Under these circumstances, he wrote, “[a] hypothetically average farming hamlet of one hundred people could thus expect to suffer the disappearance of one of its twenty or so young men once in the course of each agricultural cycle or two.” The impact of such steady disappearance of people into the slave traffic like this, often stealthily and by surprise, injected an enormous dose of ambient environmental insecurity into people’s lives, and this imposed social costs that went beyond the taxes on African manpower, production, and fertility that we have spoken of.
