32.16.02 · world-history / atlantic-slave-trade

The Atlantic slave trade — scale, economics, and abolition

shipped3 tiersLean: none

Anchor (Master): Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UP, 2000); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (UNC Press, 1944); Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (Harvard UP, 2007); Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014); slavevoyages.org estimates

Intuition Beginner

Between 1501 and 1867, European ships carried roughly 12.5 million captive Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the six-weeks-to-six-months voyage known as the Middle Passage; close to 1.8 million did not. The survivors were sold to work plantations producing sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, and rice. No forced migration in recorded history was larger, and few were deadlier per person shipped.

The trade ran on a triangle. Ships left Liverpool, Nantes, and Lisbon loaded with textiles, firearms, and alcohol, exchanged these on the West African coast for captives, crossed the Atlantic with that human cargo, and returned to Europe carrying plantation goods. Each leg paid for the next. The engine was not ideology alone; it was profit. Plantation sugar and raw cotton were among the most valuable commodities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy, and enslaved labour was the cheapest way to produce them.

A moral movement ended the legal British trade in 1807 and slavery in British colonies in 1833, but the motives were mixed and the trade limped on illegally, above all to Brazil, until final abolition in 1888. This unit goes deeper than its companion 32.16.01 on three points: the scale of the trade and how historians measure it, the economics linking plantations to European industry, and the contested motives behind abolition.

Visual Beginner

Figure: The trade at a glance. Of roughly 12.5 million captives embarked on the African coast, about 10.7 million were disembarked alive in the Americas; the difference, near 1.8 million, died on the Middle Passage. The bars below break the disembarkation total down by receiving region.

Receiving region	Approx. captives disembarked	Share of total
Brazil	5.5 million	~46%
British Caribbean (Jamaica, Barbados, etc.)	1.6 million	~13%
French Caribbean (Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe)	1.3 million	~11%
Spanish Americas (Cuba, mainland)	1.3 million	~11%
Dutch, Danish, Swedish Caribbean	0.1 million	~1%
British North America (mainland)	0.3 million	~2.4%

Sources: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org, 2020 release); Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010). Figures rounded; regional totals omit small contraband traffic and so sum to less than 10.7 million.

Worked example Beginner

How do historians turn shipping records into the headline numbers? We work the Middle Passage mortality arithmetic step by step using the slavevoyages.org figures.

Step 1: Start with the embarked total. Voyage records document approximately 12.5 million people loaded onto slave ships on the African coast across the whole trade, 1501 to 1867. This is the embarked count.

Step 2: Subtract the disembarked total. Records of arrivals in the Americas account for approximately 10.7 million people delivered alive. The difference, 12.5 minus 10.7, is 1.8 million. These are the deaths at sea, between the African coast and the American port of sale.

Step 3: Convert to a rate. Divide deaths by the embarked count: 1.8 divided by 12.5 equals 0.144, or about 14.4 percent. Historians round this to "about 15 percent" Middle Passage mortality. The rate is an average; individual voyages ranged from under 5 percent to over a third of the captives dead.

Step 4: Read the dates. The British Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and emancipated the enslaved in its colonies in 1833. The 26-year gap between ending the trade and ending slavery shows these were separate legal acts: stopping the supply of new captives first, then ending the institution itself, with slaveholders paid compensation for the "loss" of their human property.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

This section fixes the terms used in the deeper analysis. Several are quantitative, because the depth-side questions about the trade are questions of magnitude, flow, and rate.

The transatlantic triangular trade denotes the three-leg commercial circuit linking Europe, West and West-Central Africa, and the Americas. Leg one carried European manufactured goods (textiles, firearms, iron bars, alcohol, cowrie shells) to the African coast, where they were exchanged for captives. Leg two, the Middle Passage, carried captives to the Americas. Leg three carried plantation commodities, sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and rum, back to Europe. The schematic abstracts a messier reality of direct Africa-to-Americas and intercolonial voyages, but it captures the dependency structure: each leg's cargo financed the next.

The Middle Passage mortality rate for a voyage is the ratio of deaths at sea to captives embarked:

m = \frac{embarked - disembarked}{embarked} .

Across the roughly 36,000 documented voyages the mean rate is about 0.14 to 0.15, with high variance. The rate is a property of a voyage or a fleet, not of an individual; a person either survived or did not.

The plantation complex denotes the integrated economic system of large single-crop estates worked by enslaved labour, geared to export markets and financed, insured, and shipped through European metropoles. It is the unit of production that absorbed the disembarked captives.

The Williams thesis, named for Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), is the two-part claim that (i) profits from the slave trade and slave-grown plantation agriculture supplied significant capital for the British Industrial Revolution, and (ii) Britain abolished the trade in 1807 less from moral conviction than from economic interest, because the slave economy had become dispensable. Both halves are contested and are presented as positions, not as settled fact, below.

Abolition separates two distinct legal acts: suppressing the trade in captives (the 1807 British act, the 1808 US act) and ending the institution of slavery itself (the 1833 British emancipation, the 1865 US Thirteenth Amendment, the 1888 Brazilian Golden Law). The distinction matters because ending the trade did not free anyone already enslaved; it only cut off future supply.

Counterexamples to common slips

Slip 1: "The 12.5 million figure is just a guess." It is an estimate built from approximately 36,000 individual voyage records assembled in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org). It has error bars, and it has risen from Philip Curtin's 1969 estimate of about 9.5 million as the archive has been mined, but it is a measured quantity, not a round-number guess.

Slip 2: "Britain abolished the trade because slavery had become unprofitable." Seymour Drescher's Econocide (1977) argued the opposite: the British slave economy was still profitable and politically powerful in 1807, so abolition was a deliberate sacrifice of income, not a costless discard. This finding is central to the abolition-motives debate in the Advanced results section.

Slip 3: "Most enslaved Africans went to North America." Mainland British North America received roughly 305,000 people, about 2.4 percent of the total. Brazil alone took close to half. The centre of gravity of the trade was South America and the Caribbean, not the future United States.

Slip 4: "Ending the trade freed the enslaved." It did not. The 1807 act stopped new arrivals; people already held remained enslaved. Britain's 1833 emancipation freed them only after a compensated "apprenticeship" transition, and slaveholders, not the enslaved, received the compensation.

Institutional analysis Intermediate+

The deeper economic question is how a system of plantation slavery became the hinge between African coerced labour and European industrial capitalism. Three institutional mechanisms did the work: the plantation as a production unit, the credit-insurance-shipping complex that financed it, and the commodity chain that fed plantation output into European manufacturing. Each is measurable, and each is what the Williams thesis is really about.

The plantation as a production unit. Caribbean sugar plantations were industrial in their organisation long before the factory. A Jamaican sugar estate of the eighteenth century combined field gangs working in shifts with a processing mill, a boiling house, and a curing house, coordinated on a timetable and disciplined by violence. The economics were brutal and explicit: on several British Caribbean islands the enslaved population could not reproduce itself, because death rates exceeded birth rates. Planters therefore budgeted for replacement through importation. The life expectancy of an African-born enslaved person arriving in Jamaica was roughly seven years. Working people to death and buying replacements was, on the planter's own ledger, cheaper than sustaining a self-reproducing labour force. This is the institution the trade supplied.

The credit-insurance-shipping complex. A slaving voyage was capital-intensive and risky, and so it was distributed across a web of financial institutions. Merchants in Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and Lisbon syndicated the upfront cost of a ship, its outfitting, and its trade goods. Underwriters in London insured both hull and "cargo," with human beings listed as insurable property; the Zong massacre of 1781, in which 133 captives were thrown overboard so that owners could claim insurance, exposed the logic in its extreme. Banking houses, including ones ancestral to high-street and insurance brands still operating, held slave-linked accounts. These institutions developed precisely the capacities, syndication, risk-pricing, and long-distance credit, that industrial commerce later required.

The commodity chain into manufacturing. The plantation output flowed back into European industry. The clearest case is cotton. British Lancashire's mechanised mills, the emblem of the Industrial Revolution, consumed raw cotton that enslaved people grew. Before the 1790s the link was modest; after Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made short-staple upland cotton profitable, the US South became the cotton quarry of the world's first factory system, and the enslaved population of the United States grew rather than shrank during the early industrial decades.

These three mechanisms are the factual core. The interpretive question, and theWilliams thesis proper, is how much weight to put on them, and it has two live positions in the literature.

Position A (Williams, Solow, Inikori: slavery was a substantial, perhaps necessary, contributor). On this view the profits, the financial infrastructure, and the captive export markets of the slave complex were large enough to matter to industrialisation. Barbara Solow and Joseph Inikori extended Williams by arguing that the relevant quantity is not only direct profit but the whole Atlantic sector, shipping, insurance, cotton processing, and the export demand for manufactured goods, that the slave complex called into being. The empirical support is the documented wealth of slave ports, the survival of slave-linked banking and insurance institutions into the industrial era, and the dependence of the flagship cotton industry on slave-grown inputs. ^{[Williams 1944]}

Position B (Drescher, Engerman, and the quantitative-revisionist line: slavery's contribution was real but not decisive). On this view the direct profits from the slave trade, while substantial, were too small a fraction of total British capital formation to have been a determining cause of industrialisation. The slave trade's annual returns, divided against the size of the eighteenth-century British economy, do not on this accounting cross the threshold of "necessary." Drescher's further point in Econocide is that the British state sacrificed a still-profitable slave economy in 1807, which is hard to reconcile with a purely deterministic economics of abolition. ^{[Drescher 1977]}

The current consensus, to the extent one exists, treats Position A and Position B as partial: slavery was neither the sole engine of the Industrial Revolution nor a negligible sideshow. It was one significant input among several, including domestic agricultural change, property-rights institutions, coal, and scientific culture. The disagreement is about magnitudes and counterfactuals, and it is not resolvable by a single number.

Bridge. This institutional analysis builds toward the Industrial Revolution unit 32.18.01, where the plantation-to-factory cotton chain appears again in the sourcing of Lancashire's raw fibre and the export markets that disciplined early mechanisation. The foundational reason the Williams thesis remains unresolved is that the slave-linked capital flows were large in absolute terms yet a modest fraction of total British investment; this is exactly the measurement disagreement that separates Williams and Inikori from Drescher and Engerman. The same extractive-institutions nexus generalises to the decolonization unit 32.23.01, where the plantation complex's long-run effects on postcolonial development are diagnosed, and it appears again in the colonialism unit 32.15.01 as the economic architecture that later imperial rule inherited.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 3 (medium). In roughly 300 words, describe the three legs of the triangular trade and explain why each leg was necessary for the system to function. Identify which leg carried the highest-value cargo and why.

Hint. Think about what each side of the Atlantic had in surplus and what it lacked.

Answer guide

A strong answer names the outbound leg (manufactured goods to Africa), the Middle Passage (captives to the Americas), and the return leg (plantation commodities to Europe). It explains the dependency: African sellers demanded European goods as the price of captives, American plantations demanded captives as the labour to grow commodity crops, and European markets demanded the commodities. The return leg typically carried the highest-value cargo (sugar, and later raw cotton) because plantation commodities were the system's final, highest-processed output, whereas outbound manufactured goods were bulk trade goods and captives were an intermediate input. The answer should note that this is why ports like Liverpool grew rich primarily on the return and financing legs rather than on the Middle Passage itself.

Exercise 5 (medium). State Position A and Position B on the Williams thesis as defined in this unit. For each, name one empirical argument its proponents advance and one objection the other side raises. Keep your answer under 350 words.

Hint. The two positions disagree about the weight of slavery in industrialisation, not about whether slavery was profitable.

Answer guide

Position A (Williams, Solow, Inikori) holds that slave-complex profits, financial infrastructure, and captive export markets were a substantial contributor to British industrialisation; its evidence includes the wealth of slave ports and the dependence of the cotton industry on slave-grown inputs. The objection from Position B is that direct slave-trade profits were too small a fraction of total British capital formation to be determining. Position B (Drescher, Engerman) holds that slavery's contribution was real but not decisive and points to Econocide's finding that Britain sacrificed a still-profitable slave economy in 1807; the objection from Position A is that this narrows the analysis to direct profits and ignores the broader Atlantic sector, shipping, insurance, processing, and export demand, that the slave complex called into being. A complete answer notes that the disagreement is over magnitudes and counterfactuals and is not settled by a single number.

Exercise 6 (hard). The moral-versus-economic framing of British abolition has been called a false dichotomy. In roughly 400 words, evaluate that claim. What evidence would count in favour of each of the three forces usually cited, moral advocacy, economic interest, and enslaved resistance, and what would count against each?

Hint. Consider the timing of abolition (1807) relative to the profitability of the slave economy, and the role of the Haitian Revolution and Jamaican revolts in raising the cost of maintaining slavery.

Answer guide

A strong answer treats the three forces as separately testable. For moral advocacy, evidence in favour includes the mass petition movement, the sugar boycotts, and the role of Quaker and Evangelical organisation; evidence against is Drescher's point that Britain acted while the slave economy was still profitable, which is hard to explain on pure interest grounds and so credits moral pressure. For economic interest, evidence in favour includes the strategic value of suppressing rival (French, Spanish, Brazilian) trades via the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron; evidence against is that suppressing the trade was itself costly and that British industry still consumed slave-grown cotton for decades after 1807. For enslaved resistance, evidence in favour includes the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the 1831 Baptist War in Jamaica, and the chronic cost of plantation security; evidence against is that resistance raised costs but did not by itself change metropolitan law. The best answers conclude that the dichotomy is false because the forces reinforced one another: resistance raised the cost of slavery, moral advocacy changed the political feasibility of action, and economic interest shaped which action Britain took. The answer should mark as normative any claim that one motive "really" dominated.

Exercise 7 (hard, numeric). Patrick Manning's demographic model estimates that for every captive landed alive in the Americas, additional lives were lost inside Africa through capture, forced march, and detention, and through the children never born to those removed. Suppose, for a simplified counterfactual, that 10.7 million were landed alive, that inland capture and transport killed 0.4 captives per person landed, and that the unborn-children factor adds 1.1 per person landed. Compute Manning-style total continental demographic loss implied by these parameters, and comment on why such estimates are far less certain than the voyage-record totals.

Hint. Multiply the landed total by $(1 + 0.4 + 1.1)$ .

Answer

The multiplier is $1 + 0.4 + 1.1 = 2.5$ , giving $10.7 \times 2.5 = 26.75$ million as the implied continental loss under these parameters. (Manning's own published range is wider, up to the order of 50 million or more under different assumptions, because the capture-death and fertility parameters are inferred rather than recorded.) The estimate is far less certain than the voyage totals because the embarked and disembarked counts come from shipping documents, while the capture-deaths and unborn-children factors must be modelled counterfactually from population data and assumptions about fertility and violence that no archive directly records.

Advanced results Master

This section takes three depth questions as far as the evidence allows: why abolition happened when and how it did, how much the trade destabilised African polities, and how the scale of continental demographic loss is estimated. All three are contested; the humanities addendum requires that the contestation be shown rather than hidden.

Abolition motives: three positions, not two

The abolition-motives debate is usually mis-stated as a binary between morality and economics. The literature in fact carries three distinct positions, each with its own evidence and its own weaknesses.

Position 1: humanitarian-moral primacy (the Drescher-econocide position, extended). On this view the decisive variable was genuine moral revulsion, organised by the abolitionist movement and amplified by the testimony of the formerly enslaved. The strongest single piece of evidence is timing: Britain abolished the trade in 1807 while the slave colonies were still profitable and politically powerful, a pattern Seymour Drescher called "econocide." If pure economic interest had governed policy, the 1807 act is anomalous. ^{[Drescher 1977]}

Position 2: economic-interest primacy (the Williams position). On this view abolition reflected the interests of an industrial bourgeoisie that no longer needed mercantilist protection and preferred free trade, plus the strategic value of using the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron to suppress the slave trades of rival powers. The moral language was, on this account, the idiom in which an interest was pursued. ^{[Williams 1944]}

Position 3: enslaved-resistance primacy (the Baptist and resistance-centred position). On this view the decisive pressure came from below: the Haitian Revolution, the Jamaican revolts including the 1831 Baptist War, maroon wars, and the everyday refusal that made slavery chronically expensive to police. British emancipation in 1833 followed the 1831 Jamaican revolt by two years, a temporal proximity this position treats as causal rather than coincidental. ^{[Baptist 2014]}

The clean reading is that the three positions are not exclusive. Moral advocacy changed what was politically imaginable, economic interest shaped which abolition was chosen, and enslaved resistance raised the price of inaction. The claim that any one of them "really" caused abolition is a normative judgement about weight, not a finding of the archive; the unit presents all three and takes no single side.

Destabilisation of African polities

The demand for captives distorted African political economy in measurable ways. The clearest mechanism is the guns-for-slaves cycle: firearms traded on the coast were converted by African suppliers into more captives, who were exchanged for more firearms, militarising the polities closest to the coast and exposing their neighbours to raiding. The Kingdom of Dahomey moved from opposition to participation over the 1720s and 1730s; the Oyo Empire built a cavalry state on slave raiding; the Asante Confederacy traded captives for guns to secure its position against rivals. ^{[Eltis 2000]}

The structural point is that the trade selected for coercive, centralised, raid-oriented state formation and against commercial or manufacturing diversification. Regions that became supplier states grew militarily powerful in the short run but specialised in a commodity, people, whose production destroyed the human capital on which long-run development depends. This is the mechanism behind Walter Rodney's argument, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), that the trade directed African economic activity away from productive agriculture and industry. Whether one accepts Rodney's full thesis or not, the directional effect, coastal militarisation and interior insecurity, is well supported.

Estimating continental demographic loss

The voyage-record total of roughly 12.5 million embarked is the firm number. The continental loss is softer. Patrick Manning's model adds three unrecorded layers: deaths during capture and inland transport, deaths in coastal detention (the barracoons), and the children never born to the removed population. Under plausible parameters the total reaches the tens of millions; under different parameters it is lower. The uncertainty is irreducible because capture-deaths and counterfactual fertility are inferred from population models, not counted from documents. What is firm is that the trade's demographic effect on Africa was several times the number of people shipped, and that it fell disproportionately on young adults, the most productive and reproductive cohort. ^{[Manning 1990]}

Synthesis. Putting these together, the Atlantic slave trade was at once a measured demographic catastrophe, a plantation-industrial complex, and a moral reckoning whose abolition cannot be reduced to a single motive. The central insight of the demographic literature is that the 12.5 million embarked understate the continental loss once capture, inland transport, and unborn generations are counted; this is exactly why Manning's counterfactual estimates run to multiples of the voyage totals. The economic debate generalises beyond Britain: every Atlantic power that industrialised early had slavery-linked capital and captive export markets, and the foundational reason the moral-versus-economic framing persists is that humanitarian pressure, industrial interest, and enslaved resistance operated on the same statute at the same time. The bridge is that the trade's quantified scale is what makes its legacy, and the reparations claims built on it, quantifiable rather than merely rhetorical.

Connections Master

Colonialism and imperialism 32.15.01. The plantation complex analysed here is the economic architecture that later colonial rule inherited and extended. The extractive institutions, monoculture export agriculture, and coast-oriented infrastructure that colonialism imposed on Africa and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century were built on patterns the slave trade had already established. The depth unit supplies the economic mechanism, the credit-insurance-shipping nexus and the plantation as production unit, that the colonialism unit treats at broader institutional scope.
The Atlantic slave trade: perspectives 32.16.01. This unit is the depth complement to its companion. The companion covers the trade from African, European, and American perspectives, with sustained attention to lived experience, resistance, and cultural formation; this unit carries the quantitative scale, the plantation-industrial economics, and the abolition-motives debate to the depth the companion raises but does not exhaust. Reading the two together gives both the human and the structural account.
Industrial Revolution 32.18.01. The Williams thesis links this unit directly to the industrialisation literature. The cotton that fed Lancashire's mills, the credit and insurance institutions that financed slaving voyages, and the export markets that early manufactures supplied are all channels through which the slave complex touches the Industrial Revolution. The depth unit isolates these channels; the industrialisation unit embeds them in the wider account of technological and institutional change.
Decolonization 32.23.01. The extractive institutions and coast-oriented economies that the slave trade created are among the structural conditions that postcolonial states inherited and that decolonization movements had to confront. The connection runs through political economy: the same distortion of African institutions analysed here as a slave-trade effect reappears in the decolonization unit as a cause of the developmental difficulties of independent states.

Historical & philosophical context Master

The measurement of scale

The quantitative history of the trade begins with Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), which used port statistics and shipping records to estimate about 9.5 million people transported. The figure rose as the archive was mined. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, assembled by David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt, and Manolo Florentino, and published online at slavevoyages.org, now documents roughly 36,000 voyages and supports an estimate of about 12.5 million embarked and 10.7 million disembarked. ^{[slavevoyages.org]} The database is not a closed ledger: new voyages are still added, and the estimates carry genuine uncertainty, particularly for the illegal nineteenth-century trade to Brazil and Cuba that kept no clean books. But the order of magnitude is firm in a way it was not before Curtin. ^{[Eltis 2000]}

The Williams debate, 1944 to the present

Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) was marginalised by the mid-century establishment and is now central to the field. Its two claims, that slave profits helped fund British industrialisation and that abolition was economically rather than morally motivated, structured eight decades of argument. The debate turned quantitative in the 1970s: Stanley Engerman's profit calculations suggested the slave trade was a small fraction of British capital formation, while Seymour Drescher's Econocide (1977) showed the British slave economy was not in decline at abolition, undermining the simple economic-determinist account. Barbara Solow and Joseph Inikori replied by broadening the accounting beyond direct profit to the whole Atlantic sector. ^{[Williams 1944]} The historiography is a case study in how a claim survives by being re-specified rather than refuted.

Source recovery and the turn to the captive's perspective

The most recent transformation is methodological. Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery (2007) reads the same voyage records the quantitative historians built, but from the captive's side, reconstructing the Middle Passage as a process that turned people into commodities. ^{[Smallwood 2007]} Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (2014) argues for the productivity of enslaved labour in the US cotton South and connects it to American capitalism. ^{[Baptist 2014]} These works do not contradict the quantitative findings; they sit alongside them, supplying the experience and the micro-economics of coercion that aggregate numbers conceal.

A note on normative claims

Several claims in this unit are normative rather than purely descriptive. The judgement that the trade was a moral atrocity, that planter compensation in 1833 was unjust, and that present-day reparations are owed, are evaluative claims grounded in moral and political frameworks, not measurements. The unit marks them as normative and attributes them where appropriate (the reparations framework, Rodney's underdevelopment thesis, the abolitionist tradition). The descriptive core, the voyage totals, the mortality rates, the commodity flows, the institutional mechanisms, and the existence of the historiographical disagreement, stands independently of any normative frame.

Bibliography Master

Primary and source databases:

@database{slavevoyages,
  author    = {Eltis, David and Richardson, David and Behrendt, Stephen D. and Florentino, Manolo},
  title     = {Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database},
  url       = {https://www.slavevoyages.org},
  year      = {2020},
  note      = {Emory University, estimates and voyage interfaces, approx. 36,000 voyages}
}

@book{williams1944,
  author    = {Williams, Eric},
  title     = {Capitalism and Slavery},
  publisher = {University of North Carolina Press},
  year      = {1944}
}

Modern scholarship:

@book{eltis2000,
  author    = {Eltis, David},
  title     = {The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year      = {2000}
}

@book{eltisrichardson2010,
  author    = {Eltis, David and Richardson, David},
  title     = {Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade},
  publisher = {Yale University Press},
  year      = {2010}
}

@book{smallwood2007,
  author    = {Smallwood, Stephanie E.},
  title     = {Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
  year      = {2007}
}

@book{baptist2014,
  author    = {Baptist, Edward E.},
  title     = {The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism},
  publisher = {Basic Books},
  year      = {2014}
}

@book{drescher1977,
  author    = {Drescher, Seymour},
  title     = {Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition},
  publisher = {University of Pittsburgh Press},
  year      = {1977}
}

@book{manning1990,
  author    = {Manning, Patrick},
  title     = {Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year      = {1990}
}

@book{thomas1997,
  author    = {Thomas, Hugh},
  title     = {The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440--1870},
  publisher = {Simon \& Schuster},
  year      = {1997}
}

@book{curtin1969,
  author    = {Curtin, Philip D.},
  title     = {The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census},
  publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press},
  year      = {1969}
}

@book{rodney1972,
  author    = {Rodney, Walter},
  title     = {How Europe Underdeveloped Africa},
  publisher = {Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications},
  year      = {1972}
}

Prerequisites

32.15.01
32.16.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UP, 2000), Ch. 1, and Thomas, The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster, 1997), opening chapters, in plain English
intermediate: Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UP, 2000), Ch. 1-5; Thomas, The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster, 1997), economic and abolition chapters
master: Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UP, 2000); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (UNC Press, 1944); Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (Harvard UP, 2007); Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014); slavevoyages.org estimates

References

Eltis, D. — The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UP, 2000) · Ch. 1-5 (scale, origins, and the economics of the trade)
Williams, E. — Capitalism and Slavery (UNC Press, 1944) · passim (the slavery-industrialisation and abolition-motives arguments)
Smallwood, S. — Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard UP, 2007) · passim (Middle Passage mortality and the commodification of captives)
Baptist, E. — The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) · passim (plantation productivity and US capitalism)
Drescher, S. — Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977) · Ch. 1-6 (the slave economy was not in decline at abolition)
Manning, P. — Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge UP, 1990) · Ch. 2-4 (continental demographic loss and counterfactual population)
Eltis, D. and Richardson, D. — Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2010); Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org (Emory, 2020 release) · estimates and voyage interfaces (~36,000 voyages)
Thomas, H. — The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (Simon & Schuster, 1997) · economic and abolition chapters

Estimated time

beginner: 20m
intermediate: 50m
master: 80m