Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Description

Since 1999, intensive research efforts have vastly increased what is known about the history of coerced migration of transatlantic slaves. A huge database of slave trade voyages from Columbus’s era to the mid-nineteenth century is now available on an open-access Web site, incorporating newly discovered information from archives around the Atlantic world. The groundbreaking essays in this book draw on these new data to explore fundamental questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findings—that the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and more—challenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research.   For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, David Eltis and David Richardson Part I: Origins and Destinations 2. The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, António de Almeida Mendes 3. The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851 4. The Transatlantic Slave Trade to Bahia, 1582–1851 5. The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century 6. The African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba, 1789–1865 Part II: National Slave Trades 7. The Significance of the French Slave Trade to the Evolution of the French Atlantic World before 1716 8. The Dutch in the Atlantic World: New Perspectives from the Slave Trade with Particular Reference to the African Origins of the Traffic 9. The Slave Trade of Northern Germany from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries Part III: Some Wider Consequences and Implications of the New Data 10. The Slave Trade, Colonial Markets, and Slave Families in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, ca. 1790–ca. 1830 11. The Suppression of the Slave Trade and Slave Departures from Angola, 1830s–1860s 12. The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades Contributors Index