The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System

Abstract

If the best-known aspects of African slavery remain the horrors of the middle passage and the travail of plantation life in the Americas, recent work has nonetheless provided some important reminders of the Old World ramifications of slavery (Miller 1988; Meillassoux 1986; Miers and Roberts 1988; Manning in press-a). Millions of slaves were sent from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in households and plantations in North Africa and the Middle East and suffered heavy casualties on their difficult journey. Millions more, captured in the same net as those sent abroad, were condemned to slavery on the African continent. The mortality of captives in Africa, therefore, included not only losses among those headed for export at the Atlantic coast but the additional losses among those destined for export to the Orient and among those captured and transported to serve African masters.

Of His Bones are Coral Made: Submerged Cultural Resources, Site Formation Processes, and Multiple Scales of Interpretation in Coastal Ghana

“…In a similar manner to the way Delgado (2009) (Curtin 1984:21-26;Fage 1969:52;Feinberg 1989:v;Klein 1990:289;Manning 1992;Searing 1993:75-76;Vogt 1979:1;Wilks 1993:7-8), the Atlantic trade superseded it in size and general importance along the coast (DeCorse 1996:682;Mitchell 2005:170;Posnansky 1971:10-11;Ward 2003:2). 61 In terms of the sheer quantities of goods transported by sea versus by human or animal, the Atlantic trade far surpassed any other network of trade in West Africa.…”

“…60 While there are debates concerning the efficacy of using world-systems theory in studying historical trade in West Africa, it should be noted that it is virtually impossible to understand the European/international historical maritime coastal trade with West Africa in any context other than the World System (Blake 1987:398;Bruijn 1990;DeCorse 2001:11-12;Eltis 1994;Hopkins 1973:89;Inkori and Engerman 1992:9;Manning 1992;Orser 1998Orser , 2009Priestley 1969:3, 76;Rawley and Behrendt 2005:8;Walvin 1992:41;Williams 1994 58 Particularly important for this research is that shipwrecks are often the best evidence that we have of this, and, particularly in West Africa, at the source of much of the Atlantic trade, this is an especially important resource and receptacle of information. Shipwrecks hold immense potential to provide clues as to the "totality of interaction" (Kelly 1997:354) involved with historical maritime trade.…”

Latin America

“…Although violence and exploitation also played a role, the indigenous population was decimated by infectious diseases, causing a global fall in temperatures as abandoned agricultural fields reverted to secondary vegetation that absorbed more carbon (Koch et al 2019). Although Africans shared the immunities of Europeans, contributing to the infection of native Americans, inhuman conditions on the slave ships meant that at least fifteen percent of the more than ten million slaves transported from Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries died before even reaching the Americas, and the trade had devastating effects on the societies from which they were taken (Manning 1990). Yet by the final decades of the twentieth century, social movements founded on the assertion of indigenous and Afro identities were increasingly active in Latin American politics, despite assumptions that these differences would cease to be significant in societies in which states fostered national identities based on 'mixing'.…”

Potlatch and the articulation of modes of production: revisiting French Marxist Anthropology and the history of central Africa

“…In a context of relatively low demographic pressure disgruntled subordinates could simply disappear into the vast tracts of unoccupied land when things got tough, and there was little incentive to intensify production. Thus, rulers saw forms of 'outsourced exploitation,' notably the transatlantic slave trade, as an attractive alternative (see for example Manning 1992;Cooper 2000;Austin 2008). Nevertheless, for reasons we explore in detail in the second half of this essay, such explanations are not by themselves sufficient.…”