The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World Author(s): Stephen D.

Behrendt, David Eltis, David Richardson Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Aug., 2001), pp. 454-476 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Economic History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3091760 Accessed: 15/06/2009 15:48
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Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (2001),

pp. 454-476

The

costs

of
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African

agency
Atlantic

coercion: the pre-modern world

By STEPHEN

D. BEHRENDT, DAVID ELTIS, and DAVID RICHARDSON

iolent resistance by Africans forced on board slave ships in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans has received far less attention than has the same phenomenon on plantations-the ultimate destinations of those vessels. In the last third of the twentieth century, in which perhaps 95 per cent of the total scholarship on slavery has appeared, there have been published just five articles on the topic, to which might be added a few obligatory descriptive pages on slave revolts in each of the general histories of the slave trade from Mannix and Cowley in the 1960s to that of Thomas in the late 1990s.1 Resistance by slaves in the Americas, by contrast, has provided the focal point of whole scholarly careers. Given the fact that slaves spent an average of 11 weeks on a vessel and the rest of their lives in bondage in the Americas, this may at first sight seem appropriate, but some new data, collected as a spin-off from a much larger project on the transatlantic slave trade, in fact suggest the opposite. What happened on board transatlantic slave vessels now appears to have been central to the shaping of the early modem Atlantic world and warrants much closer attention. The article is divided into three sections. Section I briefly describes the data on which the article is based, explores key features of shipboard slave revolts, and investigates possible explanations of them. Some aspects of revolts, notably variations in the incidence of revolts by African region of embarkation of slaves, are difficult to explain and require further research. In section II insurance and shipping records are drawn on in an attempt to calculate the impact of shipboard resistance by Africans to enslavement on the cost structure of slaving voyages. Section III then sets resistance in the wider contexts of the costs of coerced labour in the Americas and of Euro-African power relations in pre-colonial Africa. It also estimates the impact of African agency on the number and coastal origins of slaves carried across the Atlantic and thereby on the location and size of slave systems of the Americas.

1Uya, 'Slave revolts in the middle passage'; Pierson, 'White cannibals, Black martyrs'; Rathbone, 'Thoughts on resistance to enslavement'; McGowan, 'African resistance to Atlantic slave trade'; Inikori, 'Measuring the unmeasured hazards'; Mannix and Cowley, Black cargoes;Thomas, Slave trade.
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There are three new sets of data on European trade with Africa relevant to the wider issue of African agency. One is the recently published consolidated bank of 27,233 voyages augmented with additional data (and corrections) that have become available since publication.2 This includes all voyages that were known to have experienced slave revolts. A second is a dataset of 765 vessels that sailed to the African coast with the intent of trading in produce rather than in slaves. Comparisons between slave vessels and non-slave vessels should point to characteristics and costs peculiar to slave vessels. The third is a dataset of incidents of violence between Africans and Europeans arising both from trade disputes and from the imprisonment of hundreds of unwilling people below the decks of small wooden ships. The basic unit in the first two datasets is the vessel, whereas in the third it is an on-board rebellion or an attack from outside the vessel arising from a trade dispute in which at least one person was killed, either in the violence itself or in the retribution that followed. The set contains 483 attacks or revolts experienced by 467 vessels.3 These incidents break down into 92 attacks by Africans who were not slaves, 388 rebellions by Africans held as slaves, and three instances of three or more slaves committing suicide.4 Of the 388 rebellions, 22 were 'planned' insurrections for which slaves were punished, and eight were described as 'cut-offs', a term which could be used to describe attacks from the shore, but which is assumed here to mean a revolt. The first dataset contains perhaps 70 per cent of all slave voyages, but as the information on some voyages is thin, it is certain that many more of these experienced revolts and attacks than the set indicates. Comparisons between the revolts set and the larger slave ship dataset, even excluding voyages known to have had rebellions from the latter, have therefore to be made with care. The focus of this article is on the 388 cases of slaves rising in revolt against ship's crew, the first recorded instance being in 1654 and the last in 1865, though 92.5 per cent of all revolts occurred between 1698 and 1807. What proportion of vessels experienced rebellion? If we look only at the large dataset of slave-trading voyages then the answer is less than 2 per cent, but the great bulk of the archival sources upon which this new dataset draws are port and financial records. Such records are biased against information about what happened during the voyage itself, particularly if the voyage terminated prematurely. In the French port of Nantes, however, for a period of about 60 years, authorities required
Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade. Of these 467, only 448 are also in an expanded version of the large slave trade dataset, 11 are in the smaller dataset of produce traders, or vessels that did not trade in slaves, eight are vessels carrying slaves to Indian Ocean ports, the Cape of Good Hope, or, in one case, a French vessel which in 1858 purchased slaves in Africa, deemed them 'indentured servants' but forced them on board before attempting to proceed to the French Caribbean. This vessel was a de facto slave ship. 4 Included are eight cases where the meaning of 'cut-off' is ambivalent-a revolt or an attack from shore-and 22 of planned insurrections. The 92 attacks from shore-based Africans include 14 attacks on the ship's boats, rather than on the slave vessel itself.
3

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returning captains to submit an account of the completed voyage,5 and thereby generated a source more likely to carry reports of revolts. Of the 80 Nantes vessels reporting insurrections in the eighteenth century, no fewer than 70 sailed in the period 1715-77, the years for which these records are available. A total of 815 slave vessels left Nantes and delivered slaves in the Americas for the original owners, or at least took on slaves before disappearing from the historical record in this period. The subset may thus be classed as vessels most likely to have yielded information on revolts. If 70 of these vessels experienced rebellions, then 8.6 per cent, or one voyage in 11 or 12, could have experienced trouble. This is probably a lower bound figure. Even in this subset, some insurrections were no doubt not reported, especially where losses were not severe and the competence of the officers might be called into question. On the other hand, forging entries in logbooks-which were available to owners and port authorities-or arranging for the silence of all crew was neither easy to achieve nor lightly undertaken. A ratio of one in 10 is an upperbound guess. What held for the French trade no doubt applied to other national branches of the traffic as well. There is no reason why one national group should have experienced more or fewer revolts than another, and the relative paucity of evidence of revolts elsewhere might be put down to the nature of the surviving records rather than to a lack of revolts.6 A comparison of those vessels experiencing revolts with those that did not is a preliminary to assessing the costs of coercing labour. For both categories of vessel, figure 1 and table 1 present some basic characteristics of first, the geography of revolts, and second, the vessels and people carried in them. At this preliminary stage we are forced to use chi-square and t-tests rather than a multiple regression-based analysis because the inclusion of all the variables listed in table 1 in a logistic regression severely reduces the sample size. Given that many of the vessels in the non-revolt categories of figure 1 and in column 2 of table 1 experienced slave uprisings, but have left no information on the fact, then the differentials implied in both figure and table will be lower bound. Figure 1 distributes the two categories of voyages by African region of embarkation.7 Voyages, rather than slaves are used as the unit of analysis, because voyages were the basic unit of business decision making at the time.8 The figure immediately reveals a striking geographical pattern, with
5 Serie B in the Archives Departmentales de la Loire-Atlantique listed in Mettas, Repertoire,II, p. 806. 6 Of more than 7,000 Iberian slavers in the large dataset, only three Portuguese and two Spanish vessels are recorded as experiencing revolts. On the other hand, Stein, French slave trade, p. 103 states that revolts were so common that captains did not bother to report them unless they were particularly serious. We find this implausible given the loss of life normally involved. 7 For definitions, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade, 'Introduction'. 8 As noted below, many rebellions occurred before the slave vessel was fully slaved. Expressing the impact of revolts as a share of all slaves affected would thus bias downwards any assessment of the impact of revolts. Mean number of slaves on board vessels leaving Africa on which rebellion had happened or would occur was 270.6 (N= 238, S.D. = 181.3). The equivalent mean for all voyages was 336.7 (N= 5,462, S.D. = 178.6). ? EconomicHistory Society 2001

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN 5Resistance ReSlatves 1. Fiure

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Shipped

a) C>
0)

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a) a)

region Africa. ovUpper Guinea of B. Benin West-central However, over 40 per cent All other with slave revolts came South-eas ofvoyages the fra some African revolts being much more slaves from slave aboutamong the same of comingslave revolts as African regioner had likely 1 from others. shows that the three Guinea than Guinea regions than from others. Figure shows that the three Upper Upper regions . Figure fewer revolts andalltheir slaves shped by Afexportsan Relativedistributiay expoFigure regions, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast, together with the Gabon of revolts accounted just Bight Biafra,on accounted for for just with the for Gabon region in ofsouthern southern Biafra, Bight on the region information absee is made Portuguese and
Sources: see text

a from among coming being slaves much more likely nineteenth-century somely Spanirevolts the regions, Senegambia, Sierra and Leone, Coast, andward Coast, together much if allowance does not change would lead us to of on Westdrew the The leaving The per over 10 Africa. ent slaves-centra expect. picture heavily Portuguese othe the came from All revolts slave fewer regions. toto drew central Aica, but in if slaven as either had about African regions the same share of slave revolts this than their share of few number revolts exports or substantially slaving region, lead us to expect. The picture does not change much if allowance West-cewould the andca. on revolts on Portuguese for absence of information madexcept regions the nincharacteenth-centuryo trade, if and 1807. Even French, Spanish together slave mainy between a 1660 English, Spanish vessels. The and Dutch bias under-ican by have theleast French data earlier phenomenons reporting (p.456),of the explained on WestAfrica. The Portuguese dofrevoltw heavily inWest-central ed represent Africa.9 regions except for South-east but thfrom drew fewer fromther egion slaves show alone, entralch Angola, 1700-1800, ships Table 1 adds a preliminaryanalysis of voyage characteristicsto the onthe ofonvessels thisregion. we revolts leaving re the numberienced thedouble ofto Guinea, Upper only15% revolts butnolessthan all of a lower Africawould stillhave e st-central 're1700-1800, For reasons explained earlier (p. 456), the French data have the least reporting bias by African
9

region of any national sources. Indeed, it is hard to see any at all. A breakdown of revolts on French ships alone, 1700-1800, shows that the French got 36% of their slaves from Angola, but only 15% of the revolts they experienced were on vessels leaving that region. Upper Guinea, on the other hand, supplied 12% of the slaves on French ships, 1700-1800, but no less than 35% of revolts were on vessels leaving this area. The Upper Guinea phenomenon is thus not a product of bias in the sources.
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Table 1. Characteristicsof vessels, crews, and slaves experiencingrevolts in the transatlanticslave trade comparedwith vessels, crews, and slaves that did not, all African regions, 1527-1867
Variable Number of naval guns Tonnage Tonnage per gun Tonnage per crew Slaves per ton Number of crew at outset Slaves per crew member Crew died prior to reaching coast Crew died off Africa Crew died on middle passage Ratio of slaves who were male Ratio of slaves who were children Revolt Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Mean 8.4 7.2 211.2 181.8 23.8 27.1 6.2 6.5 1.4 1.6 33.8 30.0 8.7 10.3 0.1 0.2 4.6 2.9 2.3 1.5 0.6087 0.6495 0.2332 0.2777 Number of voyages 67 5,385 246 15,230 17 1,424 175 9,922 135 3,632 201 10,508 116 2,530 109 1,818 119 1,931 114 1,880 86 3,456 81 3,022 S.D. 6.7 5.2 101.0 100.5 16.3 25.8 2.1 3.3 0.9 0.8 16.3 14.4 4.7 6.0 0.3 0.9 4.8 3.7 4.4 2.2 0.1188 0.1238 0.1415 0.1853 T-scorefor Significance differences (2-tailed) 1.82 4.48 0.975 1.03 2.58 3.72 2.83 1.58 4.62 3.27 3.02 2.15 0.069 0.0 0.329 0.305 0.01 0.0 0.005 0.114 0.0 0.001 0.003 0.032

Note: Because of differences in numbers of voyages used in calculations, the means reported for variables 3 and 4 differ from those implied by variables 1, 2, and 6. Source: calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade.

geographic patterns. At first sight, and using a significance level of 5 per cent, vessels in which slaves rebelled were larger than those in which slaves did not rebel, they carried fewer slaves per ton, and they had a larger crew at the outset of the voyage and fewer slaves per crew member thereafter. Not surprisingly, however, such ships lost more of their crew off the African coast and during the middle passage than those not experiencing revolts. Further, among the slaves who rebelled, we find fewer males, and more children, than among those who did not. Some of the more counter-intuitive of these findings are readily explained. The key relationship is between the size of the vessel and time spent on the coast and on the voyage. Generally, larger vessels took longer to load with slaves and sailed on longer routes.'1 As argued below, slave revolts were possible whenever there were slaves on board, even in relatively
10A simple regression with time spent on the coast as the dependent variable and tonnage as the independent variable gave the following result (standard errors in first set of parentheses, significance levels in second): Days spent slaving= 119.2 + 0.073 X tonnage n = 2,092 r2 = 0.01 (4.7) (0.019) (0.000) (0.000)
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small numbers. Vessels of 200 tons or more spent on average 35 days (or nearly one-fifth) longer collecting slaves and getting across the Atlantic than did vessels of less than 100 tons.11 Larger vessels therefore had more revolts than small vessels simply because they had slaves on board for a longer period. Larger vessels also carried more ships' guns, and had larger crews. Rows three and four in table 1 adjust for these factors by showing tons per gun and per crew member respectively and, as column 6 shows, the differences between vessels undergoing revolts and those avoiding revolts are not statistically significant. Thus, the existence of larger crews and more guns on vessels experiencing revolts reflects the fact that larger ships were more likely to have revolts. Table 1 also suggests that slave revolts were associated with less crowding of slaves, as represented by the slaves per ton ratio (row 5), and fewer slaves per crew member (row 7). However, more than half of all slave revolts occurred before a vessel was filled to capacity and began the journey to the Americas. Revolts severe enough to abort the voyage often meant that the vessel entered the historical record without being fully slaved. By contrast, almost all vessels that did not experience a revolt left the coast with a close to full complement of slaves, and thus their ratios of slaves to crew member and slaves to ton are higher than are found on vessels that did have revolts.12 This preliminary discussion allows the elimination of some of the variables in table 1 in the interests of getting a sample of sufficient size to support multivariate analysis. Of the 12 comparisons in table 1 (and the eight statistically significant differences in means that the table suggests) we eliminate size of vessel, and the variables directly related to it such as tonnage and tonnage per crew, and number of guns. We can now use a logit regression where the dependent variable is dichotomous, or '1' if a revolt is known to have broken out, and '0' if it did not. A dummy variable is created for Upper Guinea and Gabon, in effect to separate out the two revolts 'regimes' shown in figure 1, and a time trend is added, although, as noted, over 90 per cent of the records are from the period 1720-1807. Even with the reduced data requirements, these procedures still generate only 30 cases where a slave rebellion

ll A crude breakdown of days spent on the coast and on the middle passage together, broken down by three categories of tonnage for 1,829 slaving voyages is as follows:

Tonnage less than 100 Tonnage greater than 99 and less than 200 Tonnage greater than 199

Days spent on coast and on middle passage S.D. No. Mean 127 78.3 186.4 204.1 573 90.9 221.1 88.8 1,129

12 In only a very few cases is there any indication of the number of slaves on board when the revolt occurred, much less any idea of how close the vessel was to carrying its intended number of slaves. Evidence presented below does suggest, however, that about half of all vessels were fully loaded at the outset of the revolt.

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Variable

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Logit regressionon slave ships: dependentvariable= 1 if slave ship experienceda slave revolt
B 1.24 0.08 0.081 1.563 -0.007 -5.049 -0.736 Wald 0.321 5.26 1.269 12.16 0.596 5.208 0.25 Odds ratio 1.084 1.084 4.772 0.44 0.002 0.617 Significance 0.571 0.022 0.26 0 0.993 0.023 0.479

Intercept Sailors' deaths on coast Sailors' deaths on middle passage Slave ship from Upper Guinea Time trend Proportion of slaves who were male Proportion of slaves who were children

Notes:Odds ratio measuresthe changesin odds and is exp (B) Source: see tab. 1. N = 479 (449 vessels not experiencing revolts,30 vessels experiencing revolts).

occurred (and 449 where no rebellion occurred). Table 2 shows the results. The multivariate analysis changes our preliminary conclusions, though given the small sample size these must remain tentative. As figure 1 suggests, the regional dummy is highly significant. Recent research has pointed to large variations between African regions in the incidence of slave and crew mortality, as well as in the age and sex ratios of Africans carried into the slave trade. Some of the links suggested above between slave revolts on the one hand, and crew mortality and age and sex ratios on the other, are now shown to have been attributable to these regional effects. Thus, middle passage deaths of crew are no longer significant after the dummy variable for region is taken into account. Similarly, the lower child ratios among slaves on board ships experiencing revolts are now shown to be linked to regional variations rather than to revolts per se. The lower male ratios on vessels experiencing revolts as well as crew deaths off the African coast remain significant after controlling for region. Finally, the negative time trend reflects the large fall-off in rebellions in the nineteenth century, probably related to the increased proportions of children among deportees from all parts of Africa after 1820.13 The lower proportion of males on vessels undergoing revolts is counterintuitive. The differential is not large-about five percentage points evaluated at the mean-but it is statistically significant at the 5 per cent level. Women are rarely mentioned as leading violent resistance, either on board ship, or in the New World, where the documentation of resistance is rather more extensive. There are only six cases where the sex of the casualties is given in the present dataset, and these show that for every woman, no fewer than 17 men died either during or as a consequence of resistance. There is nevertheless an interesting issue here of continental differentials in gender roles. In general terms women had more prominent economic and social functions in West African than in West European societies. Indeed, there is strong evidence that Europeans had to adjust their conceptions of gender as a result of exchange on the African
13 See Eltis and Engerman, 'Age and sex ratios'.
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coast.14 But the adjustment remained incomplete. Europeans wanted overwhelmingly to buy male slaves but, having agreed to take a large proportion of women and put them to work in the plantation fields in gangs driven with whips, they nevertheless reserved non-domestic skilled tasks for men alone. On board slave ships, women were obviously expected to be more passive than men. Unlike the men, who were shackled soon after they came on board, the women and children were allowed some freedom of movement. The small separate area created for them below decks was normally adjacent to the officers' quarters, specifically the captain's cabin where the arms chest was located. In the case of the Thomas, a Liverpool slave ship carrying 375 slaves from Loango to Barbados in 1797, 'two or three of the female slaves having discovered that the armourer had incautiously left the arms chest open, got into the after-hatchway, and conveyed all the arms which they could find through the bulkheads to the male slaves, about two hundred of whom immediately ran up the forescuttles and put to death all of the crew who came their way'.'5 Such freedom was not a recent innovation in 1797. Over a century earlier, on the Hannibal, one of the larger slave ships, all the women ate on the quarter deck with the officers while the children messed on the poop deck.'6 Neither women nor children were normally restrained. Indeed, in evidence presented before Parliament in 1789-91, three captains and seven sailors mentioned that women were never shackled in the British slave trade-with one exception, on board the slaver Upton in the Gambia in 1762. As elsewhere in the Europeandominated Atlantic world, perhaps there was a conflict between conceptions of gender and the self-interest of those creating and imposing them. The higher crew deaths on the coast on vessels undergoing slave revolts, the other significant variable in the logit regression, could have been the cause, as well as the effect, of rebellion. The great majority of crew deaths were the result of fevers, not of violence, whereas the major cause of slave morbidity was gastro-intestinal disease.17 Rebellions and attacks from the shore were more likely when fever incapacitated the crew.'8 As noted below, sickness was a factor in slave revolts, and owners of vessels put many more crew on slave vessels than on vessels going to the coast for produce, a practice in part designed to offset expected crew mortality and sickness. Moreover, sailors went to great lengths to disguise the effects of illness. 'We concealed the death of the Sailors from ye
14 For a fuller exposition of this argument in the context of the slave trade, see Eltis, Rise of African slavery, ch. 4. 15 The Africans successfully took control of the ship and indeed captured another American brig laden with rum and attempted to sail both to Africa but were eventually taken by a British naval vessel. See Brooke, Liverpool during the eighteenthcentury, pp. 236-7. 16 For sex differentials in shackling procedures, see Phillips, 'Journal of a voyage in the Hanniba', p. 245; Stede and Gascoigne to Royal African Company (RAC), 28 July 1680, PRO, Treasury Misc., T 70/15, fo. 41. 7 Jensen and Steckel, 'Causes of slave and crew mortality'. 18 See, e.g., David Francis, Gambia, 15 Jan. 1715, PRO Colonial Office papers, CO 388/18, part 1, 027, and the cases of the Necessaire, voyage identity number (IN) 32272, the Marie Galere, voyage IN 33131, and the Rhode Island sloop, Adventure, voyage IN 36954. All voyage identity numbers in this article refer to Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade.
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Negros by throwing them overboard in the night,' one wrote, 'lest it might give them a temptation to rise upon us seeing us so much weakened by ye death of 8 & most of ye rest sick but myself, we being but 12 in all that were left.'19 On the other hand, when revolts did break out, the violence was horrific. An Irish landowner who lived through the great era of slave revolts commented during the brutal Irish rebellion of 1798 that 'a rebellion of slaves is always more bloody than an insurrection of freemen'.20 This is one piece of history where popular preconceptions fit the facts. The captives had been wrenched from their communities and faced a fearful future. Compared with slaves who had families in communities in the Americas, captives on board ship had far less to lose. Moreover, to rely on about a dozen men armed with primitive weapons to guard hundreds of unwilling people stowed between decks that provided half the space per person of the economy section of a modem airliner was surely riskier for captors than overseeing a plantation in the Americas or guarding long-term criminals. In the few cases where rebellious slaves obtained the upper hand, the crew would normally be killed except for two or three (numbers that recur across the decades and in varying circumstances) to assist in navigation. On average, some 7.3 crew died during a rebellion, or nearly a quarter of the 33.7 average number of crew on board when the vessel set out from its home port (n = 79). Crew mortality as a proportion of the muster roll was thus greater than slave mortality as a share of the slave manifest (a point taken up below). In addition, crew mortality accounts for most of the difference in crew deaths between those vessels having rebellions and those that have no record of a revolt. Higher crew mortality was thus as much an effect as a cause of revolts. Comparison of ships that had revolts with those that did not provides some useful insights, but does not explain a very large proportion of observed variation in the incidence of insurrections. Further clues are provided by an examination of the salient characteristics of a rebellion. Given the conflicting interests of those involved, it is useful to think in terms of three outcomes. One was the suppression of the rebellion to the point where the vessel made it to the Americas and sold slaves under the control of the original owners-albeit with some deleterious impact on profits. A second was the aborting of the voyage-a kind of drawn contest either because all, or most on board, died-slaves and non-slaves alike-or because the vessel was lost or had to be abandoned, but most of the slaves ended up on plantations in the Americas anyway. This outcome usually came about after the slaves had freed themselves only

19BL, Add. MS. 39946, 'Narrative of Voyages to the Guinea Coast and the West Indies, 17141716', pp. 12-13. 20Lord Charlemont on the violence in Wexford in 1798, cited in Bryce, Two centuries of Irish history, p. 167.
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to be recaptured by a third party, but the loss to the original investors was total. A third outcome was the aborting of the voyage and the return of the slaves to Africa, although it might be noted that in most instances we do not know what happened after the slaves reached the mainland. Cases such as the Franc Macon, in which the slaves took over the vessel off Gabon, only to be recaptured by African slave merchants and resold to other slave ships, and the Marie Galere, whose captives had a similar experience in the Formosa River, are put in the second category.21 Successful rebellions were quite rare so that the great majority of revolts were suppressed with the vessel remaining under the control of the original owner. Slightly more than four out of five (81.0 per cent) known outcomes fall into this category. In 28 instances the slaves remained captive, but under the control of someone other than the original owner of the slave ship, the latter in effect having lost his investment. In only 30 out of the 369 cases where anything is known about outcomes did any of the slaves return to Africa, apparently free, a success rate of one in 12. If we include in the successful category the 12 revolts where the slaves took over the vessel, but what happened thereafter was not recorded, then the success ratio becomes one in nine. Expressed as a share of all ships which took on slaves, even with a generous allowance for unrecorded revolts, the success rate is minuscule, perhaps one or two voyages per thousand. This proportion is reduced further if, instead of counting vessels, we take the number of slaves escaped as a proportion of all those embarked on a slave ship, though precision on this is difficult to achieve given the fact that numbers escaped are sometimes reported as 'some', 'many', or 'most'. In several of the 'successful' cases, only a handful of slaves actually made it to land and for the 15 revolts where the number escaping is reported, the average is 87.4 (sd=99.3). If, as estimated earlier, 10 per cent of all slave vessels experienced revolts, a guess at the proportion of slaves regaining land with free status would be less than one-tenth of 1 per cent. The two most successful cases were the Marlboroughin 1752 where at least 270 slaves from the Bight of Biafra voluntarily disembarked not far from the point at which their voyage had begun days before, and the Regina Coeli, which in 1858 was taken over by its human cargo on the Windward Coast and all captives, again 270 in number, escaped on shore close to their point of embarkation.22 In short, the odds of a rebellion occurring were many times the odds of rebels making it back to Africa once the revolt began. As this finding implies, more slaves died in the attempt to escape than actually escaped. A record of African deaths exists for 161 vessels in the revolts dataset. On average 25.4 slaves died during revolts and the subsequent retribution, but the standard deviation at 41.3 is very high and the median is less than half the mean. Thus, to an even greater degree than for all middle-passage deaths, the distribution is highly
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Voyage IN 32746, and IN 33131. See also Mettas, Ripertoire, II, pp. 511, 692-3. Renault, Liberation d'esclaves, pp. 66-7; The Times, 18 June 1858.

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skewed, with a few vessels experiencing catastrophic mortality, and many losing very few (in 59 rebellions five or fewer slaves died). Thus, 222 slaves died on board the New Britannia in January 1773 off the Gambia, when the magazine exploded while the crew struggled with the slavesin fact, only the captain, Stephen Deane, a veteran of seven slaving voyages, and one unidentified captive survived the disaster. Everyone on board the French ships, Galatee in 1738 and Coureurin 1790, died under similar circumstances, as did all slaves and crew on at least two other vessels. What we cannot be sure about is the number of slaves on board at the time of the insurrection. We do know that these vessels had 309 slaves on board when they left Africa, but in most cases, the revolt began before the vessel left and, therefore, before it had obtained its full complement of slaves. The average number on board at the time of the revolt may well have been 200 or fewer, with about one in 12 of these dying as a result of the insurrection. If, on average, 25 enslaved Africans died per revolt, then in the present sample of 388 vessels, nearly 10,000 Africans must have died fighting to escape. This might be compared with a figure of perhaps 2,600 Africans who escaped (30 successful revolts multiplied by the mean of 87.4 slaves escaping). Slaves were four times more likely to die in the attempt to escape than actually to return to Africa. In the matter of life or death, these odds can only be described as long, and in the context of the relatively high frequency of insurrections, they testify to the desperation of those held in captivity below decks. A similar message emerges from analysis of the phase of voyage and the time of day at which revolts occurred. For 289 slave revolts it is possible to specify on which of four broad phases of the voyage the violence broke out or was planned. These were the embarkation phase; the pre-middle passage phase after the last slave purchase but prior to beginning the transatlantic passage; the middle passage itself; and the time spent with slaves on board in the Americas, after the first port of call was sighted. For ships trading in West Africa, as opposed to Westcentral Africa, Sao Tome and Princes Island in the Bight of Biafra were usual calling points, partly because of wind patterns and partly because the islands could provide fresh supplies. For such vessels this second phase would last about three weeks, though for all other routes-those leaving Upper Guinea and West-central Africa and heading directly across the Atlantic-an assumption is made that this phase would last only one week. No less than 55 per cent of revolts fall into the first, or embarkation, phase. A further 12 per cent of revolts occurred in the one- to threeweek-long second phase. Thus, two out of three insurrections began while the vessel was in, or close to, African waters. Almost all the remaining one-third of revolts happened on the middle passage, with only 3 per cent occurring when the vessel was in American waters. But as slave ships spent four and a half months acquiring slaves, and a month subsequently in African waters, before setting out on a transatlantic voyage of, on average, just over two months' duration, then after allowing for time, insurrections may actually have been slightly more likely on the
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middle passage than on either of the African phases of the voyage.23 The time spent in American waters with slaves on board, perhaps one or two weeks, was trivial compared with what was involved in acquiring and moving the slaves across the Atlantic. Contemporaries and modem scholars alike have usually argued that revolts were more likely when the vessel was within sight of Africa, but John Atkins was right when he pointed out in 1735 that 'there has not been wanting examples of rising and killing a ship's company, distant from the land'.24 Adjusted for time, the risk of a revolt breaking out was close to constant as long as there were any slaves on board.25 On time of day we have data for only 63 revolts, but allocating these to one of four six-hour categories suggests that rebellion was no more prevalent at one time of day than at another.26 Moreover, uprisings during the night were no more likely than during daytime. Threat of rebellion might have had a strong geographical bias, but in terms of hour of the day and phase of the voyage, it was a constant. Finally, in this profile we need to look at causes, or more precisely, the trigger for the overt resistance. Only 25 cases supply information on this, with the most common catalyst being illness among crew (nine cases) followed by lax security, perhaps putting too many men on shore, leaving weapons and tools unattended, or having too many slaves unshackled at once (five cases). Dissent among the crew (four cases) was also a factor. Weather, shortages of provisions, and disputes with shore-

23 Prior to 1807, mean duration of the middle passage, defined as the interlude between departure from last place of slave purchase and arrival at first port of sale in the Americas, was 73.4 days (N= 3,217, S.D. = 32.7). This and the embarkation time (or time between first and last purchase of slaves in Africa) are the only precise measurements of voyage phase available. There is no category in the slave ship dataset for time spent between leaving the last port of purchase and setting out across the Atlantic, nor for the period 'within sight of the Americas', both of which are used in the historical record by those reporting slave rebellions. It follows that there can be no formal chi-square test. However, if we combine 'middle passage' with 'within sight of the Americas', and assume that on average slave ships spent three weeks in African waters after completing their slave purchases and before crossing the Atlantic, then the percentage distribution of duration of voyage phase and number of insurrections by voyage phase is as follows:

Embark phase Revolts (N) Revolts (%) Time (months) Time (%) 164 57.1 4.5 64.7

African water phase 35 12.3 0.72 10.7

Middle passage 88 30.7 1.73 24.6

Total 287 100 6.95 100

Although no formal chi-square test is possible, a comparison of row 2 with row 4 suggests that the percentage of revolts is about what would be expected given the share of voyage time spent on each voyage phase. 24Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies, p. 175. We thank Robert Harms for this reference. 25Not taking into account the number of slaves on board in addition to time introduces some bias. There were fewer slaves on board at the beginning of the 4.5-month embarkation period than during the middle passage. The risk of revolt per slave per day may have been slightly greater during the embarkation period than during the middle passage. 26 A chi-square test indicated that the observed distribution was not significantly different from the null hypothesis of equal distribution over the four six-hour periods.
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based slave merchants turning into physical confrontations account for the remainder. The evidence discussed in this section indicates that, in terms of understanding shipboard slave revolts, the type or size of vessel, its armament, equipment or number of crew at the outset of the voyage, or the ratio of these things to each other, did not appear to matter very much. Pressure from desperate people seems continuous as long as there were desperate people on board. Exogenous events such as illness, human error on the part of the crew, or what from the slaves' standpoint would appear as fissures in the ruling class (crew versus crew, or Europeans versus African slave merchant), provided the opportunity for these pressures to manifest themselves as violent resistance, but the pressure itself was a constant. The single most important factor appears to be the strong regional pattern in the incidence of revolts, though the higher proportion of females among the slaves on board is also significant. There is nothing in the datasets to explain either of these phenomena. The creation or construction of gender roles is a complex social process, especially when the unit of comparison is two widely separated continents. But at least scholars can now direct their efforts to the African side of this mixture of confrontation and exchange that the coercion of labour necessarily involved. Whether it is regional patterns of resistance or conceptions of gender, it is Africa rather than Europe that is likely to provide the answers.27 II What are the implications of these findings for the way the slave trade was conducted and more specifically for the costs involved in slave trading? One macro-implication is immediately suggested by figure 1. Perhaps there was a causal relationship between the frequency of revolts in the Upper Guinea/Gabon regions in Africa and the fact that they supplied such a tiny proportion of the slaves entering the transatlantic slave trade. Did European slave traders avoid these 'high-risk' regions in light of the difficulties of obtaining insurance discussed below? In the mid-eighteenth century, for reasons as yet unclear, a very pronounced increase occurred in the African loading times of slave vessels in the heavily slaved areas of both the West African and West-central African littoral.28 Loading times, and the costs of trading for slaves in Africa, in fact, reached their highest point ever between 1751 and 1775-the only period during which the Upper Guinea regions were significant suppliers of slaves in the slave trade. Whatever the cause, it appears to have an African origin, or at least cannot have had any grounding in Europe. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that European traders were forced temporarily to draw on these areas more heavily because of a deterioration of trading conditions in other parts of Africa, and that doing so increased
27 28

For a discussion of African influences, see Behrendt et al., Shipboard slave revolts. Eltis and Richardson, 'Productivity'.
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Revolts
,
0

40-

Allvoyages

30-

201010

`/,

//,
_

o,

,,

0o ?O S

OS00

~?oS

SO

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'

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Figure 2. Relative distributionof voyages experiencingviolent incidents and of all voyages over time
Sources: see text

the incidence of slave revolts in the Atlantic trade markedly. Figure 2 shows the distribution of slave revolts over time along with the distribution of all voyages. More than two out of every five recorded instances of violence in the slave trade happened during this single quarter century, while only one out of five slave voyages in the larger dataset sailed in these years. Indeed, the shift in the regional distribution of the slave trade during 1751-75 (compared with the distribution before 1751 and after 1775) accounts for about half of the differential in incidents of violence in that quarter century. In addition to these macro effects, how costly were the precautions which slave traders had to take in the face of ever-present pressure from slaves, whether or not a revolt happened? Actual revolts may have occurred on 10 per cent or less of all slave ships, but the fear of the potential devastation from a revolt was constantly present. Owners and captains took basic cost-increasing precautions before they left their home port in terms of numbers of crew, guns, and equipment, but given epidemiological knowledge at the time, they could not protect themselves against the effect of illness without hiring many more men than, except on a minority of voyages, they would strictly require. As we have seen, captives would grasp any opportunity, however hopeless, to escape or inflict damage on their gaolers. The key point here is that the standard insurance contract excluded losses from revolt of 5-10 per cent of the human cargo, specifying typically that this proportion of the slave cargo is 'warranted free of damage by insurrection', with in some cases, extra
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insurance being available at a higher premium.29 The first abolitionistsponsored legislation regulating the British slave trade, the Dolben Act of 1788, allowed British merchants to insure their cargo of slaves against loss or damage arising from the 'perils of the sea, piracy, insurrection, or capture by the King's enemies, barr[a]try [fraudulent breach of duty] of the master and crew, and destruction by fire'.30 Loss or damage attributable to the 'perils of the sea' in peacetime was at or just above 5 per cent.31 The risk of a slave revolt (estimated above to be one in ten voyages) was thus greater than all other maritime hazards combined. On the other hand, as we have seen, the vast majority of slave revolts were not successful, and cannot be equated with a weather-induced shipwreck. On average, one-eighth of the human cargo was lost to the owner as a result of an insurrection, which, allowing for collateral damage to the vessel and equipment, would suggest that full insurance against revolts would have increased voyage insurance by 25 to 50 per cent [(0.125 x 0.10)/0.05]. Put another way, without resistance, the slave trader would not have suffered damage to his human cargo and equipment amounting to nearly 2 per cent of the costs of the expedition on average.32 Comparisons of slave vessels with non-slave, or produce, vessels provide a further insight into the costs of coercion. A dataset exists of 765 produce vessels that sailed to Africa and then back to Europe (or in a few cases to the Americas) without obtaining slaves in the period 1698 to 1807. The produce voyages had a very pronounced regional bias in that 90 per cent of them traded to Upper Guinea regions, which appeared to require smaller vessels than elsewhere on the African coast. Given the fact that slave vessels trading on this part of the coast tended to be smaller than those trading elsewhere, and revolts more common, comparisons between slave and non-slave vessels are restricted to this region. Table 3 provides a profile of slave and produce vessels trading in Upper Guinea comprising four variables with implications for costs of size of vessel, number of crew, armament, and round-trip voyage time. The voyage for the produce ship is deemed to have ended when it returned to the port of departure, and for the slave vessel when it reached the Americas. The similarities between the two types of voyages are striking, except, of course, for numbers of crew. This is the only variable displaying statistically significant differences between the two types of voyages. Not surprisingly, the slave vessel carried nearly twice as many crew when it set off for Africa as did its produce-carrying counterpart. Moreover, a
29 See the four Rhode Island slave voyage insurance contracts, dating from 1764-76, in New York Historical Society, Slavery MS. Box 2, T/14, Thomlinson, Freesthick & Co. to Samuel and William Vernon, London, 12 Feb. 1757; Donnan, ed., Documents, II, pp. 216-17, 221-2, 325. These are itemized accounts, in contrast to the more general requests which merchants made for insurance. 30Donnan, ed., Documents, II, p. 586. 31 Behrendt, 'Volume and regional distribution of British slave trade', pp. 190-1. 32 This is consistent with evidence on insurance policies, which, even allowing for the exclusions noted earlier in the text, normally required premiums of 6 to 7.5% per ?100 insured in peacetime for voyages between Europe and the Americas via Africa. These rates were 20-50% higher than the loss rate of ships from 'natural' causes noted in the text. For data on premiums, see PRO, Chancery Masters Exhibits, C 107/11, underwriting books of Abraham Clibbor, 1768-75. ? EconomicHistory Society 2001

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Table 3.

Profiles of slaving and produce voyages to the Upper Guinea coast, 1714-1800
Tonnage Crew at outset 26.1 13.8 1,510 14.7 6.6 132 Guns 5.2 3.5 985 4.9 3.5 89 Round trip (days) 276.1 116.7 1,151 267.5 104.8 114

Slave ship S.D. N Produce ship S.D. N

Source: see tab. 1

148.9 84.9 1,966 149.9 71.8 182

slave ship required at least two additional skills in its labour force. One was carpentry, for the construction of slave platforms, bulkheads below decks, and above-deck barricades when the vessel was on the African coast, and the other was medical assistance in the purchasing and maintenance of a healthy cargo. Surgeons in particular were expensive, frequently being allowed a small share of the human cargo based on their perceived performance. One might reasonably assume that without resistance, illness, and the requirements of feeding and a modicum of care among the people held between decks, these additional personnel would not have been necessary. It follows that labour costs must have been approximately twice as great on a slave vessel as they would have been on either a produce vessel of similar size or, say, a vessel carrying free migrants.33 Labour costs, however, were not the only differences in costs faced by slave traders. Slave traders supplied provisions for slaves, whereas produce vessels had no need of these. In the eighteenth century passenger ships in the north Atlantic required migrants to sustain themselves.34 An extensive sample of provision manifests for the Royal African Company suggests that provisions added 4 per cent to the cost of a cargo. For armaments there was little difference between a slave and produce vessel, again counterintuitive at first sight. Ships' guns of the type that appear in port records were in effect carriage guns and pointed outwards, not in-board. Not shown in table 3 are the additional armaments required to control a slave cargo. These included a wide range of small arms and semi-fixed guns arranged strategically to keep control when the slaves were allowed on deck, but the additional costs of these could not have formed a large part of outfitting a vessel and they are ignored here. In summary, without resistance, labour would have cost half as much, and capital and outfitting, 5 per cent less. The structure of costs in the slave trade after 1660 is sufficiently well known to permit estimations of the impact on overall costs of the additional outlays just noted. Analysis is restricted to 1681-1800, the

33 There do not seem to have been differences 34 Wokeck, Trade in strangers,pp. 57, 72, 75-7. ? Economic History Society 2001

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period during which nearly two-thirds of all slave vessels sailed.35 During these years, on average, about one-third of the cost of the slave in the Americas was the capital cost of the vessel and its outfit, about one-third was the merchandise exchanged for the slaves on the African coast, and about one-third labour, including the small shares of the slaves allowed to officers for a successful expedition.36 A halving of labour costs and a reduction of 5 per cent in the capital costs accordingly constitutes a reduction in total costs of 18 per cent ((0.5 X 0.33) + (0.05 X 0.33))the costs of coercion. III Assessing the significance of the higher costs associated with forcing people to act against their will hinges on a review of the cost and benefits of slavery as practiced in the Americas. Resistance could not prevent nearly four centuries of efficient production of a range of semi-tropical produce. As is now well understood, ceterisparibus, output, revenues, and profits will be greater using slave rather than free labour. Slavery will force an individual-in this case, an African individual-off his or her preferred labour supply curve. A slave's participation in the workforce will be much higher than that of an individual whose decision to enter the workforce is voluntary. Free labour will join the workforce later, retire at an earlier age, and move in and out of the workforce more readily between those times in response to competing demands for leisure and from family and other responsibilities. The slave will also work longer hours per day and, most importantly for crops such as sugar, will be unable to avoid the disamenities of gang-labour where personal control over the pace of work is minimal or non-existent. Slavery pushes the supply curve of labour to the right so that a given expenditure in pounds sterling will yield more labour from slaves than from free persons.37 The distinction between coerced and free presented here is, however, artificial in two senses. First, all labour is forced in the sense that all decisions to work for someone else result from an evaluation on the part of the worker that working is less unpleasant than the alternative-which for a slave would be physical violence and for a 'free' worker would be starvation. The choice of the latter emerges from a state-enforced system of property rights and the unequal distribution of the resulting property.38 The free-slave line is also less than clear in that once the slave is brought to a place of work-once the coercive police structure is establishedthere is still the issue of how best to extract work. Whips were used to
35 Differences in cost structures in the nineteenth century were attributable partly to more rapid technological change, and partly to the large impact of attempts to suppress the traffic. 36For capital and labour costs only, see the discussion in Eltis and Richardson, 'Productivity', pp. 468-70 where estimates for the 1680s (0.479), 1764-75 (0.492), and the 1780s (0.593) are presented. The mean of these estimates is 0.501. 37 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, and restated in Fogel, Without consent or contract. For the theoretical underpinnings, see Barzel, 'Economic analysis of slavery', pp. 88-95. 38 Steinfield and Engerman, 'Labor-free or coerced'. ( EconomicHistory Society 2001

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drive slave gangs, but incentives or bribes were not just possible, they were widely used. The latter may not have been in monetary form, but they were still costly. Underlying their use was the calculus between additional force and additional bribes. If, however, these were alternatives, then higher incentives, or bribes, would have reduced the costs of coercion.39 For most slave systems in the Americas there is abundant evidence of combinations of the two. An upward sloping supply curve existed for slave labour as well as for free. Despite these similarities, the history of slavery and emancipation suggests that workers prefer free status, however constrained, to slave status, whatever incentive system is incorporated. Formal discussions of policing have focused on the monitoring of production as well as patterns of slave consumption.40 But if we shift the perspective from the plantation to the whole slave system, direct coercion was much more important (and incentives much less) in the enslavement and delivery of slaves than on the plantation itself. Four main steps are required to ensure a supply of labour: longdistance movement of people where population is insufficient; the separate issue of getting labour to a particular work site (say, a mine or plantation) once it has been brought into a region; extracting work once the labour is on site; and preventing voluntary departure thereafter.41 The first two of these steps are relatively easy to achieve with a slave trade. Further, because sugar and rice are produced in low-lying, high-disease areas and in unpleasant working conditions, non-slaves will be fewer and more expensive than slaves. The third-extracting work-was the preoccupation of mine or plantation management. Management also had some involvement in the fourth, but the main restraint on departure or-worse from the owners' standpoint-conspiracies amctng slaves to revolt, was provided by the state either locally, for example a militia and slave patrols, or nationally (or imperially), in the form of armed forces and a navy.42 At all four stages, the cost of coercion is largely independent of output. The costs of the first two-essentially the costs of enslavement, restraint, and transport-were reflected in the price the master paid for the slave. The fourth step was covered from direct taxes and levies on the slave owner to finance slave patrols and slave catchers, or duties on produce to help pay for soldiers and naval vessels, but the costs of these, too, hardly varied with the value of plantation output. At the third stage, physical coercion mixed with incentives but it is unlikely that this was a major
39 Oakes, Ruling race, pp. 179-90. There are clear parallels here with the interpretations of some labour historians that higher wages undermine resistance to industrial capitalism. 40 Barzel, 'Economic analysis of slavery', pp. 96-106. 41 Steinfield and Engerman, 'Labor-free or coerced', pp. 110-13. 42 For security reasons, sugar was almost always grown on islands, either geographic or demographic (surrounded by a white buffer population). Islands pre-suppose a navy and major rebellions were always suppressed with naval intervention. Sydnor (Slavery in Mississippi, pp. 67-101) provides a good description of the policing function on and off the estate in the US new South. The large numbers of non-slaves ensured that the South felt no inhibitions in supporting the American Revolution and even in the 1850s-the underground railroad notwithstanding-very few people anywhere in the US were actively hostile to the Fugitive Slave Law (Campbell, Slave catchers). By contrast, an overwhelming black majority population in the English Caribbean meant there was less enthusiasm for independence: O'Shaughnessy, 'Redcoats and slaves'.
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variable cost compared with the fixed costs of the other stages.43 It is the long-run rather than the short-run supply curve for a firm using slave labour that lies to the right of its free labour-using counterpart. The cost structure of a slave plantation or voyage was analogous to that of, say, a dam-based hydroelectric operation. If insufficient amounts were spent on either coercion or dam construction, then there would be a risk of sudden collapse with output falling precipitously. While sugar exports declined over a decade rather than immediately after rebellion, this was the ultimate outcome in St Domingue after the revolt of 1791. Of these four steps, policing or coercion seems particularly important to the first and second, and as long as the slave trade remained open, the cost of acquiring slaves in Africa and delivering them into the hands of plantation owners underpinned the price of all slaves in the Americas. Initially, the cost of European indentured servants and indigenous labour, adjusted appropriately for the term of work, fell below the cost of bringing unwilling people from Africa, and the transatlantic slave trade was small or non-existent. A slave trade began only when this situation was reversed. Likewise, the slave traffic ended only when the costs imposed by its suppression exceeded the cost of obtaining alternative (non-slave) labour from Asia, and to a much lesser extent from Europe, or when the slave population began to increase naturally. Higher fixed costs from slave resistance would make the switch from indentured to slave labour in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occur later, and the switch from slave labour to Asian contract labour in the nineteenth century earlier than would have been the case without resistance. If the costs of controlling resistance were built into the price of the slave delivered to the Americas, then the central question for assessing the impact of resistance is the proportion of the price that policing absorbed, and how this proportion varied. Delivering a slave to the Americas had four cost components, capture, coastal factoring, transoceanic transport, and distributing the human commodity in the Americas. In the eighteenth century, transport made up about half of the sum of these components with most of the remainder accounted for by the price of the slave on the African coast. In the previous section it was estimated that coercion made up about 18 per cent of middle passage costs. Although little information exists about cost structures for delivery of slaves to the coast, it is unlikely that coercion costs would be any lower during this initial phase of the movement of slaves to the Americas. It is now possible to turn to an assessment of what the extra costs arising from African agency and resistance meant in terms of the numbers of slaves carried across the Atlantic. This involves posing a counterfactual or two and employing a simple supply and demand model (including

43 For slave catchers and marronage see Campbell, Slave catchers; Franklin, Slavery to freedom; and Mullin, Africa in America.

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estimates of elasticities).44 A movement of African people across the Atlantic without coercion-a migration without resistance on the part of the migrant-would have meant that the supply curve would have shifted to the right by approximately 18 per cent. Between 1680 and 1800, nearly 6.6 million slaves left Africa for the New World. The model predicts that without shipboard or coastal resistance the number of people moving across the Atlantic from Africa would have been nearly 9 per cent greater. Put another way, in the long eighteenth century alone, resistance resulted in nearly 600,000 fewer slaves crossing the Atlantic and forced European consumers to pay higher prices for plantation produce. In effect, Africans who died resisting the slave traders as well as those who resisted unsuccessfully, but survived to work on the plantations of the Americas, saved others from forced migration to the Americas. But African agency in the slave trade was a much larger issue than just violent resistance on slave ships. Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, sub-Saharan Africans shaped the economy of the emerging Atlantic world in at least two other ways-again manifested through the cost structures of the major export commodities of the Americas. In the first decades of Atlantic exploration, northern Italians and Portuguese created a complete plantation complex, including large exports of sugar and a slave labour force that could not reproduce itself, prior to the first New World manifestation of this phenomenon in Brazil.45The geographic movement of the plantation complex in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was towards Africa rather than towards the Americas. Sugar production in the Atlantic shifted from the Canaries to Madeira and then to Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea in the course of a century or so. In effect, the plantation complex had circumvented the arid zone of the African continent by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and was poised to make the small step to the mainland where land, labour, and rain were even more abundant than on Sao Tome. At this point, however, the movement of the complex towards Africa halted and plantations appeared next, not in Africa, but on the part of the Americas closest to Africa-but still 4,000 miles distant from supplies of dependable slave labour. Explanations for this dramatic shift-epidemiology, ecology of sugar production, differentials in labour productivity-have tended to ignore the inability of Europeans to establish, outside Angola, the political
The relevant formula is e S* Q* e -+ y e+y where Q* = percentage change in quantity of slaves entering the slave trade e = elasticity of demand y = elasticity of supply S* = percentage increase in costs as a result of resistance. e is estimated at -1.95; y is 2.0. For a discussion of elasticity and the derivation of the model, see Eltis, 'British contribution', pp. 225-6 and the literature cited there. 45 Curtin, Rise and fall of plantation complex. For the genesis of some of these ideas see Verlinden, Beginnings of modem civilisation.
44

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presence in Africa which plantations demanded before the partition era. In the late seventeenth century Europeans attempted to establish plantations in their enclaves on the Gold Coast and found it impossible to control the local population. Theft and the difficulty of recovering escaped slaves meant that costs were too high.46 Even after abolition of the slave trade, export-based production of palm oil and peanuts developed first under African control. Thus, the first, largest, and most paradoxical African impact on the Atlantic economy was the transatlantic slave trade itself. European weakness in the face of African political and military realities, coupled, of course, with Europeans' taste for plantation produce, created the labour shortage that the slave trade filled. Sugar plantations never developed in West Africa, but the history of Sao Tome and the correspondence of business agents on the coast suggest that in the early modem period competitive sugar production there was a possibility that Africans did not allow to develop.47 A second impact of Africans that goes beyond violence on slave ships followed from the natural African assumption of equal status in the trading relationship that came in the wake of holding Europeans at bay. Before nineteenth-century partition there was no question of Europeans organizing labour levies on a conquered population such as developed in early modem Spanish America, or in colonial Africa, or in German-occupied Europe after 1940. Europeans had no choice but to buy slaves; they could not steal them in significant numbers. Prices of slaves on the African coast averaged 25 per cent of slave prices in the Americas between 1681 and 1697, 35 per cent of American prices in 1698-1710, and 50 per cent at the end of the eighteenth century.48 Raids or levies on a conquered population would have reduced the price of slaves in the Americas, at least in the short run. Moreover, the absence of financial intermediaries and the resort, in places, to pawning practices meant that the cost of doing business on the African coast is likely to have been more expensive for both Europeans and Africans when trading with each other than it would have been if they had been trading only among themselves. When tensions developed which were based on non-performance of contracts, they degenerated quickly into assaults and the consignment of pawns into slavery. At such times each side often ceased to see the other as individuals and would launch retaliatory actions against all Africans in the European case, and all Europeans in the African. Thus, higher transaction costs also increased the price of slaves to planters in the Americas, though an equal and peaceful business relationship was the norm. In terms of the above model and the discussion that preceded it, the
46 According to minutes of the council at Dutch Elmina, 'the difficulty in the cultivation of sugar is that much of it is stolen by the Negroes themselves, as they have a very great liking for it': van Dantzig, ed., Dutch and Guinea Coast, p. 130. The British saw the local population 'harbouring all ours and the Dutch Comp's Rebellious Black Servts.'. For other evidence relating to the Gold Coast, see Seth Grosvenour and James Phipps to Royal African Company, 15 March 1712, PRO T 70/5, fo. 81. For similar links between slaves and the local population in the Gambia see John Snow to Royal African Company, Fort James, 8 June 1708, PRO T 70/5, fo. 52. 47 For a full development of this argument see Eltis, Rise of African slavery, pp. 137-65. 48Ibid., pp. 151-3.

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first of these two wider counterfactuals is an absence of African resistance of any kind. In this event there would have been little or no transatlantic slave trading. Europeans would have established a lower-cost plantation sector in parts of West Africa and obtained the labour they needed in much the same way as they did in the early colonial period, for example in the Belgian Congo. The historical reality, of course, was high fixed costs in Africa that first held the plantation complex at bay, and then forced it across the Atlantic. The second wider counterfactual is effective African resistance to the establishment on African soil of plantations, but an unequal relationship (or no business relationship at all) in the matter of moving slaves to the Americas. Historical examples of this in different contexts would be the raids of Romans on the fringes of their empire, or of Aztecs on the peoples of what is now northern Mexico which often resulted in a tributary relationship where slaves were given to ward off further attacks. In this scenario-closest to reality on the eastern fringes of Portuguese Angola-Europeans would have organized punitive military raids every so often in order to ensure a flow of 'free' labour. In fact, the slaves would not have been free, but the cost of periodic military expeditions would have been much less than the cost of paying elite Africans what amounted to full market value for their human commodities. If this situation had held, then the resulting slave trade would have been much greater than the historical reality. If it is assumed, for the sake of developing an example, that the cost of obtaining slaves through tribute would have been half that of buying them on the open market, then we can estimate how much greater the slave trade might have been. In the period from 1680 to 1800, African prices of slaves averaged about 35 per cent of American prices (in terms of prime cost, to use the contemporary terminology). A halving of the African price of slaves would thus have meant a fall in costs (or a shift rightwards in the supply curve) of 17.5 per cent. This would mean an increase of about 9 per cent in the number of slaves carried off from Africa (again another 600,000 persons), a result similar to the previous exercise based on the absence of shipboard resistance. Combining the two effects means that the African capacity to resist and deal with Europeans as equals resulted in the preservation of well over 1 million Africans from the stark alternatives of death on the middle passage or a life on a plantation in the Americas. African power relative to Europe may have helped to ensure a plantation complex in the Americas rather than in Africa itself, but that power also put a cap on the number of slaves carried across the Atlantic. And, as we have shown, it was not just the numbers of slaves carried across the Atlantic that African agency helped to shape; it was also the direction and structure of the trade. The regional distribution of the slave trade was just as much a product of Africa as of Europe. Victoria University of Wellington Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario University of Hull
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Footnote references Atkins, J., A voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies (1735). Barzel, Y., 'An economic analysis of slavery', J. Law & Econ., 20 (1977), pp. 88-106. Behrendt, S. D., 'The annual volume and regional distribution of the British slave trade, 17801807', J. Afr. Hist., 38 (1997), pp. 187-211. Behrendt, S. D., Eltis, D., and Richardson, D., Shipboard slave revolts, African agency and Atlantic history (forthcoming). Brooke, R., Liverpool as it was during the last quarterof the eighteenthcentury, 1775 to 1800 (1853). Bryce, J., Two centuriesof Irish history, 1691-1870 (1888). Campbell, S. W., The slave catchers:enforcement of the fugitive slave law, 1850-1860 (1950). Curtin, P. D., The rise and fall of the plantation complex (Cambridge, 1990). Donnan, E., ed., Documents illustrative of the history of the slave trade to America, 4 vols. (1930-5). Eltis, D., 'The British contribution to the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade', Econ. Hist Rev., 2nd ser., XXXII (1979), pp. 211-27. Eltis, D., The rise of African slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000). Eltis, D., Behrendt, S. D., Richardson, D., and Klein, H. S., The trans-Atlanticslave trade: a database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). Eltis, D. and Engerman, S. L., 'Fluctuations in age and sex ratios in the transatlantic slave trade, 1663-1864', Econ. Hist. Rev., XLVI (1993), pp. 308-23. Eltis, D. and Richardson, D., 'Productivity in the transatlantic slave trade', Exp. Econ. Hist., 32 (1995), pp. 465-84. Fogel, R. W., Without consent or contract: the rise and fall of American slavery (1989). Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., Time on the cross: the economicsof American Negro slavery (1974). Franklin, J. H., From slavery to freedom: a history of Negro Americans (1980). Inikori, J. E., 'Measuring the unmeasured hazards of the Atlantic slave trade: documents relating to the British trade', Revue Franfaise d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer, 83 (1996), pp. 53-92. Jensen, R. A. and Steckel, R. H., 'New evidence on the causes of slave and crew mortality in the transatlantic slave trade', J. Econ. Hist., 46 (1986), pp. 57-78. McGowan, W., 'African resistance to the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa', Slavery & Abolition, 11 (1990), pp. 5-29. Mannix, D. P. and Cowley, M., Black cargoes: a history of the Atlantic slave trade (1962). Mettas, J., Repertoiredes expeditionsnegrieres franfaises au XVIIIe siecle, eds. S. and M. Daget, 2 vols. (1978, 1984). Mullin, M., Africa in America: slave acculturationand resistancein the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (1992). Oakes, J., The ruling race: a history of American slaveholders(1982). O'Shaughnessy, A., 'Redcoats and slaves in the British Caribbean', in R. L. Paquette and S. L. Engerman, eds., The LesserAntilles in the age of European expansion (1995), pp. 113-23. Phillips, T., 'A journal of a voyage made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694', in A. Churchill and J. Churchill, Collection of voyages and travels, 6 vols. (1746), VI, pp. 187-255. Pierson, W. D., 'White cannibals, Black martyrs: fear, depression, and religious faith as causes of suicide among new slaves', J. Negro Hist., 62 (1977), pp. 147-59. Rathbone, R., 'Some thoughts on resistance to enslavement in West Africa', Slavery & Abolition, 6 (1986), pp. 11-22. Renault, F., Liberation d'esclaves et nouvelles servitude (1976). Syndor, C. S., Slavery in Mississippi (1933). Stein, R. L., The French slave trade under the Ancien Regime (1979). Steinfield, R. J. and Engerman, S. L., 'Labor-free or coerced? A historical reassessment of differences and similarities', in T. Brass and M. van der Linden, eds., Free and unfree labor: the debate continues (1997), pp. 107-26. Thomas, H., The slave trade: the story of the Atlantic trade, 1440-1870 (1997). Uya, O. E., 'Slave revolts in the middle passage: a neglected theme', Calabar Hist. J., 1 (1976), pp. 65-88. van Dantzig, A., ed., The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674-1742: a collectionof documentsfrom the general state archive at The Hague (1978). Verlinden, C., The beginningsof modern civilisation: eleven essays with an introduction(1970). Wokeck, M., Trade in strangers:the beginningsof mass migration to North America (1999).

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