A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

by William J. Bernstein

Few subjects carry the emotional freight of the slave trade, and until very recently most of the approximations of its volume, nationality, and mortality reflected the ideological needs of the estimators more than objective reality. Only after 1950 did the subject become an object of serious historical inquiry, as scholars such as Philip Curtin and David Eltis strove to obtain a meaningful and accurate census of the trade. The picture their data draw is stunning.81 Between 1519 and the end of the slave trade in the late 1860s, 9.5 million African slaves arrived in the New World; Figure 10-2 plots the annual transatlantic traffic. Since the best estimates of mortality on the middle passage are around 15 percent, this means that eleven million captives began the journey in Africa. The majority of the 9.5 million who survived the middle passage cut, crushed, and boiled cane.82 Fully 80 percent of slaves came to Brazil and the Caribbean, while most of the rest went to Spanish North America and South America. So massive was this involuntary migration that as early as 1580, slaves constituted well over half of voyagers to the New World; by 1700, three-quarters; and by 1820, 90 percent. Truly, the settlement of the Americas would not have been possible without black slaves, who constituted fully 77 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic before 1820.83 Only after the mid-nineteenth century, when the institution was finally outlawed, did the majority of immigrants have white skin.