Extending the Frontiers

Abstract

This book examines the various essays based on the transatlantic slave trade database that contains 34,850 voyages, well over half of which contain information which was unavailable in 1999. A reassessment of the transatlantic slave trade is based on new information and interpretations for branches of the trade that have received less attention than they should. A new database to identify the coastal origins of vessels that were captured and condemned in the courts of mixed commission in Sierra Leone and Havana is used and detailed information now available on the Africans onboard those vessels is then exploited to construct a profile of enslaved peoples not previously possible. Traditional historiography argues for the central importance of Angola as a source of slaves arriving in nineteenth-century Cuba. The Dutch role in the early modern Atlantic world and North German slave trade are explained well. The book also examines some of the broader influences on and effects of the slave trade. Brazilian slave traffic within a broader geographic context is exhibited. There is a great need for similar work on slaves arriving in the Caribbean and the North American mainland, where captives have tended to disappear from the view of the historian after disembarking. The new estimates of the transatlantic traffic are combined with recent research on the intra-American slave trade and population data to reevaluate the demographic experience of Caribbean slave populations.

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