M&D Deep Duck: Slave Trade - numbers

[Monte Davis]

Glancing over that website's tables for "flag" [of slave ships] rather than
destination, my impression is that British (and later Americans) were a
significantly larger fraction of carriers (which may or may not be the same
as traders) than they were of "destination slave populations." Maybe we
Anglophones developed moral qualms about slaveholding per se a bit earlier
than those mainland Europeans -- but hey, as long as they were buying from
Africa  and needed transport, and we had good ships & sailors, no sense
leaving money on the table.

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Very useful information to contextualize the time. So essentially the
> largest slave traders, which were the dominant sea powers and colonizers
> -Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Great Britain, France and US were also  the
> dominant purchasers and owners of slaves, largely in their colonial
> holdings.
>     I just saw Selma last night. These events were closer to the time of
> the beginning of Pynchon's writing career. One sees the depth of influence
> everywhere. Pynchon takes the realities of our time and looks for the roots.
>    Hoping someone can fill in some gaps in my history. So were Spanish
> slave dealers all directly working for the crown or were there corporate
> structures there too?
>    This certainly is an ignominious origin for Capitalism.
> On Feb 3, 2015, at 4:13 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> > The handiest compilation I've seen online for the trans-Atlantic slave
> trade is the interactive tables at
> >
> > http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces
> >
> > In broadest strokes, for the whole tabulated span 1501-1866:
> >
> > 12.5 million slaves embarked, 10.7 million disembarked. So ~14% died on
> the voyage (inherent vice, y'know)
> >
> > Ranked destinations:
> >
> > Brazil: 4.8 million
> > Caribbean/West Indies: 3.9 million
> > Spanish Americas: 1.3 million
> > North America: 390,000
> >
> > (That last surprises many people: it wasn't all or even mostly about us,
> not that that's anything to preen about)
> >
> > Slaves to Brazil peaked in 1800-1850, to Caribbean and North America in
> 1750-1800. Spanish America had an early peak in 1600-1650 and another in
> 1800-1850
> >
> > As I've noted here before, other sources concur that in total, there
> were roughly two slaves for every European settler. Obviously the ratio
> varied wildly from place to place -- but viewed from Mars, the story is less
> >
> > "Europeans settle New World, don't miss the tragic appendix about
> slavery"
> >
> > than
> >
> > "Europeans, using twice their own number of expendable prisoners, spend
> ~300 years getting a firm enough beachhead that other Europeans can really
> start pouring in in the early 19th century."
> >
> > Becky, re your "American slavery was probably the most vicious and
> inhumane form of slavery the world has ever known":
> >
> > Not so at the brute quantitative level of "how many died?" and "how well
> did the slave population reproduce itself and grow?" In the Caribbean death
> rates were much higher: disease, climate, sugar cultivation even tougher
> than cotton, tobacco or indigo) Slave population growth was lower or
> negative, rebellions and brutal repression much more common. And Brazil was
> no picnic, although ISTR it was there that the largest proportion of any
> New World slave population was able to slip into the forest as maroons,
> and/or blend with indigenes.
> >
> > But at the more refined level of "How hard was it for a slave to become
> free?"... or "How many knots did the law twist itself into to make slaves
> pure chattel rather than Nth-class citizens?"... or "How wide was the gap
> between public rhetoric about freedom and the actual slave society?"...or
> "How much pseudo-science was ginned up to justify slavery?" ...the US
> version was certainly right up (down) there.
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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