Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. in slave mortality on the high seas has engendered an increasingly sophisticated investigation of the reasons why Africans died aboard the sailing vessels that carried them from Africa to the New World. Research on this question for a long time remained confined to listing contemporaries' observations and thus limited conclusions within a narrow spectrum of eighteenth-century preoccupations. Techniques of statistical inference from scattered and often problematic reports of slave deaths during the Middle Passage have recently extended the analysis to consider the behavioral data in terms of modern epidemiology, demography, and other notions beyond the intellectual horizons of the participants in the trade. Although the theoretical objective implicit in such quantitative study is a balanced and simultaneous consideration of all possible causes of slave deaths, conclusions based on these new methods have so far tended to focus on the single crude distinction between the immediate consequences of the abuses that slaves suffered at sea as opposed to the delayed effects of debilitating conditions that they might have encountered earlier, along the largely undocumented African slave trails, in the barracoons, and on the beaches. This initial step, however promising as an advance along the newly-opened statistical front, has inadvertently become mired in an analytical failure to distinguish between two significantly different statistical measures, the percentage (or ratio) of slave loss Joseph C. Miller is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. The author thanks the following for suggestions that materially improved the arguments advanced in this article: ? 1981 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Fri, 9 May 2014 01:21:02 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 386 | JOSEPH C. MILLER and the rate of slave mortality at sea.1 Although the ultimate goal of a full multivariate pathology of slave deaths from the point of capture through their "seasoning" in the Americas remains unattainable for the time being, clarification of the important difference between these two statistical indicators of mortality must precede the establishment of a solid methodological basis on which historians may broaden their field of inquiry to take account of more causes of mortality among slaves, whether located on the oceans, in the Af...

La mort dans le Middle Passage : une approche cartographique de la traite des esclaves atlantique

“…15 Those characteristics roughly accord with the general patterns evident in the TSTD and the long-standing scholarship on death on the Middle Passage, including Dutch voyages (Miller 1981;Eltis 1984;Cohn 1985;Postma 2003;Hogerzeil & Richardson 2007;Eltis & Richardson 2010: 22, 30, 162, 175, 179, 204). The Dutch slave trade started in 1596, began to decline in the 1780s, and ended in 1829.…”

“…To illustrate the potential of such a critical cartographic approach to Middle Passage Studies, the maps debuted in this article chart the death of enslaved Africans and their disposal overboard on twenty-five voyages by Dutch vessels sailing from the Gold Coast of West Africa to the South American colony of Suriname in the second half of the 18th century. The maps' purpose is not so much analysis of the spatial-temporal patterns of death on the Middle Passage, a topic already well understood through decades of scholarship and better advanced through statistical approaches (Miller 1981;Eltis 1984;Cohn 1985;Postma 2003;Hogerzeil & Richardson 2007;Eltis & Richardson 2010). Rather, the maps' purpose is twofold.…”

“Espantosa mortandade”: desembarques, demografias e enfermidades africanas

“…É importante matizar a visão que torna o tráfico atlântico exclusivamente como propagador de doenças e epidemias. Impactos microbianos tinham desdobramentos conjunturais e demográficos, sendo fundamental destacar o clima, regimes econômicos, demografia, padrões de propriedade, dieta alimentar, entre outras dinâmicas de morbidade e mortalidade [29][30][31][32] Também podemos pensar num movimento contrário. Eltis argumentou que o impacto epidemiológico europeu no continente africano foi negligenciado nas abordagens históricas sobre o tráfico atlântico 33 (p. 161).…”

“Appalling mortality”: disembarkation, demographics, and African diseases

“…Micro-bial impacts had conjunctural and demographic connections, and it is essential to consider the climate, the economic regime, demography, property standards, and diet in other dynamics of morbidity and mortality. [29][30][31][32] . One could also think about a movement in the opposite direction.…”