The main conclusions of this essay became apparent to the authors only when they finally realized that slaves destined for export from Africa were supplied in substantial measure from markets organized like a contemporary high seas fishery and that a similar performance might be expected. The African slaver was a fisher or men. The authors wish to thank the National Science Foundation and the University of Houston which provided the financial support which made this paper possible. The authors also wish to thank, but not to implicate, the many helpful readers of early drafts of this paper: Dauril Alden, Terry Anderson, Philip Curtin, George Daly, Stanley Engerman, Robert Higgs, Tom Mayor, Joseph C. Miller, Clyde Reed, Richard Trewthaway, and Edgar V. Winans.

⁰¹ Two classic examples are Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966Google Scholar reprint of 1944 ed.), and Williams, Gomer, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966Google Scholar reprint of 1897 ed.). More recent authors, perhaps unintentionally, often give the same impression. See Bohannan, Paul and Curtin, Philip, Africa ana Africans (Garden City, N.Y.: The Natural History Press, 1971), p. 272Google Scholar; and Rotberg, Robert I., A Political History of Tropical Africa (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), pp. 143–144.Google Scholar

⁰² A corollary argument over the profits of imperialism also exists. See Sheridan, R. B., “The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2d series, XVIII (1965), 292–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. P. Thomas, “The Sugar Colonies of the Old Empire: Profit or Loss for Great Britain?” and “Rejoinder” by Sheridan, Economic History Review, 2d ser., XXI (1968), 30–61.Google Scholar The profitability of American slavery has been exhaustively investigated. See Conrad, A. H. and Meyer, J., “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy, LXVI, (1958), 95–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sutch, R., “The Profitability of Ante-Bellum Slavery—Revisited,” Southern Economic Journal, XXXI (1965), 365–77Google Scholar; and Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., “The Economics of Slavery,” The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 311–341.Google Scholar Also by the same authors, see Time on The Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston-Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1974).Google Scholar

⁰³ Time, CI (March 27, 1972), 43. Also See Browne, Robert S., “The Economic Case for Reparations to Black America,” American Economic Review, LXII (May 1972), 39–46.Google Scholar

⁰⁴ Curtin, P. D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 268–269.Google Scholar

⁰⁵ Ibid., pp. 87 and 211. Perhaps a quarter of the total Atlantic trade was carried out by the British.

⁰⁶ The authors realize that it will be difficult for some readers to dispassionately evaluate the economic analysis of the slave trade laid out in this paper. Slaves were people and slavery and the slave trade a nasty business. An analysis that treats the buying and selling of human beings as if they were a commodity may seem inappropriate in the light of the overriding moral issues involved. We acknowledge this difficulty; nevertheless, we hold to the proposition that our approach is useful and leads to insights into the economics of slavery and more particularly of the slave trade that would be lost if we did not attempt such an abstraction.

⁰⁷ In the rest of the paper, we shall use the term “economic profit” in its technical definition—being the returns to a factor of production above the returns which could be earned in the next best alternative use of that factor. “Normal profit” is the return to a factor just equal to its next best alternative use—i.e., just equal to the opportunity cost. There will be a risk premium included in “normal profits” that varies between industries of different uncertainties. Economic rents and economic profits are to be considered synonyms. “Ricardian rents” can accrue to an intramarginal firm in a perfectly competitive industry if the supply of some factor of production, like land, is not perfectly elastic in supply and the firm owns the resource.

⁰⁸ Harlow, V. T., A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 338–340.Google Scholar

⁰⁹ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), Z 1–19Google Scholar and Z 294–297.

¹⁰ Dunn, R. S., “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, XXVI (1969), 15.Google Scholar

¹¹ Ibid., p. 12.

¹² Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica (London, 1774), Vol. I, p. 400.Google Scholar

¹³ Good uncleared arable land in Barbados sold at £ 1 per acre in 1629, less than that in the early 1640's, climbed to perhaps as high as £5/acre in the sugar boom of the late 1640's, and then seems to have fallen slightly. Jamaican land was free from 1655 through the 1670's and then rose slowly to a peak of £ 4 or £5/acre in 1800. Dunn, Richard, Sugar and Slaves (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 51Google Scholar, 66; Ligon, Richard, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Frank Cass, 1970Google Scholar reprint, first pub. in 1657), p. 86; Bennett, J. H., “The English Caribbees in the Period of the Civil War, 1642–1646, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, XXIV (1967), 372; J. H. Bennett, “Cary Helyar, Merchant and Planter,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, XXI (1964), 61Google Scholar; Britain, Great, Acts of the Privy Council, 1613–1880, Vol. 1 (Hereford, 1908), No. 1126Google Scholar; Long, History of Jamaica, Vol. I, p. 457; Beckford, William, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1790), Vol. 1, p. xxxiGoogle Scholar; and Edwards, Bryan, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (New York: AMS Press, 1966 reprint of 1819 ed.), Vol. II, pp. 291–92.Google Scholar Since sugar produced per acre was worth at least £.10 per year in the field, the total land rents could hardly have been as much as five percent of the gross value of the crop and usually much less. Barrett, Ward, “Caribbean Sugar-Production Standards in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Merchants and Scholars, ed. by Parker, John (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965), p. 166.Google Scholar Of the five percent rent, only a small part could have been due to the cheaper labor resulting from the slave trade because Europeans would have continued to work the land in the absence of slavery at only a marginally higher cost. The same condition was also true for the Chesapeake; see Wyckoff, V. J., “Land Prices in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” American Economic Review, XXVIII (1938), 82–88.Google Scholar Therefore any Ricardian rents due to the expansion of staple producing industries would be relatively small.

¹⁴ The Virginia County Records, Virginia State Library, indicate that very few tobacco “plantations” in the seventeenth century employed more than a few slaves or indentured servants.

¹⁵ Ligon, History of Barbadoes, pp. 22 and 108, stated that a large 500-acre plantation, with 200 acres in cane, complete with labor force and all equipment, cost £14,000 in 1647. Sir Dalby Thomas wrote in 1690 that a plantation of about half that size, complete with equipment and slaves, would cost £5,625 in “A Historical Account of the West Indies” (1690), reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany (London, 1808), Vol. II, p. 366.Google Scholar In 1798, a fully equipped and staffed Jamaican plantation with 200 acres in cane was priced at £30,000 by Edwards, History of the British West Indies, Vol. II p. 291.

¹⁶ Ligon, History of Barbadoes, p. 116 said a “principle overseer” on a large Barbados plantation would earn £50/year in 1650. In 1690, overseers received £20/year in Barbados .and a little more in Guadeloupe. D. Thomas, “A Historical Account,” p. 366; Deerr, Noel, The History of Sugar (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1950), Vol. II, p. 333.Google Scholar A century later in Jamaica, a manager of a large plantation would earn about £140 sterling. Edwards, History of the British West Indies, Vol. II, p. 299; and Craton, M. and Walvin, J., A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), pp. 111Google Scholar, 175.

¹⁷ T. E. Anderson and R. P. Thomas, “The Economic Growth of the Chesapeake during the Seventeenth Century,” Discussion Paper, Institute for Economic Research, University of Washington, 1973 (mimeographed); and Batie, R., “A Comparative Economic History of the Spanish, French, and English on the Caribbean Islands during the Seventeenth Century” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1972).Google Scholar

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¹⁹ Even in North America, where the costs of food were relatively low and life expectancies were high, slave breeding was not very lucrative in the eighteenth century. See Gray, L. C., History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), Vol. I, p. 364.Google Scholar This was even more true of the British West Indies. Pitman, F. W., “Slavery on the British West India Plantations in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Negro History, XI (1926), 637Google Scholar; Sheridan, Richard, “Africa and the Caribbean in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” American Historical Review, LXXVIII (1972), 20–21Google Scholar; and Bennett, H. J., “The Problem of Slave Labor Supply at the Codrington Plantations,” Journal of Negro History, XXXVI (1951), 431.Google Scholar

²⁰ Bean, R. N., “The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1650–1755,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1971), p. 210Google Scholar; Dumbell, Stanley, “The Profits of the Guinea Trade,” Economic History, 2 (1931), p. 256Google Scholar; and Pares, Richard, A West India Fortune (U.S.A.: Archon Books, 1968, first published in 1950), p. 152.Google Scholar

²¹ Ligon, History of Barbadoes, p. 112, claims that the rate of return on a Barbadian sugar plantation was over fifty percent per year in about 1650. By 1690, the rate of return on investment in sugar plantations was low, and it was still low a century later. See D. Thomas, “A Historical Account,” p. 369; and Edwards, History of British West Indies, Vol. II, pp. 300ff. Clearly, the returns in sugar planting were little, if any, better than the next best alternative use of the capital except during the first few years.

²² Davies, K. G., “The Origins of the Commission System in the West India Trade,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, Vol. II (1952), pp. 89–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Checkland, S. G., “Two Scottish West Indian Liquidations,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy, IV (1957), 127–143Google Scholar; Pares, A West Indian Fortune; White, P. L. (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1956)Google Scholar; Wright, L. B., Letters of Robert Carter, 1720–1727 (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1940).Google Scholar

²³ Davis, R., The Rise of the English Shipping Industry, (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 81ffGoogle Scholar; Greenhill, B., The Merchant Schooners (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968Google Scholar) show that the practice lasted into the twentieth century in English coastal shipping.

²⁴ Davis, The Rise, pp. 200 and 298.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 295.

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 138–139, 148–149. There was some risk premium paid in the slightly higher wages of the seamen and the right of the officers to ship free a slave or so on their own account, but the premium was amazingly low in light of the very high mortality among the crews of slavers.

²⁷ G. Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers.

²⁸ Dumbell, “Profits,” pp. 254–257.

²⁹ E. Williams, Capitalism.

³⁰ Hyde, F. E., Parkinson, B. B., and Marriner, S., “The Nature and Profitability of the Liverpool Slave Trade,” Economic History Review, V (1953), 368–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Parkinson, B. B., “A Slaver's Accounts,” Accounting Research, II (1951), 144–150.Google Scholar

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³³ Bean, “British,” pp. 79–102.

³⁴ Hyde, Parkinson, Marriner, “The Nature and Profitability,” p. 369.

³⁵ Davies, Royal African Company, pp. 316ff.

³⁶ Hyde, Parkinson, Marriner, “The Nature and Profitability,” pp. 370, 374. A study of 101 Dutch slaving voyages between 1733 and 1802 shows that only 59 made even a moderate profit. Emmer, Pieter C., “The History of the Dutch Slave Trade, A Bibliographical Survey,” Journal of Economic History, XXXII (1972), 743.Google Scholar

³⁷ Actually, even in equilibrium the average rates of return in different industries will not be equal because the variance of returns (risk) will differ between industries. Since most investors are risk-averse, a risk premium is required to attract investors into an industry where there is a larger variance around the expected rate of return.

³⁸ Bean, “British,” pp. 79–102.

³⁹ Davies, Royal African Company, p. 113; and Bean, “British,” pp. 225–226.

⁴⁰ The reasons for the failure of this monopoly company, and those of other European nations trading to Africa, are too complex to go into here, but the prime difficulties they faced were diseconomies of scale and a “free rider” problem. Davies, Royal African Company, pp. 346–349; and Bean, “British,” pp. 79–102.

⁴¹ Davies, Royal African Company, p. 198.

⁴² B. Mayer (ed.), Captain Canot, An African Slaver (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968; first printed in 1854); and Martin, E. (ed.), Journal of a Slave-Dealer 1754–1759 (Nicholas Owen) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930).Google Scholar

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⁴⁶ Birmingham, D., The Portuguese Conquest of Angola (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 26.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Davies, Royal African Company, Appendix I, gives a breakdown of Royal African Company exports by commodity and value.

⁴⁸ A feeling for the forms and complexities of trading on the African coast can best be obtained by reading contemporary accounts such as Martin, B. and Spurrell, M. (eds.), The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton) 1750–1754 (London: The Epworth Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and those contained in Donnan, Elizabeth, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Carnegie Institute #409 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1930–1935), 4Google Scholar vok; and Dow, G. F., Slave Ships and Slaving (Salem: Marine Research Society, 1927).Google Scholar For a recent discussion by an economist see Rottenberg, Simon, “The Business of Slave Trading,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, LXVI (1967), 409–423.Google Scholar

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⁵⁰ Some of these political entities were clearly states, with a hierarchical power structure topped by a hereditary king. Others were without central authority, semistates,” and were merely kinship groupings where the demarcation between “foreigner” and “relative” was not sharp. Fortes, Meyer, The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi (London: Oxford University Press, 1945)Google Scholar; Middleton, J. and Tait, D. (eds.), Tribes Without Rulers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958)Google Scholar; Sahlins, M. D., “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist, LXIII (1961), 322–345CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jones, G. I., The Trading States of the Oil Rivers (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 17.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Daaku, K. Y., Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 199.Google Scholar

⁵² Ibid., p. 202.

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⁵⁴ The persistent price differentials between areas of Africa are easily explained by the preferences of American slave owners for slaves from certain regions, such as Ghana, and by the higher transport costs from more distant sources, such as Madagascar.

⁵⁵ Berbain, S., Le Comptoir francais de Juda (Ouidah) au XVIII^e siecle (Paris: Libraire Larose, 1942)Google Scholar; and Akinjogbin, I. A., Dahomey and Its Neighbors, 1709–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

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⁵⁷ Something like ten percent of all slaves annually exported from Africa were passing through Whydah during the period of Whydah's greatest importance—perhaps as many as 20,000 slaves per year. Newbury, C. W., The Western Slave Coast and Its Rulers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 20–25Google Scholar; Polanyi, Karl, Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), p. 138Google Scholar; Berbain, Le Comptoir, p. 50ff; Kilson, Marion, “West African Society and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1441–1865,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)Google Scholar, ed. by Huggins, Kilson and Fox, Vol. I, pp; 39–53.

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⁵⁹ In a similar situation the loss of Old Calabar's trade to Bonny was attributed to excessive port fees, the differential then being the values of about four slaves. Capt. John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (London: Frank Cass, 1966 reprint of 1823 ed.), pp. 143, 245, 246.

⁶⁰ Barbot, A Description, p. 33.

⁶¹ S. W. Koelle interviewed a large number of ex-slaves in Sierra Leone in the mid-nineteehth century. They were about evenly divided between those, who were enslaved by war, by kidnapping, or by the internal workings of their own societies. Philip Curtin has observed that Koelle chose his informants in order to represent as many language groups as possible, and thus mass enslavements through warfare were underrepresented. Koelle, S. W., Polyglotta Africana (Gray, Austria: Akademische Druck, 1963 reprint of 1854Google Scholar ed.); Hair, P. E. H., “The Enslavement of Koelle's Informants,” Journal of African History, VI (1965), 193–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; P. D. Curtin, “The Slave Trade and Atlantic Basin: Intercontinental Perspectives,” p. 86n and Marion Kilson, “West African Society and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1441–1865,” p. 50n, both in Huggins, Kilson and Fox (eds.), Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience.

⁶² Domar, E. D., “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History, XXX (1970), 18–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and North, D. C. and Thomas, R. P., “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A; Theoretical Model,” Journal of Economic History, XXXI (1971), 777–803.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶³ This process was formalized in Sierra Leone by recognizing that a slave became the property of the master to whom he ran. Fyfe, C., A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 54.Google Scholar This is precisely the explanation for the replacement of slavery by serfdom in early Medieval Europe presented by North and Thomas, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System.”

⁶⁴ Jones, The Trading States, p. 58.

⁶⁵ The American demand for slaves raised the export price for slaves above their value as slaves in Africa. But the full difference between the export price and the reservation price was not all gain because part of the gap was due. to a fall in the reservation price. Higher export prices meant more incentive to steal slaves, higher protection costs, and thus less incentive to hold slaves in Africa.

⁶⁶ Examples of warring for profit are legion. An early one is Crone, G. R. (ed.), The Voyagers of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937)Google Scholar, second series #80, p. 30. The classic case of the slave-raiding state is Dahomey. See Polanyi, Dahomey, p. 23ff. The high level of violence in West Africa after the Atlantic slave trade was ended is not really evidence that the trade was unimportant in inducing warfare, for both the ending of the trade and the nineteenth-century revolution in military technology had disrupted the old balances of power. See Klein, Martin A., “Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia,” Journal of African History, XIII (1972), 419–441CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dike, K. O., Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Ajayi, J. F. A. and Smith, R., Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Crutchfield, j. A. and Pontecorvo, G., The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study of Irrational Conservation (Baltimore: Resources for the Future, 1969), pp. 11–36.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Ibid.; and Gould, J. R., “Externalities, Factor Proportions, and the Level of Exploitation of Free Access Resources,” Economica, XXXIX (1972), 383–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁹ Of course there were also restraints upon the slaving activities of individuals and. of political entities. These restraints resulted from ties of kinship and from fear of retaliation.

⁷⁰ Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 106,122, 221, 240.

⁷¹ The situation in Africa was not one of total anarchy, but of relative anarchy, and the level of property right enforcement varied sharply in Africa with time and place. Some of the larger, more centralized states seem to have done a fairly good job of protecting their citizens. Certainly the threats posed by the slave trade were a strong inducement toward political amalgamation in order to gain the potential economies of scale in defense.

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⁷⁴ The example absurdly overstates the gains to the English both because the demand for tropical products certainly was not perfectly inelastic and because it is very unlikely that the price could have fallen by half as a result of the use of the cheaper labor. The fall in sugar and tobacco prices between 1640 and 1800 was never as large as this over any sustained period. This period saw the switch from European indentured servants to African slaves for use as field labor on British West Indies sugar plantations in about 1650 and in Virginian tobacco fields in about 1700. It also saw substantial reductions in transport and technological improvements which should have tended to lower prices. See Beveridge, W.H., Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (New York: Kelly, 1966), pp. 75Google Scholar, 383, and 429; Posthumus, N. W., Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1946), pp. 119–120Google Scholar, 134–135, and II (1964), pp. 276–279, 664; and Price, J. M., “The Tobacco Adventure to Russia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., LI, pt. 1 (March 1961), 103.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, pp. 260 and 263.