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Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Rejoinder Rebutted

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

B. L. Anderson  and
David Richardson
B. L. Anderson
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in Economic History, The University of Liverpool, L69 3BX, England.
David Richardson
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Economic History, The University of Hull, HU6 7RX, England.
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Abstract

In his rejoinder in the September 1983 issue of this JOURNAL to our comment on his article that appeared in December 1981, J. E. Inikori claims that we fail to address effectively any of the six major points raised by his article. We confess that we did not respond to his arguments about temporal fluctuations and interfirm variations in profit margins, largely because we regarded such arguments as commonplace and the subject of little debate among historians. We do have doubts, however, about Inikori's attempt to relate profit margins to the size of firms in the trade, as we indicate below. The main concern of our comment was with several more questionable assertions made by Inikori about the market structure and general profitability of the slave trade, and we sought to challenge these. Our criticisms centered on Inikori's classification of British slaving firms, his analysis of the elasticities of supply of trade goods and export credit, his method of calculating profits, and his interpretation of the career of one Liverpool slave merchant, William Davenport, for whose ventures we have exceptionally detailed accounts. Inikori's Rejoinder rejects all of our criticisms, but the arguments he advances remain conceptually unsound and rely upon questionable interpretations of slender evidence. We propose to deal only with the main points of our criticisms that Inikori either misunderstands or still fails to meet.

Type
A Symposium on the Atlantic Slave Trade
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1985 , pp. 705 - 707
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 Inikori, J. E., “Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Rejoinder,” this JOURNAL, 43 (09 1983), p. 723.Google Scholar

2 This market power was, according to Inikori, reinforced by inelasticities of supply of trade goods and export credit. See Inikori, , “Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 41 (12 1981), pp. 758, 762–63. We reject Inikori's view of the markets for trade goods and credit.Google Scholar

3 pp. 753–58.Google Scholar

4 Richardson, David, “West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade,” in Gemery, H. A. and Hogendorn, J. S., eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), p. 306. Inikori's Table 1 in his Rejoinder uses similar material.Google Scholar

5 Curtin, P. D., Economic Change in Pre-colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), Supplementary Evidence, pp. 95–107.Google Scholar

6 There is no evidence to suggest that there was any significant decline in the demand from other markets for most of the types of trade goods exported to West Africa during these 60 years or so. In any case exports to West Africa constituted less than 4 percent of total British exports during the eighteenth century and probably under 0.5 percent of total British output. Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns,” p. 305.Google Scholar

7 Ashton, T. S., Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1959), p. 133.Google Scholar

8 For instance, Inikori assumed in his original article a depreciation rate of 331/3 percent on the cost of ship and outfit per voyage, which he claimed was “very generous.” In fact this seems too low. See Richardson, David, “Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: the Accounts of William Davenport, 1757–1784,” in Anstey, Roger and Hair, P. E. H., eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series (Liverpool, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 70–71.Google Scholar

9 That not all Leyland's voyages had such successful outcomes as the five for which we have evidence is suggested by the fact that several Leyland slaving vessels were lost during the 1790s. Public Record Office, Treasury Miscellaneous, T64/286.Google Scholar