Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic

Abstract

No problem has exercised Africanists for so long and so heatedly as the slave trade. Now that any difference of opinion as to its morality has ended, debate tends to concentrate on its economic and political aspects, particularly on its magnitude and regional characteristics. In the past few scholarly generations, sophisticated statistical manipulations have supplied more evidence, but it has been concentrated on the number of slaves who arrived in the New World. Nonetheless, dearth of evidence (sometimes total) regarding the other components of the trade has not seemed to discourage efforts to arrive at global figures and, by extension, to determine its effects on African societies.The present paper asks why this should be so, and wonders how any defensible conclusions can ever be reached about almost any facet of the trade that can go beyond ideology or truism. It concludes that no global estimate of the slave trade, or of any ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘underpopulation’ it may have caused, are possible, though carefully constructed micro-studies might provide limited answers. Under the circumstances, to believe or advocate any particular set or range of figures becomes an act of faith rather than an epistemologically sound decision

The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: Perspectives from African and comparative economic history

“…8 But what matters is whether AJR are right about which regions of the future colonial world were more and less heavily populated ca.1500. For Sub-Saharan Africa, we must admit that there are huge gaps in what we know (Henige, 1986). For the pre-colonial era all figures for the population of the region as a whole, or of the territories of its future colonies and post-colonial states, are merely backward projections from colonial enumerations, which generally began in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and were initially not proper censuses.…”

Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

“…3 Walter Rodney's influential book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa set the tone for research on the impact of slave trade, but more historiographically influential were a series of books and articles published that focused on the statistics of the slave trade, based on the compiled data found in the trans-Atlantic slave trade database. These works have offered demographic models of how the slave trade depopulated and underdeveloped the region of West Africa (Rodney 1981;Curtin 1969;Fage 1969;Lovejoy 1982Lovejoy , 2000Henige 1986); with the aid of computer models, Patrick Manning and William Griffiths (1988) conjectured that the slave trade had caused a rapid population decline in West Africa, a drop of 3-7 million from a base of 25 million in 1730. 4 Cook draws on Simmel's (1971, 45-46) assumptions that all human relationships involve exchanges that generate gain for the participants.…”

Earlier African Historical Demographies

“…Finally, the ever-lengthening debate as to the total size of the African population before European contact and the Atlantic slave trade seems to be generating more heat than light (see Henige 1986). Beginning with Riccioli, a seventeenth century author whose "analysis" consisted of hypothesizing a world population of 1 000 million, its distribution among the continents in multiples of 100 million, and finally arriving at an African population of 100 million (see Caldwell1985, 459), global figures have most often been products of ideology rather than detailed research.…”