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THE ANNUAL VOLUME AND REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE, 1780–1807

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 1997

STEPHEN D. BEHRENDT
STEPHEN D. BEHRENDT
Affiliation:
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University
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Abstract

In a recent article David Richardson revised estimates of the volume and African regional distribution of the eighteenth-century British slave trade. Richardson calculated that British slave vessels sailing between 1698 and 1807 – to the year of Abolition – embarked 3,052,509 slaves on the African coast. This figure falls at the midpoint between lower-bound estimates made by Curtin in 1969 and upper-bound estimates published by Inikori seven years later. Further, Richardson provided historians with the first extended year-by-year series of British slave exports; and he separated the trading data of the three principal British slaving ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol, which comprised 50, 28 and 18 per cent of the trade, respectively.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , July 1997 , pp. 187 - 211
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Research for this article was supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Council for Research in Economic History and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. I would like to thank Joseph C. Miller for helpful comments and Svend E. Holsoe for providing information on 46 British slave ships trading to St Croix or St Thomas.