David Eltis on the Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (2001), pp. 17-46.

David Eltis discuss the same topic as Thornton and Rediker, but his methodology is rather different from them. Based on maps and data, Eltis attempts to reassess the size and distribution of the African slaves. Regarding to the volume and structure of the transatlantic slave trade, Philip Curtin and Joseph Inikori built on a combination of estimates of people who lived through the slave trade era, aggregated shipping data, and population projections of recipient regions in the Americas; Paul Lovejoy consolidated the conclusions of scholars who had recovered more new data from the archives after Curtin published his findings. Unlike them, he prefers to do his research on voyage-by-voyage shipping data rather than the estimates of then-contemporaries and historians derived from those data. Therefore, Eltis believes that their works are still in need of further revision.

In his essay, he takes four steps in reconsidering the broad outlines of the slave trade. He not only discusses the role of national participation, national groupings who acrossed African regions, but examines regions of disembarkation in the Americas and the African origins of slaves disembarking in a few American regions. Although Eltis considers “an Atlantic framework that allows for interaction among four continents is required”, his analytic unit is mainly on nation and national groupings. According to him, “before 1650, the Portuguese transported more than 95 percent of what appear by later standards to be a small flow of slaves. Between 1660 and 1807, when the slave trade was at its height, the British and their dependencies carried every second slave that arrived in the Americas, a dominance that would no doubt have continued but for the politically inspired decision to abolish the trade.”

Besides, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Americans, and the Spanish also joined the Atlantic slave trade. He also argues that “a larger role for African agency in interpretations of the shaping of the trade is essential.” While in fact, he rarely discusses the agency of African slaves in his essay.

Regarding to the transatlantic slave trade, these historians adopt different methodologies, which can greatly help us to understand it in a new way. Although their interpretations are different, in helping us to understand the transatlantic slave trade, in fact, they are compatible with each other.