Estimated Slave Imports to the New World, in the 17th Century
Historian Lorean S. Walsh tells us in Slavery in the North American Mainland, Chapter 5 of The Cambridge World History of Slavery,European powers clearing land for farming, learning how to raise suitable crops for food in unfamiliar environments, erecting houses, & building up herds of Old World livestock required massive amounts of labor. Moreover, in order to procure essential supplies from their homelands, settlers had either to produce products in demand in Europe or to earn income to buy them through trade with other regions. With capital for development & workers willing to emigrate to the new settlements in short supply, colonists soon turned to novel solutions to alleviate their labor problems,
Initially some aristocratic investors expected to develop their holdings with European tenants, but the ready availability of land precluded tenancy as a viable option in most regions. Others hoped to persuade or force Native Americans to work for them, a strategy that also proved futile on the mainland. In the early seventeenth century, England was perceived to be overpopulated, so British colonists turned first to fellow countrymen to fill the labor gap. English men & women too poor to pay their passage to the New World were recruited to come to the colonies under indenture, working off the cost of transportation with a number of years of unpaid service.
Spanish American 292,500
Brazil 560,000
British Caribbean 263,700
Dutch Caribbean 40,000
French Caribbean 155,800
Danish Caribbean 4,000
British North America 10,000
By the 1480s Portuguese ships were already transporting Africans for use as enslaved laborers on the sugar plantations in the Cape Verde & Madeira islands in the eastern Atlantic.
Spanish conquistadors took enslaved Africans to the Caribbean after 1502, but Portuguese merchants continued to dominate the transatlantic slave trade for another century and a half, operating from their bases in the Congo-Angola area along the west coast of Africa.
The Dutch became the foremost traders of enslaved people during parts of the 1600s, and in the following century English and French merchants controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade, taking a large percentage of their human cargo from the region of West Africa between the Sénégal and Niger rivers.
In 1713 an agreement between Spain and Britain granted the British a monopoly on the trade of enslaved people with the Spanish colonies. Under the Asiento de negros, Britain was entitled to supply those colonies with 4,800 enslaved Africans per year for 30 years. (BTW The contract for this supply was assigned to the South Sea Company, of which British Queen Anne held some 22.5 percent of the stock.)
Studies affirm the history of the African slave trade and its economic effect on western Africa, where coastal states became rich and powerful while savanna states were destabilized as their people were taken captive
Probably no more than a few hundred thousand Africans were taken to the Americas before 1600. In the 17th century, however, demand for enslaved labor rose sharply with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region in North America. The largest numbers of enslaved people were taken to the Americas during the 18th century, when, according to some historians’ estimates, nearly three-fifths of the total volume of the transatlantic slave trade took place.
A large percentage of the African people taken captive were women in their childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families. The European enslavers usually left behind persons who were elderly, disabled, or otherwise dependent—groups who were least able to contribute to the economic health of their societies.
Bibliography on Slavery in the Western Hemisphere
Books
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London: Verso, 1997.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Solow, Barbara L., ed. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Klein, Herbert S., and Francisco Vidal Luna. Slavery in Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Horne, Gerald. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.
Beckles, Hilary McD. A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
Articles
Eltis, David, and David Richardson. "The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery." The Journal of African History 44, no. 4 (2003): 667-676.
Miller, Joseph C. "Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities Through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery in Brazil." Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 2 (2004): 20-32.
Heywood, Linda M., and John K. Thornton. "Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660." Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 1 (2004): 1-15.
Klein, Herbert S. "The Atlantic Slave Trade and the African Diaspora." Historically Speaking 6, no. 1 (2004): 10-12.
Curtin, Philip D. "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade." Political Science Quarterly 83, no. 2 (1968): 190-216.
Morgan, Philip D. "British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600-1780." The North American Review 67, no. 2 (1997): 38-55.
Solow, Barbara L. "Caribbean Slavery and British Growth: The Eric Williams Hypothesis." The Journal of Development Studies 17, no. 4 (1981): 423-442.
Inikori, Joseph E. "The Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade." Social and Economic Studies 32, no. 3 (1983): 1-20.
Lovejoy, Paul E. "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature." Journal of African History 30, no. 3 (1989): 365-394.
Eltis, David. "The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment." The William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 17-46.
Galloway, J. H. "The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914." Journal of Historical Geography 30, no. 1 (1995): 167-182.
Klein, Herbert S. "Economic Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade." The Americas 54, no. 4 (1998): 621-629.
Socolow, Susan Migden. "Economic Roles of the Free Women of Color in Early New Orleans." French Historical Studies 15, no. 3 (1988): 408-431.
