1788-1868.” Social Science History 13: 285–313.Google Scholar
McDonald, John, and Shlomowitz, Ralph (forthcoming) “Mortality on immigrant voyages to Australia in the nineteenth century.” Explorations in Economic History.Google Scholar
Miller, J. C. (1982) “The significance of drought, disease and famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West Central Africa.” Journal of African History 23: 17–61.Google Scholar
Miller, J. C. (1988) Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Northrup, David (1978) “African mortality in the suppression of the slave trade: The case of the Bight of Biafra.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9: 47–64.Google Scholar
Owen, W. F. W. (1833) Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia and Madagascar. 2 vols. London: R. Bentley.Google Scholar
Sheridan, Richard (1985) Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680-1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shlomowitz, R. (1989) “Mortality and voyages of liberated Africans to the West Indies, 1841-1867.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Steckel, R. H., and Jensen, R. A. (1986) “New evidence on the causes of slave and crew mortality in the Atlantic slave trade.” Journal of Economic History 46: 57–77.Google Scholar
Stein, R. (1980) “Mortality in the eighteenth-century French slave trade.” Journal of African History 21: 35–41.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Commerce (1967) World Weather Records, 1951-60. Vol. 5, Africa. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Yule, H. (1850) The African Squadron Vindicated. London: James Ridgway.Google Scholar