¹ For the most recent assessment of the factors involved, see the essays in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and the People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin and James Walvin (2007).

² See, for instance, Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (1975); Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977)Google Scholar; idem, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 1987); idem, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in the British Emancipation (Oxford, 2004); Davis, David B., Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Brown, Christopher L., Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar.

³ Eltis, David, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Quirk, Joel and Richardson, David, ‘Anti-slavery, European Identity and International Society: A Macro-historical Perspective’, Journal of Modern European History, 7 (2009), 68–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ For reviews and interpretations, see Fogel, Robert W., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989)Google ScholarPubMed; Davis, David B., Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁵ North, Douglass C., Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, 2005), 103–4Google Scholar.

⁶ North, Douglass C., ‘Sources of Productivity Change in Ocean Shipping, 1600–1850’, Journal of Political Economy, 76 (1968), 953–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ For the medieval Mediterranean, see Greif, Avner, ‘Institutions and International Trade: Lessons from the Commercial Revolution’, American Economic Review, 82 (1992), 128–33Google Scholar; idem, ‘On the Political Foundations of the Late Medieval Commercial Revolution: Genoa during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), 271–97. For Africa, see Abner Cohen, ‘Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas’, in The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, ed. Claude Meillassoux (1971), 266–81; Lovejoy, Paul E., Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade 1700–1900 (Zaria, 1980)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D., Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; Landa, Janet T., Trust, Ethnicity and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law and Gift-Exchange (Ann Arbor, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁸ The literature on networking in Atlantic trade has grown rapidly in the last half century. See, for example, Bailyn, Bernard, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955)Google Scholar; Hancock, David, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar; Smith, Simon D., Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, ch. 1. A similar pattern helped to shape the much older movement of non-Muslim enslaved Africans into the Islamic world.

¹⁰ As Water Rodney reminded us, legal and judicial processes helped ensure that, in some cases, captives sold to Europeans would come from within the same ethnic group as their enslavers (Rodney, Walter, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford, 1970), 108)Google Scholar.

¹¹ On the debate over the ‘middle ground’ in Euro-Indian relations in the Americas, see the exchange between Susan Sleeper-Smith, Richard White and Philip J. Deloria, in the forum, William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 63 (2006), 3–22.

¹² On the concept of the Atlantic World and the need to place Africa and Africans at the centre of its development, see The Atlantic World, 1450–2000, ed. Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (Bloomington, 2008).

¹³ I do not seek to define slavery here but, rather, to note the conditions under which enslaved people had to live. For a discussion of definitions, see Joel Quirk, Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (Paris, 2009).

¹⁴ On accumulation see Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1944)Google Scholar; and Inikori, Joseph E., Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Quirk and Richardson, ‘Anti-slavery and European Identity’.

¹⁶ There is a huge and ever growing literature on violence and resistance in transatlantic slavery. Among recent examples, see Behrendt, Stephen D., Eltis, David and Richardson, David, ‘The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World’, Economic History Review, 54 (2001), 454–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane Diouf (2003); Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar; Taylor, Eric Robert, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, 2006)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ As North puts it, the ‘persistence of disorder [in many societies] is, on the face of it, puzzling because disorder increases uncertainty and typically the great majority of players are losers’ (Understanding the Process, 103).

¹⁸ See, for example, Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven, 1981), 197–215. The concept of the zero-sum was not, of course, peculiar to Africans; it was a feature of some strands of mercantilist thinking in Europe and helps to account for intra-European conflicts for control of land in the Americas and of trade with particular parts of Atlantic Africa, among other things. I shall ignore the latter aspect of the cultures of exchange in Atlantic Africa in this paper and to emphasise instead Afro-European relations.

¹⁹ Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983; 2000 edn), 68Google Scholar.

²⁰ See, for example, the narrative of Venture Smith, who suggests that after seizing him and many others with a view to their sale to Europeans, his own captors were themselves seized near Anomabu on the Gold Coast and subsequently sold into transatlantic slavery (A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America (New London, 1798), 13).

²¹ As Richard Hakluyt noted, on his first expedition to Africa for slaves, Sir John Hawkins secured his victims ‘partly by the sword, and partly by other means’ (Richard Hakluyt, ‘The First Voyage of the Right Worshipfull and Valiant Knight, Sir John Hawkins, now Treasurer of Her Majesties Navie Royall, Made to the West Indies 1562’, in The Hawkins’ Voyages, ed. Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 57 (1878), 6). On the wider issue of African resistance as well as violence in Afro-European relations see Hawthorne, Walter, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar; and Richardson, David, ‘Shipboard Slave Revolts, African Authority and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 58 (2001), 69–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²² Adam Smith, among others, noted the resilience of African polities in dealings with European traders, contrasting this with the collapse of indigenous American communities when faced with Europeans (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (2 vols., 1776), ed. Edwin Cannan (1961 edn), ii, 150). His views are echoed in some recent interpretations of Afro-European relations. See for example, Law, Robin, ‘“Here Is No Resisting the Country”: The Realities of Power in Afro-European Relations on the West African “Slave Coast”‘, Itinerario, 18 (1994), 50–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 147; Christopher, Emma, Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (Cambridge, 2006), 157Google Scholar.

²³ Among the earliest mulattoes were Portuguese renegades and settlers in Upper Guinea (Rodney, Upper Guinea, 83–8). Called by contemporaries, lançados, after the Portuguese word to throw or cast, they married within the local community, placed themselves under local rule and joined in local ceremonials. Most became traders, throwing in their lot with local Africans. Other Portuguese helped to found the settlement at Luanda and became in time integrated into the local community there (Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (1987), 245–314). For other European-mulatto communities, see Searing, James F., West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1993), 93–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Priestley, Margaret A., ‘Richard Brew: An Eighteenth Century Trader at Anomabu’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Ghana, 4 (1959), 29–46Google Scholar; Daaku, Kwame Y., Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720 (Oxford, 1970), 48–96Google Scholar; Jones, Adam, From Slaves to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galhinas Country (West Africa) 1730–1890 (Wiesbaden, 1983)Google Scholar; Brooks, George E., Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, 1993)Google Scholar; idem, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2003); Mouser, Bruce L., ‘Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 45–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Isle de Los as a Bulking Center in the Slave Trade 1750–1800’, Revue Française d'Histoire d'Outre-mer, 83 (1996), 77–90; idem, ‘Continuing British Interest in the Coastal Guinea-Conakry and Fuuta Jaloo Highlands (1750–1850)’, Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 43 (2003), 761–90; A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown 1793–1794, ed. Bruce L. Mouser (Bloomington, 2002).

²⁴ Studies of such communities include Latham, A. J. H., Old Calabar, 1600–1891 (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar; Law, Robin, ‘A Lagoonside Port on the Eighteenth Century Slave Coast: The Early History of Badagri’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 28 (1994), 1–21Google Scholar; idem, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Oxford, 2004), 71–122; Lovejoy, Paul E. and Richardson, David, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 333–55CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; idem, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce, and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History, 45 (2004), 363–92; Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington, 2007).

²⁵ Philip D. Curtin, ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade from Senegambia’, in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison, 1981), 83–97; Robin Law, ‘Slave-raiders and Middlemen, Monopolists and Free Traders: The Supply of Slaves for the Atlantic Trade in Dahomey, c. 1715–1850’, Journal of African History, 30 (1989), 45–68; Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990), 95–6Google Scholar; Evans, Eric W. and Richardson, David, ‘Hunting for Rents: The Economics of Slaving in Pre-Colonial Africa’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 678–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Two examples of such moves were Dahomey's conquest of the slave ‘port’ of Ouidah in the Bight of Benin in 1727 and Asante's conquest of the coastal Fante states of the Gold Coast between 1807 and 1816. Gareth Austen has described the latter as the culmination of a longstanding Asante desire to seize ‘the middlemen's rake-off’ from their slave sales to European forts (Gareth Austen, ‘Between Abolition and Jihad: The Asante Response to the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1807–1896’, in From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate Commerce’: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa, ed. Robin Law (Cambridge, 1995), 93). In neither case, however, did slave exports through the routes in question return to pre-conquest levels, though some exports may have been channelled through alternative routes.

²⁷ A minority of shipmasters made multiple voyages, often to the same trading venue, and thus became well known to local African traders. In some cases, they identified ships by the master's name not the ship's (Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing the Diary of Antera Duke, ed. Daryll C. Forde (1956)). Many masters, however, made only one or two voyages in command, though they may have made earlier voyages in a more junior capacity. On the African side, discord within local communities could result in major changes in local trading personnel. A prime example is a notorious ‘massacre’ at Old Calabar in 1767, which allowed one emerging trading faction to displace an established one, with the fallout from the event continuing for a decade or more and disturbing external trade relations (Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Anglo-Efik Relations and Protection against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740–1807’, in Fighting the Slave Trade, ed. Diouf, 101–21.

²⁸ The following section draws heavily on evidence contained in www.slavevoyages.com, last accessed 10 Jan. 2009, and An Atlas of Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, forthcoming), which itself relies on the aforementioned dataset.

²⁹ This is the latest estimate of the total number of captives boarding ship in Africa for the Americas based on www.slavevoyages.com, last accessed 10 Jan. 2009. It is estimated that the dataset contains evidence of at least 80 per cent of all transatlantic slaving voyages dispatched to Africa from the Americas and Europe.

³⁰ On the dominance of the ‘south Atlantic’ slave trade by vessels from Brazil see also Miller, Way of Death; Birmingham, David B., Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and their Neighbours under the Influence of the Portuguese 1483–1790 (Oxford, 1966)Google Scholar; Curto, Jose C., Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese–Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1550–1830 (Leiden, 2004)Google Scholar; Candido, Mariana P., ‘Merchants and the Business of the Slave Trade in Benguela, c. 1750–1850’, African Economic History, 35 (2007), 1–30Google Scholar.

³¹ As noted earlier, Portuguese-speaking mulattoes were also important in parts of Upper Guinea from an early stage in African-European oceanic contact.

³² Details of Liverpool's trade pattern are provided in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade’, in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony J. Tibbles (Liverpool, 2007), pp. 43–65. For others, see Atlas of Slavery, ed. Eltis and Richardson.

³³ Attempting to understand these transatlantic connections has been a major aspect of recent research on the influence of Africa and Africans in shaping the cultural history of the Atlantic world. This is not my concern here. Such research, however, is the focus of on-going debates centring on the relationship between African heritage and the American environment in creating new or synthetic cultures in the Americas. For strong claims of African heritage in shaping such cultures, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), 11, 38, 150; Gwendolyn M. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2005), xv, 49, 55–79, 168–9. For other examples, see John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1992; repr. New York, 1998); Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (2000); Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman (New York, 2003); Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, 2004); The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington, 2004); Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade, ed. José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France (Trenton, 2005); and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA, 2001). For different emphases, see Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976); and, more recently, David Eltis, Philip D. Morgan and David Richardson, ‘Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1329–58.

³⁴ See also David Eltis, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Slave-Trading Ports: An Atlantic-Wide Perspective, 1676–1832’, in Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra), ed. Robin Law and Silke Stricktrodt (Stirling, 1999), 12–34.

³⁵ For details of the estimated numbers departing from each of these ports see Atlas of Slavery, ed. Eltis and Richardson, table 4.

³⁶ Law, Ouidah; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘“Horrid Hole”’; idem, ‘Trust’; Miller, Way of Death; Candido, ‘Merchants in Benguela’.

³⁷ Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982), passim; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600–1810’, Journal of African History, 42 (1999), 25–50.

³⁸ On pawning in general see Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola (Boulder, 1994); and Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola (Trenton, 2003). For its specific relationship to the export slave trade, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Business of Slaving’. In terms of secret societies, there are useful discussions of Ekpe (or the Leopard Society) at Old Calabar and adjacent areas in Latham, Old Calabar; Donald C. Simmons, ‘An Ethnographic Sketch of the Efik People’, in Efik Traders, ed. Forde; and U. N. Abalogu, ‘Ekpe Society in Arochukwu and Bende’, Nigeria Magazine, 126–7 (1978), 78–97. For the Poro Society, which operated throughout much of what is today Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Cote d'Ivoire, see Little, Kenneth, ‘The Political Function of Poro: Part I’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 35 (1965), 349–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The Political Function of Poro: Part II’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 36 (1966), 62–72; and Beryl L. Bellman, The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual (New Brunswick, 1984).

³⁹ For a discussion of this issue on one context at least, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Anglo-Efik Relations’.

⁴⁰ On the high incidence of coastal attacks on ships at these places, see Behrendt, Eltis and Richardson, ‘Costs of Coercion’; Richardson, ‘Shipboard Slave Revolts’.

⁴¹ 24 June 1780, Old Callabar (sic), from King Henshaw, Duke Ephraim and Willy Honesty, cited in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade 1760–1789’, in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Louisville, 2001), 109–10. The issue of security worked both ways: nine years later, in 1789, Duke Ephraim, son of the Duke Ephraim who signed the Old Calabar letter to Liverpool merchants in 1780, had cause to write to a Bristol trading firm, demanding the return of two of his canoe men named Abashey and Antegra. He claimed they were ‘free men’ and had been kidnapped into slavery by one of the Bristol firm's shipmasters. Duke Ephraim reminded his Bristol correspondents: ‘I Done very well with Capt Leroach [Laroche] and he to[o]k my people of[f]’ (ibid., 111).

⁴² Evans and Richardson, ‘Hunting for Rents’. For the theoretical basis of this argument, see Krueger, Anne O, ‘The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society’, American Economic Review, 64 (1974), 291–303Google Scholar.

⁴³ The massacre of Old Calabar in 1767, in which a group of British traders conspired with one faction in Old Calabar to destroy and enslave another faction, provides a particularly clear example of how internal local discord and tension could offer European traders opportunities for short-term gain while sowing distrust and damaging long-term trade relations with the community as a whole. Aftershocks of the massacre were felt for some years after 1767, and provided the context for the alleged poisoning of two Liverpool shipmasters in the 1770s by the damaged party (Sparks, Two Princes; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’; idem and idem, ‘Anglo-Efik Relations’).

⁴⁴ On the gun trade, see Ray A. Kea, ‘Trade, State Formation and Warfare on the Gold Coast, 1600–1826’ (Ph.D., University of London, 1973); Inikori, Joseph E., ‘The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750–1807’, Journal of African History, 18 (1977), 339–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richards, W. A., ‘The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 43–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much of the discussion of the exchange of firearms for slaves centres on the guns–slave cycle, in which imported firearms were seen to provoke warfare and thus the supply of captives for export. There are also suggestions, however, that the firearms dispatched to Africa were of inferior quality and highly unreliable (Miller, Way of Death, 88–9; Elizabeth A. Isechei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge, 1997), 337). According to Miller, an official check of the gun stock at Luanda revealed that only 5 per cent of the stock met ‘the government's standards of military reliability’.

⁴⁵ On variations in the ‘bundles’ of goods exchanged at different African trading venues, see my ‘West African Consumption Patterns and their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade’, in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York, 1979), 303–30, esp. 311–15. See also Curto, Enslaving Spirits, who emphasises the role of local consumer preferences to explain the displacement of Portuguese fortified wines by Brazilian cachaca in trade at Luanda from the late seventeenth century.

⁴⁶ Richardson, ‘West Africa Consumption Patterns’; Hogendorn, Jan S. and Johnson, Marion, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eltis, David, ‘Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World before 1870: Estimates of Trends in Values, Composition and Direction’, Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), 197–239Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Barter remained an important part of trade along the Windward Coast and nearby areas well into the eighteenth century (The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton), 1750–1754, ed. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (1962), passim).

⁴⁸ Richardson, ‘West Africa Consumption Patterns’, 318, 323; Marion Johnson, ‘The Ounce in Eighteenth-Century West African Trade’, Journal of African History, 7 (1966), 197–214; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), ch. 6.

⁴⁹ Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: the Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Schwartz, Stuart, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; Higman, Barry W., ‘The Sugar Revolution’, Economic History Review, 53 (2000), 213–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ On the dominating influence of sugar and sugar-related commodities over slave shipments across the Atlantic, see David Eltis, ‘The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance’, in General History of the Caribbean, iii: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed. Franklin W. Knight (Kingston, 1997), 109–19. I recognise that the US came to have the biggest slave population in the Americas in history by 1860 and that cotton production dominated the US antebellum South, but no more than about 5 per cent of the African captives taken across the Atlantic during the era of the Atlantic slave trade disembarked in what became the United States (www.slavevoyages.com, last accessed 10 Jan. 2009).

⁵¹ On the failure of enslaved Africans to reproduce in areas where sugar cultivation was dominant, see Barry W. Higman, Slave Population of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, 1984); idem, ‘The Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies, from Settlement to ca. 1850’, in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: The Colonial Era, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, 1996), 307–9; David Eltis and Paul Lachance, ‘The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades’, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, 2008), 335–63.

⁵² Bean, Richard N., The British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1650–1775 (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph C., ‘Slave Prices in the Portuguese Southern Atlantic, 1600–1830’, in Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Lovejoy, Paul E. (Madison, 1986), 43–79Google Scholar; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 93–4.

⁵³ Manning, Slavery and African Life, 94.

⁵⁴ Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogenedorn, ‘Elasticity of Slave Labor Supply and the Development of the Slave Economies in the British Caribbean: The Seventeenth Century Experience’, in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Ruben and Arthur Tudin, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 292 (1977), 72–84; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 93–4; Miller, ‘Slave Prices’; David Richardson, ‘Slave Prices in West and West-Central Africa, 1699–1807: Toward an Annual Series’, Bulletin of Economic Research, 43 (1990), 21–56; Lovejoy, Paul E. and Richardson, David, ‘British Abolition and its Impact on Slave Prices along the Atlantic Coast of Africa, 1783–1850’, Journal of Economic History, 55 (1995), 98–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ On Brazilian prices, see Miller, ‘Slave Prices’; on Caribbean prices, see David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘Prices of African Slaves Newly Arrived in the Americas, 1673–1865: New Evidence on Long-Run Trends and Regional Differentials’, in Slavery in the Development of the Americas: Essays in Honor of Stanley L. Engerman, ed. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (Cambridge, 2004), 181–218; on South Carolina prices, see David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis and David Richardson, ‘Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reassessment’, Journal of Economic History, 66 (2006), 1054–65.

⁵⁶ Eltis, David and Richardson, David, ‘Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), 465–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ On terms of trade, see Gemery, Henry A., Hogendorn, Jan S. and Johnson, Marion, ‘Evidence of English/African Terms of Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, Explorations in Economic History, 27 (1990), 157–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on shifting patterns of trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in Extending the Frontiers, ed. Eltis and Richardson, 46–7.

⁵⁸ Eltis and Richardson, ‘Productivity’.

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⁶¹ In terms of acquired or inherited skills, some of the strongest claims have linked the rise of rice cultivation in South Carolina and elsewhere to the skills of imported Africans (Carney, Black Rice); cf. Eltis, Morgan and Richardson, ‘Agency and Diaspora’). For an identification of the Akan from the Gold Coast with rebelliousness, see Schuler, Monica, ‘Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean’, Savacou, 1 (1970), 8–31Google Scholar.

⁶² On female work in sugar and low reproduction see Richard S. Dunn, ‘Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica’, in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, 1993), 49–73. In the case of rice cultivation and associated drainage, ditching and maintenance work, planters regarded men and boys as best equipped to discharge the work. They allocated spades and axes almost entirely to men. Chaplin, Joyce E., An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 227–76Google Scholar; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 155–9

⁶³ Eltis and Richardson, ‘Prices of African Slaves’, 197. For price data grouped by ethnicity, see The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880, ed. Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias Garcia and Maria del Carmen Barcia (Cambridge, 1995), 73–4.

⁶⁴ Galenson, David, Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which shows prices of females were 84 per cent of those of males at Barbados in 1680–1723. Similar ratios are evident in Cuba in the nineteenth century, when, as in Barbados, the dominant crop was sugar but also in the southern US when the crop was cotton and slave numbers largely increased through natural reproduction rather than imports from Africa. For Cuba, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Comparative Perspectives’, American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 1201–18; for the US, see Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols., Boston, MA, 1974), i, 75–7. For evidence on slave prices in the Caribbean between 1674 and 1807 see Eltis and Richardson, ‘Prices of African Slaves’; David Eltis, Frank. D. Lewis and David Richardson, ‘Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade and Productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–1807’, Economic History Review, 58 (2005), 673–700.

⁶⁵ On the transport cost ‘wedge’ between Africa and America, see Eltis, David, ‘The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa’, Journal of African History, 35 (1994), 237–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Bean, British Slave Trade; Johnson, ‘Ounce’.

⁶⁷ Eltis, David and Engerman, Stanley L., ‘Fluctuations in Age and Sex Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663–1864’, Economic History Review, 46 (1993), 308–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ On the magnitude and price of enslaved Africans entering the trans-Saharan traffic, see Ralph A. Austen, ‘The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census’, in Uncommon Market, ed. Gemery and Hogendorn, 23–77; idem, ‘The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census’, in The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, ed. Elizabeth Savage (1992), 214–49; Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppression 1840–1890 (Princeton, 1982), 10.

⁶⁹ Lovejoy, Paul E. and Richardson, David, ‘Competing Markets for Male and Female Slaves: Slave Prices in the Interior of West Africa, 1780–1850’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 28 (1995), 261–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ There is a massive literature on slavery in Africa, much of it concerned with the extent to which enslaved people were assimilated into kinship structures (e.g. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison, 1977), 7–66) and the degree to which slavery was transformed by commercial forces and predatory state activities (Lovejoy, Transformations; Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago, 1991)). There seems little doubt, however, that, among the newly enslaved in Africa at least, females often outnumbered males and that this was linked to the reproductive and productive roles of women. Summarising the literature, Frank McGlynn suggested that women ‘predominated in the internal market and exchange transactions of African kinship slavery, valued for their reproduction of dependents and production of domestic, craft and agricultural factors’ (Frank McGlynn, ‘African Slavery’, in Encyclopedia of Social History, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York, 1994), 20–1).

⁷¹ On the massacring of prisoners, see Meillassoux, Anthropology of Slavery; Law, Robin, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1991), 97Google Scholar; Romer, Ludwig Ferdinand, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), ed. Winsnes, Selena. A. (Oxford, 2000), 128Google Scholar.

⁷² Potts, Malcolm and Hayden, Thomas, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World (Dallas, 2008), 192Google Scholar.

⁷³ As an example of the conservatism of traditions, a German traveller, Isert, observed in 1785 that the sacrifice of fifty people each year to the king of Dahomey was a ‘dreadful custom’ and ‘financial loss’, but that for political reasons the king could not ‘terminate a custom that is as old as the kingdom itself’ (P. E. Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade (1785), trans. Selena A. Winsnes (Oxford, 1992), 111).

⁷⁴ The motivation of warfare in Africa has been a source of much debate, with claims that wars were often primarily motivated by political, not economic, considerations and would have occurred in any case in the absence of the export slave trade, being challenged by arguments that the possibility of exporting captives helped create a new type of ‘predatory’ state, transforming its victims into commodities for export. For statements of this argument, see Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (1988; Cambridge, 1998 edn), 81–93; Klein, Martin A., Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998), 37–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ North, Understanding the Process, 63.

⁷⁶ Atlas of Slavery, ed. Eltis and Richardson.

⁷⁷ Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles and Profits: Merchant Decision-Making in the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 58 (2001), 171–204; idem, ‘Seasonality, African Trade and Atlantic History’ (unpublished paper delivered to the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University, 21 June 2007).

⁷⁸ Hogerzeil, Simon J. and Richardson, David, ‘Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality: Day to Day Evidence from the Dutch African Trade, 1751–1797’, Journal of Economic History, 67 (2007), 160–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ For a general statement see Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, ‘Technological Change, Slavery and the Slave Trade’, in Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Clive Dewey and Anthony G. Hopkins (1978), 243–58.

⁸⁰ Haines, Robin and Shlomowitz, Ralph, ‘Explaining the Decline in Mortality in the Eighteenth Century British Slave Trade’, Economic History Review, 53 (2000), 262–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Sheridan, Richard B., ‘The Commercial and Financial Organisation of the British Slave Trade, 1750–1807’, Economic History Review, 11 (1958–9), 249–63Google Scholar; Price, Jacob M., ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Solow, Barbara L. (Cambridge, 1991), 293–339CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robin Pearson and David Richardson, ‘Social Capital, Institutional Innovation, and Atlantic Trade before 1800’, Business History, 50 (2008), 765–80.

⁸² Peter Mathias, ‘Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise’, in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. Kenneth Morgan and John J. McCusker (Cambridge, 2000), 15–36.

⁸³ Harms, River of Wealth, 197–215.

⁸⁴ North, Understanding the Process, 78.