Behrendtet Et All (2001) - African Agency

8/13/2019 Behrendtet Et All (2001) - African Agency

1/24

The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World

Author(s): Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis, David RichardsonSource: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Aug., 2001), pp. 454-476Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Economic History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3091760

Accessed: 15/06/2009 15:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell PublishingandEconomic History Societyare collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

extend access to The Economic History Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3091760?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=blackhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=blackhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3091760?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/24

Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (2001), pp. 454-476

h e c o s t s o coerc ionf r i c a n a g e n c y n t h pre modern

Atlant ic w o r lBy STEPHEN D. BEHRENDT, DAVID ELTIS, andDAVID RICHARDSON

iolent resistance by Africans forced on board slave ships in theAtlantic and Indian Oceans has received far less attention than hasthe same phenomenon on plantations-the ultimate destinations of thosevessels. In the last third of the twentieth century, in which perhaps 95per cent of the total scholarship on slavery has appeared, there have beenpublished just five articles on the topic, to which might be added a fewobligatory descriptive pages on slave revolts in each of the general historiesof the slave trade from Mannix and Cowley in the 1960s to that ofThomas in the late 1990s.1 Resistance by slaves in the Americas, bycontrast, has provided the focal point of whole scholarly careers. Giventhe fact that slaves spent an average of 11 weeks on a vessel and therest of their lives in bondage in the Americas, this may at first sight seemappropriate, but some new data, collected as a spin-off from a muchlarger project on the transatlantic slave trade, in fact suggest the opposite.What happened on board transatlantic slave vessels now appears to havebeen central to the shaping of the early modem Atlantic world andwarrants much closer attention.The article is divided into three sections. Section I briefly describesthe data on which the article is based, explores key features of shipboardslave revolts, and investigates possible explanations of them. Some aspectsof revolts, notably variations in the incidence of revolts by African regionof embarkation of slaves, are difficult to explain and require furtherresearch. In section II insurance and shipping records are drawn on inan attempt to calculate the impact of shipboard resistance by Africans toenslavement on the cost structure of slaving voyages. Section III thensets resistance in the wider contexts of the costs of coerced labour in theAmericas and of Euro-African power relations in pre-colonial Africa. Italso estimates the impact of African agency on the number and coastalorigins of slaves carried across the Atlantic and thereby on the locationand 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.? EconomicHistory Society 2001. Publishedby BlackwellPublishers,108 CowleyRoad, OxfordOX4 IJF, UK and 350 Main Street,Maiden,MA 02148, USA.


3/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDI

There are three new sets of data on European trade with Africa relevantto the wider issue of African agency. One is the recently publishedconsolidated bank of 27,233 voyages augmented with additional data(and corrections) that have become available since publication.2 Thisincludes all voyages that were known to have experienced slave revolts.A second is a dataset of 765 vessels that sailed to the African coast withthe intent of trading in produce rather than in slaves. Comparisonsbetween slave vessels and non-slave vessels should point to characteristicsand costs peculiar to slave vessels. The third is a dataset of incidents ofviolence between Africans and Europeans arising both from trade disputesand from the imprisonment of hundreds of unwilling people below thedecks of small wooden ships. The basic unit in the first two datasets isthe vessel, whereas in the third it is an on-board rebellion or an attackfrom outside the vessel arising from a trade dispute in which at least oneperson was killed, either in the violence itself or in the retribution thatfollowed. The set contains 483 attacks or revolts experienced by 467vessels.3 These incidents break down into 92 attacks by Africans whowere not slaves, 388 rebellions by Africans held as slaves, and threeinstances of three or more slaves committing suicide.4 Of the 388rebellions, 22 were 'planned' insurrections for which slaves were punished,and eight were described as 'cut-offs', a term which could be used todescribe attacks from the shore, but which is assumed here to mean arevolt. 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 manymore 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 the388 cases of slaves rising in revolt against ship's crew, the first recordedinstance being in 1654 and the last in 1865, though 92.5 per cent of allrevolts occurred between 1698 and 1807.What proportion of vessels experienced rebellion? If we look only atthe large dataset of slave-trading voyages then the answer is less than 2per cent, but the great bulk of the archival sources upon which this newdataset draws are port and financial records. Such records are biasedagainst information about what happened during the voyage itself, parti-cularly if the voyage terminated prematurely. In the French port ofNantes, however, for a period of about 60 years, authorities required

2 Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade.3 Of these 467, only 448 are also in an expanded version of the large slave trade dataset, 11 arein the smaller dataset of produce traders, or vessels that did not trade in slaves, eight are vesselscarrying slaves to Indian Ocean ports, the Cape of Good Hope, or, in one case, a French vesselwhich in 1858 purchased slaves in Africa, deemed them 'indentured servants' but forced them onboard 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 attackfrom shore-and 22 of planned insurrections. The 92 attacks from shore-based Africans include 14attacks on the ship's boats, rather than on the slave vessel itself.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

455


4/24


5/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD5-

Resistance

Fiure.eSlatves Shipped b(D

a) 32-0)C>

regionSources: see textrevolts being much more likely among slaves coming from some Africanregions than from others. Figure 1 shows that the three Upper Guinearegions, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast, togetherwith the Gabon region in southern Bight of Biafra, accounted for just

a)a)

ovUpper Guinea B.f Beninest-centralfrica.owever, over 40 per centof theoyages with slave revolts came fra South-eas All otherAfricanegioner had about the same of slave revolts as slave

expoFigureRelativedistributiayewer revolts and alltheirlaveshped by Afexportsan

would lead us to expect. The picture does not change much if allowance

region

is made for thebsee of information on revolts on Portuguese andSpanirevoltseingmuch moreikely amonglaves coming fromomelynineteenth-century

regions than from others. Figure 1 shows that the three Upper Guinea

regions, Senegambia, Sierraeone,nd theoast, andward Coast, together

with the Gabon region in southern Bight of Biafra, accounted for just

over 10 pernt of thelaves-centraeavingfrica. The Portuguese drew heavily on West-central Aica, but in toto drew fewer slaveevolts came from the regions. ll otheAfrican regionsither had abouthe same share of slave revoltss slavenfexportsor substantiallyewumber revoltshan their share oflavinghis region,West-cewouldead s to expect. The picture does not change much if allowanceregionsadexceptor thebsence of information on revolts on Portuguesendca.Spanishvessels.he Spanish slave trade,ainya nincharacteenth-centuryohephenomenonsxplainedarlierp.456),of therench atahave he east eportingias ynder-icanrepresent ednWest-central Africa. he Portuguese dofrevoltweavily onest-entralchhips lone, 700-1800,howrew fewerlaves from he egionhfromngola,ut

English, French, and Dutch together between 1660 and 1807. Even if

only15 fthereo doublehe numberiencede fevoltsnvesselseavinghisregion. pperGuinea,n thee st-centralAfrica would stillhave a lowerre1700-1800,utnolessthan allof evoltsregions except for South-east Africa.9Table 1 adds a preliminaryanalysis of voyage characteristics o the

9 For reasons explained earlier (p. 456), the French data have the least reporting bias by Africanregion of any national sources. Indeed, it is hard to see any at all. A breakdown of revolts onFrench ships alone, 1700-1800, shows that the French got 36 of their slaves from Angola, butonly 15 of the revolts they experienced were on vessels leaving that region. Upper Guinea, on theother hand, supplied 12 of the slaves on French ships, 1700-1800, but no less than 35 of revoltswere on vessels leaving this area. The Upper Guinea phenomenon is thus not a product of bias inthe sources.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

457


6/24

458 S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONTable 1. Characteristicsof vessels, crews, and slaves experiencingrevolts inthe transatlantic slave tradecomparedwith vessels, crews, and slaves that didnot, all African regions, 1527-1867Variable Revolt Mean Number of S.D. T-score or Significancevoyages differences (2-tailed)Number of naval guns Yes 8.4 67 6.7 1.82 0.069No 7.2 5,385 5.2Tonnage Yes 211.2 246 101.0 4.48 0.0No 181.8 15,230 100.5Tonnage per gun Yes 23.8 17 16.3 0.975 0.329No 27.1 1,424 25.8Tonnage per crew Yes 6.2 175 2.1 1.03 0.305No 6.5 9,922 3.3Slaves per ton Yes 1.4 135 0.9 2.58 0.01No 1.6 3,632 0.8Number of crew at outset Yes 33.8 201 16.3 3.72 0.0

No 30.0 10,508 14.4Slaves per crew member Yes 8.7 116 4.7 2.83 0.005No 10.3 2,530 6.0Crew died prior to Yes 0.1 109 0.3 1.58 0.114reaching coast No 0.2 1,818 0.9Crew died off Africa Yes 4.6 119 4.8 4.62 0.0No 2.9 1,931 3.7Crew died on middle Yes 2.3 114 4.4 3.27 0.001passage No 1.5 1,880 2.2Ratio of slaves who Yes 0.6087 86 0.1188 3.02 0.003were male No 0.6495 3,456 0.1238Ratio of slaves who Yes 0.2332 81 0.1415 2.15 0.032were children No 0.2777 3,022 0.1853Note: Because of differences in numbers of voyages used in calculations, the means reported for variables 3 and4 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 percent, vessels in which slaves rebelled were larger than those in whichslaves did not rebel, they carried fewer slaves per ton, and they had alarger crew at the outset of the voyage and fewer slaves per crew memberthereafter. Not surprisingly, however, such ships lost more of their crewoff the African coast and during the middle passage than those notexperiencing revolts. Further, among the slaves who rebelled, we findfewer males, and more children, than among those who did not. Someof the more counter-intuitive of these findings are readily explained. Thekey relationship is between the size of the vessel and time spent on thecoast and on the voyage. Generally, larger vessels took longer to loadwith slaves and sailed on longer routes.'1 As argued below, slave revoltswere 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 theindependent variable gave the following result (standard errors in first set of parentheses, significancelevels in second):Days spent slaving= 119.2 + 0.073 X tonnage(4.7) (0.019) n = 2,092 r2 = 0.01(0.000) (0.000)? EconomicHistory Society 2001


7/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDsmall numbers. Vessels of 200 tons or more spent on average 35 days(or nearly one-fifth) longer collecting slaves and getting across the Atlanticthan did vessels of less than 100 tons.11 Larger vessels therefore hadmore revolts than small vessels simply because they had slaves on boardfor a longer period. Larger vessels also carried more ships' guns, andhad larger crews. Rows three and four in table 1 adjust for these factorsby showing tons per gun and per crew member respectively and, ascolumn 6 shows, the differences between vessels undergoing revolts andthose avoiding revolts are not statistically significant. Thus, the existenceof larger crews and more guns on vessels experiencing revolts reflects thefact that larger ships were more likely to have revolts. Table 1 alsosuggests that slave revolts were associated with less crowding of slaves,as represented by the slaves per ton ratio (row 5), and fewer slaves percrew member (row 7). However, more than half of all slave revoltsoccurred before a vessel was filled to capacity and began the journey tothe Americas. Revolts severe enough to abort the voyage often meantthat the vessel entered the historical record without being fully slaved.By contrast, almost all vessels that did not experience a revolt left thecoast with a close to full complement of slaves, and thus their ratios ofslaves to crew member and slaves to ton are higher than are found onvessels that did have revolts.12This preliminary discussion allows the elimination of some of thevariables in table 1 in the interests of getting a sample of sufficient sizeto support multivariate analysis. Of the 12 comparisons in table 1 (andthe eight statistically significant differences in means that the tablesuggests) we eliminate size of vessel, and the variables directly related toit such as tonnage and tonnage per crew, and number of guns. We cannow 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. Adummy variable is created for Upper Guinea and Gabon, in effect toseparate out the two revolts 'regimes' shown in figure 1, and a timetrend is added, although, as noted, over 90 per cent of the records arefrom 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, brokendown by three categories of tonnage for 1,829 slaving voyages is as follows:Days spent on coast and on middlepassage

Mean No. S.D.Tonnage less than 100 186.4 127 78.3Tonnage greater than 99 and less than 200 204.1 573 90.9Tonnage greater than 199 221.1 1,129 88.8

12 In only a very few cases is there any indication of the number of slaves on board when therevolt occurred, much less any idea of how close the vessel was to carrying its intended number ofslaves. Evidence presented below does suggest, however, that about half of all vessels were fullyloaded at the outset of the revolt.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

459


8/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONTable 2. Logit regressionon slave ships: dependentvariable= 1 if slave shipexperienceda slave revoltVariable B Wald Odds ratio SignificanceIntercept 1.24 0.321 0.571Sailors' deaths on coast 0.08 5.26 1.084 0.022Sailors' deaths on middle passage 0.081 1.269 1.084 0.26Slave ship from Upper Guinea 1.563 12.16 4.772 0Time trend -0.007 0.596 0.44 0.993Proportion of slaves who were male -5.049 5.208 0.002 0.023Proportion of slaves who were children -0.736 0.25 0.617 0.479Notes:Odds ratio measures he changes n odds and is exp (B)Source: ee tab. 1. N = 479 (449 vessels not experiencing evolts,30 vesselsexperiencing evolts).

occurred (and 449 where no rebellion occurred). Table 2 shows theresults. The multivariate analysis changes our preliminary conclusions,though given the small sample size these must remain tentative. As figure1 suggests, the regional dummy is highly significant. Recent research haspointed to large variations between African regions in the incidence ofslave and crew mortality, as well as in the age and sex ratios of Africanscarried into the slave trade. Some of the links suggested above betweenslave revolts on the one hand, and crew mortality and age and sex ratioson the other, are now shown to have been attributable to these regionaleffects. Thus, middle passage deaths of crew are no longer significantafter the dummy variable for region is taken into account. Similarly, thelower child ratios among slaves on board ships experiencing revolts arenow shown to be linked to regional variations rather than to revolts perse. The lower male ratios on vessels experiencing revolts as well as crewdeaths off the African coast remain significant after controlling for region.Finally, the negative time trend reflects the large fall-off in rebellions inthe nineteenth century, probably related to the increased proportions ofchildren among deportees from all parts of Africa after 1820.13The lower proportion of males on vessels undergoing revolts is counter-intuitive. The differential is not large-about five percentage points evalu-ated at the mean-but it is statistically significant at the 5 per cent level.Women are rarely mentioned as leading violent resistance, either onboard ship, or in the New World, where the documentation of resistanceis rather more extensive. There are only six cases where the sex of thecasualties is given in the present dataset, and these show that for everywoman, no fewer than 17 men died either during or as a consequenceof resistance. There is nevertheless an interesting issue here of continentaldifferentials in gender roles. In general terms women had more prominenteconomic and social functions in West African than in West Europeansocieties. Indeed, there is strong evidence that Europeans had to adjusttheir conceptions of gender as a result of exchange on the African

13See Eltis and Engerman, 'Age and sex ratios'.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

460


9/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDcoast.14 But the adjustment remained incomplete. Europeans wantedoverwhelmingly to buy male slaves but, having agreed to take a largeproportion of women and put them to work in the plantation fields ingangs driven with whips, they nevertheless reserved non-domestic skilledtasks for men alone. On board slave ships, women were obviouslyexpected to be more passive than men. Unlike the men, who wereshackled soon after they came on board, the women and children wereallowed some freedom of movement. The small separate area created forthem below decks was normally adjacent to the officers' quarters, specifi-cally the captain's cabin where the arms chest was located. In the caseof the Thomas, a Liverpool slave ship carrying 375 slaves from Loangoto Barbados in 1797, 'two or three of the female slaves having discoveredthat the armourer had incautiously left the arms chest open, got into theafter-hatchway, and conveyed all the arms which they could find throughthe bulkheads to the male slaves, about two hundred of whom immedi-ately ran up the forescuttles and put to death all of the crew who cametheir way'.'5 Such freedom was not a recent innovation in 1797. Over acentury earlier, on the Hannibal, one of the larger slave ships, all thewomen ate on the quarter deck with the officers while the childrenmessed on the poop deck.'6 Neither women nor children were normallyrestrained. Indeed, in evidence presented before Parliament in 1789-91,three captains and seven sailors mentioned that women were nevershackled in the British slave trade-with one exception, on board theslaver Upton in the Gambia in 1762. As elsewhere in the European-dominated Atlantic world, perhaps there was a conflict between concep-tions of gender and the self-interest of those creating and imposing them.The higher crew deaths on the coast on vessels undergoing slaverevolts, the other significant variable in the logit regression, could havebeen the cause, as well as the effect, of rebellion. The great majority ofcrew deaths were the result of fevers, not of violence, whereas the majorcause of slave morbidity was gastro-intestinal disease.17 Rebellions andattacks from the shore were more likely when fever incapacitated thecrew.'8 As noted below, sickness was a factor in slave revolts, and ownersof vessels put many more crew on slave vessels than on vessels going tothe coast for produce, a practice in part designed to offset expected crewmortality and sickness. Moreover, sailors went to great lengths to disguisethe effects of illness. 'We concealed the death of the Sailors from ye

14For a fuller exposition of this argument in the context of the slave trade, see Eltis, Rise ofAfrican slavery, ch. 4.15 The Africans successfully took control of the ship and indeed captured another American brigladen with rum and attempted to sail both to Africa but were eventually taken by a British navalvessel. See Brooke, Liverpoolduring 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, TreasuryMisc., 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, part1, 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 identitynumbers in this article refer to Eltis et al., Trans-Atlanticslave trade.

? EconomicHistory Society 2001

461


10/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONNegros by throwing them overboard in the night,' one wrote, 'lest itmight give them a temptation to rise upon us seeing us so much weakenedby ye death of 8 & most of ye rest sick but myself, we being but 12 inall that were left.'19

On the other hand, when revolts did break out, the violence washorrific. An Irish landowner who lived through the great era of slaverevolts commented during the brutal Irish rebellion of 1798 that 'arebellion of slaves is always more bloody than an insurrection of free-men'.20 This is one piece of history where popular preconceptions fit thefacts. The captives had been wrenched from their communities and faceda fearful future. Compared with slaves who had families in communitiesin the Americas, captives on board ship had far less to lose. Moreover,to rely on about a dozen men armed with primitive weapons to guardhundreds of unwilling people stowed between decks that provided halfthe space per person of the economy section of a modem airliner wassurely riskier for captors than overseeing a plantation in the Americas orguarding long-term criminals. In the few cases where rebellious slavesobtained the upper hand, the crew would normally be killed except fortwo or three (numbers that recur across the decades and in varyingcircumstances) to assist in navigation. On average, some 7.3 crew diedduring a rebellion, or nearly a quarter of the 33.7 average number ofcrew on board when the vessel set out from its home port (n = 79). Crewmortality as a proportion of the muster roll was thus greater than slavemortality as a share of the slave manifest (a point taken up below). Inaddition, crew mortality accounts for most of the difference in crewdeaths between those vessels having rebellions and those that have norecord of a revolt. Higher crew mortality was thus as much an effect asa cause of revolts.Comparison of ships that had revolts with those that did not providessome useful insights, but does not explain a very large proportion ofobserved variation in the incidence of insurrections. Further clues areprovided by an examination of the salient characteristics of a rebellion.Given the conflicting interests of those involved, it is useful to think interms of three outcomes. One was the suppression of the rebellion tothe point where the vessel made it to the Americas and sold slaves underthe control of the original owners-albeit with some deleterious impacton profits. A second was the aborting of the voyage-a kind of drawncontest either because all, or most on board, died-slaves and non-slavesalike-or because the vessel was lost or had to be abandoned, but mostof the slaves ended up on plantations in the Americas anyway. Thisoutcome 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, 1714-1716', pp. 12-13.20Lord Charlemont on the violence in Wexford in 1798, cited in Bryce, Two centuriesof Irishhistory, p. 167.

? EconomicHistorySociety 2001

462


11/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDto be recaptured by a third party, but the loss to the original investorswas total. A third outcome was the aborting of the voyage and the returnof the slaves to Africa, although it might be noted that in most instanceswe do not know what happened after the slaves reached the mainland.Cases such as the Franc Macon, in which the slaves took over the vesseloff Gabon, only to be recaptured by African slave merchants and resoldto other slave ships, and the Marie Galere, whose captives had a similarexperience in the Formosa River, are put in the second category.21Successful rebellions were quite rare so that the great majority ofrevolts were suppressed with the vessel remaining under the control ofthe original owner. Slightly more than four out of five (81.0 per cent)known outcomes fall into this category. In 28 instances the slavesremained captive, but under the control of someone other than theoriginal owner of the slave ship, the latter in effect having lost hisinvestment. In only 30 out of the 369 cases where anything is knownabout outcomes did any of the slaves return to Africa, apparently free, asuccess rate of one in 12. If we include in the successful category the12 revolts where the slaves took over the vessel, but what happenedthereafter was not recorded, then the success ratio becomes one in nine.Expressed as a share of all ships which took on slaves, even with agenerous allowance for unrecorded revolts, the success rate is minuscule,perhaps one or two voyages per thousand. This proportion is reducedfurther if, instead of counting vessels, we take the number of slavesescaped as a proportion of all those embarked on a slave ship, thoughprecision on this is difficult to achieve given the fact that numbers escapedare sometimes reported as 'some', 'many', or 'most'. In several of the'successful' cases, only a handful of slaves actually made it to land andfor the 15 revolts where the number escaping is reported, the average is87.4 (sd=99.3). If, as estimated earlier, 10 per cent of all slave vesselsexperienced revolts, a guess at the proportion of slaves regaining landwith free status would be less than one-tenth of 1 per cent. The twomost successful cases were the Marlborough n 1752 where at least 270slaves from the Bight of Biafra voluntarily disembarked not far from thepoint at which their voyage had begun days before, and the Regina Coeli,which in 1858 was taken over by its human cargo on the WindwardCoast and all captives, again 270 in number, escaped on shore close totheir point of embarkation.22In short, the odds of a rebellion occurringwere many times the odds of rebels making it back to Africa once therevolt began.As this finding implies, more slaves died in the attempt to escape thanactually escaped. A record of African deaths exists for 161 vessels in therevolts dataset. On average 25.4 slaves died during revolts and thesubsequent retribution, but the standard deviation at 41.3 is very highand the median is less than half the mean. Thus, to an even greaterdegree than for all middle-passage deaths, the distribution is highly

21 Voyage IN 32746, and IN 33131. See also Mettas, Ripertoire,II, pp. 511, 692-3.22 Renault, Liberationd'esclaves,pp. 66-7; The Times, 18 June 1858.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

463


12/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONskewed, with a few vessels experiencing catastrophic mortality, and manylosing very few (in 59 rebellions five or fewer slaves died). Thus, 222slaves died on board the New Britannia in January 1773 off the Gambia,when the magazine exploded while the crew struggled with the slaves-in fact, only the captain, Stephen Deane, a veteran of seven slavingvoyages, and one unidentified captive survived the disaster. Everyone onboard the French ships, Galatee in 1738 and Coureur n 1790, died undersimilar circumstances, as did all slaves and crew on at least two othervessels. What we cannot be sure about is the number of slaves on boardat the time of the insurrection. We do know that these vessels had 309slaves on board when they left Africa, but in most cases, the revolt beganbefore the vessel left and, therefore, before it had obtained its fullcomplement of slaves. The average number on board at the time of therevolt may well have been 200 or fewer, with about one in 12 of thesedying as a result of the insurrection. If, on average, 25 enslaved Africansdied per revolt, then in the present sample of 388 vessels, nearly 10,000Africans must have died fighting to escape. This might be compared witha figure of perhaps 2,600 Africans who escaped (30 successful revoltsmultiplied by the mean of 87.4 slaves escaping). Slaves were four timesmore likely to die in the attempt to escape than actually to return toAfrica. In the matter of life or death, these odds can only be describedas long, and in the context of the relatively high frequency of insurrec-tions, they testify to the desperation of those held in captivity below decks.A similar message emerges from analysis of the phase of voyage andthe time of day at which revolts occurred. For 289 slave revolts it ispossible to specify on which of four broad phases of the voyage theviolence broke out or was planned. These were the embarkation phase;the pre-middle passage phase after the last slave purchase but prior tobeginning the transatlantic passage; the middle passage itself; and thetime spent with slaves on board in the Americas, after the first port ofcall was sighted. For ships trading in West Africa, as opposed to West-central Africa, Sao Tome and Princes Island in the Bight of Biafra wereusual calling points, partly because of wind patterns and partly becausethe islands could provide fresh supplies. For such vessels this secondphase would last about three weeks, though for all other routes-thoseleaving Upper Guinea and West-central Africa and heading directly acrossthe Atlantic-an assumption is made that this phase would last only oneweek. 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 three-week-long second phase. Thus, two out of three insurrections beganwhile the vessel was in, or close to, African waters. Almost all theremaining one-third of revolts happened on the middle passage, withonly 3 per cent occurring when the vessel was in American waters. Butas slave ships spent four and a half months acquiring slaves, and a monthsubsequently in African waters, before setting out on a transatlanticvoyage of, on average, just over two months' duration, then after allowingfor time, insurrections may actually have been slightly more likely on the

? EconomicHistorySociety 2001

464


13/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDmiddle passage than on either of the African phases of the voyage.23Thetime spent in American waters with slaves on board, perhaps one or twoweeks, was trivial compared with what was involved in acquiring andmoving the slaves across the Atlantic. Contemporaries and modem schol-ars alike have usually argued that revolts were more likely when the vesselwas within sight of Africa, but John Atkins was right when he pointedout in 1735 that 'there has not been wanting examples of rising andkilling a ship's company, distant from the land'.24 Adjusted for time, therisk of a revolt breaking out was close to constant as long as there wereany 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 thatrebellion was no more prevalent at one time of day than at another.26Moreover, uprisings during the night were no more likely than duringdaytime. 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 onthis, with the most common catalyst being illness among crew (ninecases) followed by lax security, perhaps putting too many men on shore,leaving weapons and tools unattended, or having too many slavesunshackled at once (five cases). Dissent among the crew (four cases) wasalso 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 departurefrom 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 purchaseof slaves in Africa) are the only precise measurements of voyage phase available. There is no categoryin the slave ship dataset for time spent between leaving the last port of purchase and setting outacross the Atlantic, nor for the period 'within sight of the Americas', both of which are used in thehistorical record by those reporting slave rebellions. It follows that there can be no formal chi-squaretest. However, if we combine 'middle passage' with 'within sight of the Americas', and assume thaton average slave ships spent three weeks in African waters after completing their slave purchasesand before crossing the Atlantic, then the percentage distribution of duration of voyage phase andnumber of insurrections by voyage phase is as follows:Embark African water Middle Totalphase phase passage

Revolts (N) 164 35 88 287Revolts ( ) 57.1 12.3 30.7 100Time (months) 4.5 0.72 1.73 6.95Time ( ) 64.7 10.7 24.6 100Although no formal chi-square test is possible, a comparison of row 2 with row 4 suggests that thepercentage of revolts is about what would be expected given the share of voyage time spent on eachvoyage phase.24Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies, p. 175. We thank Robert Harms forthis reference.25Not taking into account the number of slaves on board in addition to time introduces somebias. There were fewer slaves on board at the beginning of the 4.5-month embarkation period thanduring the middle passage. The risk of revolt per slave per day may have been slightly greaterduring the embarkation period than during the middle passage.

26 A chi-square test indicated that the observed distribution was not significantly different fromthe null hypothesis of equal distribution over the four six-hour periods.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

465


14/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONbased slave merchants turning into physical confrontations account forthe remainder.The evidence discussed in this section indicates that, in terms ofunderstanding shipboard slave revolts, the type or size of vessel, itsarmament, equipment or number of crew at the outset of the voyage, orthe ratio of these things to each other, did not appear to matter verymuch. Pressure from desperate people seems continuous as long as therewere desperate people on board. Exogenous events such as illness, humanerror on the part of the crew, or what from the slaves' standpoint wouldappear as fissures in the ruling class (crew versus crew, or Europeansversus African slave merchant), provided the opportunity for these press-ures to manifest themselves as violent resistance, but the pressure itselfwas a constant. The single most important factor appears to be the strongregional pattern in the incidence of revolts, though the higher proportionof females among the slaves on board is also significant. There is nothingin the datasets to explain either of these phenomena. The creation orconstruction of gender roles is a complex social process, especially whenthe unit of comparison is two widely separated continents. But at leastscholars can now direct their efforts to the African side of this mixtureof confrontation and exchange that the coercion of labour necessarilyinvolved. Whether it is regional patterns of resistance or conceptionsof gender, it is Africa rather than Europe that is likely to providethe answers.27

IIWhat are the implications of these findings for the way the slave tradewas conducted and more specifically for the costs involved in slavetrading? One macro-implication is immediately suggested by figure 1.Perhaps there was a causal relationship between the frequency of revoltsin the Upper Guinea/Gabon regions in Africa and the fact that theysupplied such a tiny proportion of the slaves entering the transatlanticslave trade. Did European slave traders avoid these 'high-risk' regions inlight of the difficulties of obtaining insurance discussed below? In themid-eighteenth century, for reasons as yet unclear, a very pronouncedincrease occurred in the African loading times of slave vessels in theheavily slaved areas of both the West African and West-central Africanlittoral.28 Loading times, and the costs of trading for slaves in Africa, infact, reached their highest point ever between 1751 and 1775-the onlyperiod during which the Upper Guinea regions were significant suppliersof slaves in the slave trade. Whatever the cause, it appears to have anAfrican origin, or at least cannot have had any grounding in Europe. Itis hard to avoid the conclusion that European traders were forced tempor-arily to draw on these areas more heavily because of a deterioration oftrading conditions in other parts of Africa, and that doing so increased

27 For a discussion of African influences, see Behrendt et al., Shipboardslave revolts.28 Eltis and Richardson, 'Productivity'.? EconomicHistoy Society 2001

466


15/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD50 - Revolts

, 40- m Allvoyages0

30-

10 I I

^ 20-

o, ,, _ 6

10- `/, //,

?O So S ~S00 S SO?o 'o 'PeriodFigure 2. Relative distributionof voyages experiencingviolent incidentsand ofall voyages over timeSources: see text

the incidence of slave revolts in the Atlantic trade markedly. Figure 2shows the distribution of slave revolts over time along with the distributionof all voyages. More than two out of every five recorded instances ofviolence in the slave trade happened during this single quarter century,while only one out of five slave voyages in the larger dataset sailed inthese years. Indeed, the shift in the regional distribution of the slavetrade during 1751-75 (compared with the distribution before 1751 andafter 1775) accounts for about half of the differential in incidents ofviolence in that quarter century.In addition to these macro effects, how costly were the precautionswhich slave traders had to take in the face of ever-present pressure fromslaves, whether or not a revolt happened? Actual revolts may haveoccurred on 10 per cent or less of all slave ships, but the fear of thepotential devastation from a revolt was constantly present. Owners andcaptains took basic cost-increasing precautions before they left their homeport in terms of numbers of crew, guns, and equipment, but givenepidemiological knowledge at the time, they could not protect themselvesagainst the effect of illness without hiring many more men than, excepton a minority of voyages, they would strictly require. As we have seen,captives would grasp any opportunity, however hopeless, to escape orinflict damage on their gaolers. The key point here is that the standardinsurance contract excluded losses from revolt of 5-10 per cent of thehuman cargo, specifying typically that this proportion of the slave cargois 'warranted free of damage by insurrection', with in some cases, extra? EconomicHistory Society 2001

467


16/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONinsurance being available at a higher premium.29 The first abolitionist-sponsored legislation regulating the British slave trade, the Dolben Actof 1788, allowed British merchants to insure their cargo of slaves againstloss 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 damageattributable to the 'perils of the sea' in peacetime was at or just above 5per cent.31 The risk of a slave revolt (estimated above to be one in tenvoyages) was thus greater than all other maritime hazards combined. Onthe other hand, as we have seen, the vast majority of slave revolts werenot successful, and cannot be equated with a weather-induced shipwreck.On average, one-eighth of the human cargo was lost to the owner as aresult of an insurrection, which, allowing for collateral damage to thevessel and equipment, would suggest that full insurance against revoltswould have increased voyage insurance by 25 to 50 per cent[(0.125 x 0.10)/0.05]. Put another way, without resistance, the slavetrader would not have suffered damage to his human cargo and equipmentamounting to nearly 2 per cent of the costs of the expedition on average.32Comparisons of slave vessels with non-slave, or produce, vessels providea further insight into the costs of coercion. A dataset exists of 765produce vessels that sailed to Africa and then back to Europe (or in afew cases to the Americas) without obtaining slaves in the period 1698to 1807. The produce voyages had a very pronounced regional bias inthat 90 per cent of them traded to Upper Guinea regions, which appearedto require smaller vessels than elsewhere on the African coast. Given thefact that slave vessels trading on this part of the coast tended to besmaller than those trading elsewhere, and revolts more common, compari-sons between slave and non-slave vessels are restricted to this region.Table 3 provides a profile of slave and produce vessels trading in UpperGuinea comprising four variables with implications for costs of size ofvessel, number of crew, armament, and round-trip voyage time. Thevoyage for the produce ship is deemed to have ended when it returnedto the port of departure, and for the slave vessel when it reached theAmericas. The similarities between the two types of voyages are striking,except, of course, for numbers of crew. This is the only variable displayingstatistically significant differences between the two types of voyages. Notsurprisingly, the slave vessel carried nearly twice as many crew when itset 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 YorkHistorical Society, Slavery MS. Box 2, T/14, Thomlinson, Freesthick & Co. to Samuel and WilliamVernon, London, 12 Feb. 1757; Donnan, ed., Documents, II, pp. 216-17, 221-2, 325. These areitemized accounts, in contrast to the more general requests which merchants made for insurance.30Donnan, ed., Documents, II, p. 586.31Behrendt, '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 exclusionsnoted earlier in the text, normally required premiums of 6 to 7.5 per ?100 insured in peacetimefor 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, ChanceryMasters Exhibits, C 107/11, underwriting books of Abraham Clibbor, 1768-75.? EconomicHistorySociety 2001

468


17/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDTable 3. Profiles of slaving and producevoyages to the UpperGuinea coast,1714-1800

Tonnage Crew at outset Guns Round trip (days)Slave ship 148.9 26.1 5.2 276.1S.D. 84.9 13.8 3.5 116.7N 1,966 1,510 985 1,151Produce ship 149.9 14.7 4.9 267.5S.D. 71.8 6.6 3.5 104.8N 182 132 89 114Source: see tab. 1

slave ship required at least two additional skills in its labour force. Onewas carpentry, for the construction of slave platforms, bulkheads belowdecks, and above-deck barricades when the vessel was on the Africancoast, and the other was medical assistance in the purchasing and mainte-nance of a healthy cargo. Surgeons in particularwere expensive, frequentlybeing allowed a small share of the human cargo based on their perceivedperformance. One might reasonably assume that without resistance, ill-ness, and the requirements of feeding and a modicum of care among thepeople held between decks, these additional personnel would not havebeen necessary. It follows that labour costs must have been approximatelytwice as great on a slave vessel as they would have been on either aproduce vessel of similar size or, say, a vessel carrying free migrants.33

Labour costs, however, were not the only differences in costs faced byslave traders. Slave traders supplied provisions for slaves, whereas producevessels had no need of these. In the eighteenth century passenger shipsin the north Atlantic required migrants to sustain themselves.34 Anextensive sample of provision manifests for the Royal African Companysuggests that provisions added 4 per cent to the cost of a cargo. Forarmaments there was little difference between a slave and produce vessel,again counterintuitive at first sight. Ships' guns of the type that appearin port records were in effect carriage guns and pointed outwards, notin-board. Not shown in table 3 are the additional armaments requiredto control a slave cargo. These included a wide range of small arms andsemi-fixed guns arranged strategically to keep control when the slaveswere allowed on deck, but the additional costs of these could not haveformed a large part of outfitting a vessel and they are ignored here. Insummary, without resistance, labour would have cost half as much, andcapital and outfitting, 5 per cent less.The structure of costs in the slave trade after 1660 is sufficiently wellknown to permit estimations of the impact on overall costs of theadditional outlays just noted. Analysis is restricted to 1681-1800, the

33 There do not seem to have been differences in wage costs between the two voyage types.34 Wokeck, Trade in strangers,pp. 57, 72, 75-7.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

469


18/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONperiod during which nearly two-thirds of all slave vessels sailed.35 Duringthese years, on average, about one-third of the cost of the slave in theAmericas was the capital cost of the vessel and its outfit, about one-thirdwas the merchandise exchanged for the slaves on the African coast, andabout one-third labour, including the small shares of the slaves allowedto officers for a successful expedition.36 A halving of labour costs and areduction of 5 per cent in the capital costs accordingly constitutes areduction in total costs of 18 per cent ((0.5 X 0.33) + (0.05 X 0.33))-the costs of coercion.

IIIAssessing the significance of the higher costs associated with forcingpeople to act against their will hinges on a review of the cost and benefitsof slavery as practiced in the Americas. Resistance could not preventnearly four centuries of efficient production of a range of semi-tropicalproduce. As is now well understood, ceterisparibus, output, revenues, andprofits will be greater using slave rather than free labour. Slavery willforce an individual-in this case, an African individual-off his or herpreferred labour supply curve. A slave's participation in the workforcewill be much higher than that of an individual whose decision to enterthe workforce is voluntary. Free labour will join the workforce later, retireat an earlier age, and move in and out of the workforce more readilybetween those times in response to competing demands for leisure andfrom family and other responsibilities. The slave will also work longerhours per day and, most importantly for crops such as sugar, will beunable to avoid the disamenities of gang-labour where personal controlover the pace of work is minimal or non-existent. Slavery pushes thesupply curve of labour to the right so that a given expenditure in poundssterling will yield more labour from slaves than from free persons.37The distinction between coerced and free presented here is, however,artificial in two senses. First, all labour is forced in the sense that alldecisions to work for someone else result from an evaluation on the partof the worker that working is less unpleasant than the alternative-whichfor a slave would be physical violence and for a 'free' worker would bestarvation. The choice of the latter emerges from a state-enforced systemof property rights and the unequal distribution of the resulting property.38The free-slave line is also less than clear in that once the slave is broughtto a place of work-once the coercive police structure is established-there 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 rapidtechnological 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) arepresented. The mean of these estimates is 0.501.37 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, and restated in Fogel, Withoutconsentor contract. Forthe theoretical underpinnings, see Barzel, 'Economic analysis of slavery', pp. 88-95.38 Steinfield and Engerman, 'Labor-free or coerced'.( EconomicHistory Society 2001

470


19/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDdrive slave gangs, but incentives or bribes were not just possible, theywere widely used. The latter may not have been in monetary form, butthey were still costly. Underlying their use was the calculus betweenadditional force and additional bribes. If, however, these were alternatives,then higher incentives, or bribes, would have reduced the costs ofcoercion.39 For most slave systems in the Americas there is abundantevidence of combinations of the two. An upward sloping supply curveexisted for slave labour as well as for free. Despite these similarities, thehistory of slavery and emancipation suggests that workers prefer freestatus, however constrained, to slave status, whatever incentive system isincorporated. Formal discussions of policing have focused on the monitor-ing of production as well as patterns of slave consumption.40 But if weshift the perspective from the plantation to the whole slave system, directcoercion was much more important (and incentives much less) in theenslavement and delivery of slaves than on the plantation itself.Four main steps are required to ensure a supply of labour: long-distance movement of people where population is insufficient; the separateissue 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 labouris on site; and preventing voluntary departure thereafter.41The first twoof these steps are relatively easy to achieve with a slave trade. Further,because sugar and rice are produced in low-lying, high-disease areas andin unpleasant working conditions, non-slaves will be fewer and moreexpensive than slaves. The third-extracting work-was the preoccupationof mine or plantation management. Management also had some involve-ment in the fourth, but the main restraint on departure or-worse fromthe owners' standpoint-conspiracies amctngslaves to revolt, was providedby the state either locally, for example a militia and slave patrols, ornationally (or imperially), in the form of armed forces and a navy.42Atall four stages, the cost of coercion is largely independent of output. Thecosts of the first two-essentially the costs of enslavement, restraint, andtransport-were reflected in the price the master paid for the slave. Thefourth step was covered from direct taxes and levies on the slave ownerto finance slave patrols and slave catchers, or duties on produce to helppay for soldiers and naval vessels, but the costs of these, too, hardlyvaried with the value of plantation output. At the third stage, physicalcoercion 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 somelabour 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 demo-graphic (surrounded by a white buffer population). Islands pre-suppose a navy and major rebellionswere always suppressed with naval intervention. Sydnor (Slavery in Mississippi, pp. 67-101) providesa good description of the policing function on and off the estate in the US new South. The largenumbers of non-slaves ensured that the South felt no inhibitions in supporting the AmericanRevolution and even in the 1850s-the underground railroad notwithstanding-very few peopleanywhere in the US were actively hostile to the Fugitive Slave Law (Campbell, Slave catchers).Bycontrast, an overwhelming black majority population in the English Caribbean meant there was lessenthusiasm for independence: O'Shaughnessy, 'Redcoats and slaves'.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

471


20/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONvariable cost compared with the fixed costs of the other stages.43 It isthe long-run rather than the short-run supply curve for a firm using slavelabour that lies to the right of its free labour-using counterpart. The coststructure of a slave plantation or voyage was analogous to that of, say,a dam-based hydroelectric operation. If insufficient amounts were spenton either coercion or dam construction, then there would be a risk ofsudden collapse with output falling precipitously. While sugar exportsdeclined over a decade rather than immediately after rebellion, this wasthe ultimate outcome in St Domingue after the revolt of 1791.Of these four steps, policing or coercion seems particularly importantto 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 handsof 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 bringingunwilling people from Africa, and the transatlantic slave trade was smallor non-existent. A slave trade began only when this situation was reversed.Likewise, the slave traffic ended only when the costs imposed by itssuppression exceeded the cost of obtaining alternative (non-slave) labourfrom Asia, and to a much lesser extent from Europe, or when the slavepopulation began to increase naturally. Higher fixed costs from slaveresistance would make the switch from indentured to slave labour in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries occur later, and the switch from slavelabour to Asian contract labour in the nineteenth century earlier thanwould have been the case without resistance. If the costs of controllingresistance were built into the price of the slave delivered to the Americas,then the central question for assessing the impact of resistance is theproportion of the price that policing absorbed, and how this proportionvaried. Delivering a slave to the Americas had four cost components,capture, coastal factoring, transoceanic transport, and distributing thehuman commodity in the Americas. In the eighteenth century, transportmade up about half of the sum of these components with most of theremainder accounted for by the price of the slave on the African coast.In the previous section it was estimated that coercion made up about 18per cent of middle passage costs. Although little information exists aboutcost structures for delivery of slaves to the coast, it is unlikely thatcoercion costs would be any lower during this initial phase of themovement of slaves to the Americas.It is now possible to turn to an assessment of what the extra costsarising from African agency and resistance meant in terms of the numbersof slaves carried across the Atlantic. This involves posing a counterfactualor 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.? EconomicHistory'Society 2001

472


21/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDestimates of elasticities).44 A movement of African people across theAtlantic without coercion-a migration without resistance on the part ofthe migrant-would have meant that the supply curve would have shiftedto the right by approximately 18 per cent. Between 1680 and 1800,nearly 6.6 million slaves left Africa for the New World. The modelpredicts that without shipboard or coastal resistance the number of peoplemoving across the Atlantic from Africa would have been nearly 9 percent greater. Put another way, in the long eighteenth century alone,resistance resulted in nearly 600,000 fewer slaves crossing the Atlanticand forced European consumers to pay higher prices for plantationproduce. In effect, Africans who died resisting the slave traders as wellas those who resisted unsuccessfully, but survived to work on theplantations of the Americas, saved others from forced migration to theAmericas.

But African agency in the slave trade was a much larger issue thanjust violent resistance on slave ships. Between the sixteenth century andthe nineteenth, sub-Saharan Africans shaped the economy of the emergingAtlantic world in at least two other ways-again manifested through thecost structures of the major export commodities of the Americas. In thefirst decades of Atlantic exploration, northern Italians and Portuguesecreated a complete plantation complex, including large exports of sugarand a slave labour force that could not reproduce itself, prior to the firstNew World manifestation of this phenomenon in Brazil.45The geographicmovement of the plantation complex in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-turies was towards Africa rather than towards the Americas. Sugar pro-duction in the Atlantic shifted from the Canaries to Madeira and thento Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea in the course of a century or so. Ineffect, the plantation complex had circumvented the arid zone of theAfrican continent by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and waspoised to make the small step to the mainland where land, labour, andrain were even more abundant than on Sao Tome. At this point, however,the movement of the complex towards Africa halted and plantationsappeared next, not in Africa, but on the part of the Americas closest toAfrica-but still 4,000 miles distant from supplies of dependable slavelabour. Explanations for this dramatic shift-epidemiology, ecology ofsugar production, differentials in labour productivity-have tended toignore the inability of Europeans to establish, outside Angola, the political

44 The relevant formula ise S*Q* -e+y+ y

where Q* = percentage change in quantity of slaves entering the slave tradee = elasticity of demandy = elasticity of supplyS* = 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, seeEltis, '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.? EconomicHistory Society 2001

473


22/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONpresence in Africa which plantations demanded before the partition era.In the late seventeenth century Europeans attempted to establish plan-tations in their enclaves on the Gold Coast and found it impossible tocontrol the local population. Theft and the difficulty of recovering escapedslaves meant that costs were too high.46 Even after abolition of the slavetrade, export-based production of palm oil and peanuts developed firstunder African control. Thus, the first, largest, and most paradoxicalAfrican impact on the Atlantic economy was the transatlantic slave tradeitself. European weakness in the face of African political and militaryrealities, coupled, of course, with Europeans' taste for plantation produce,created the labour shortage that the slave trade filled. Sugar plantationsnever developed in West Africa, but the history of Sao Tome and thecorrespondence of business agents on the coast suggest that in the earlymodem period competitive sugar production there was a possibility thatAfricans did not allow to develop.47A second impact of Africans that goes beyond violence on slave shipsfollowed from the natural African assumption of equal status in the tradingrelationship that came in the wake of holding Europeans at bay. Beforenineteenth-century partition there was no question of Europeans organizinglabour levies on a conquered population such as developed in early modemSpanish America, or in colonial Africa, or in German-occupied Europeafter 1940. Europeans had no choice but to buy slaves; they could notsteal them in significant numbers. Prices of slaves on the African coastaveraged 25 per cent of slave prices in the Americas between 1681 and1697, 35 per cent of American prices in 1698-1710, and 50 per cent atthe end of the eighteenth century.48 Raids or levies on a conqueredpopulation would have reduced the price of slaves in the Americas, at leastin the short run. Moreover, the absence of financial intermediariesand theresort, in places, to pawning practices meant that the cost of doing businesson the African coast is likely to have been more expensive for bothEuropeans and Africans when trading with each other than it would havebeen if they had been trading only among themselves. When tensionsdeveloped which were based on non-performanceof contracts, they degener-ated quickly into assaults and the consignment of pawns into slavery. Atsuch times each side often ceased to see the other as individuals and wouldlaunch retaliatoryactions against all Africans in the European case, and allEuropeans in the African. Thus, higher transaction costs also increased theprice of slaves to planters in the Americas, though an equal and peacefulbusiness 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 sugaris that much of it is stolen by the Negroes themselves, as they have a very great liking for it': vanDantzig, ed., Dutch and Guinea Coast, p. 130. The British saw the local population 'harbouring allours and the Dutch Comp's Rebellious Black Servts.'. For other evidence relating to the GoldCoast, see Seth Grosvenour and James Phipps to Royal African Company, 15 March 1712, PROT 70/5, fo. 81. For similar links between slaves and the local population in the Gambia see JohnSnow 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.

( EconomicHistorySociety 2001

474


23/24

AFRICAN AGENCY IN THE PRE-MODERN ATLANTIC WORLDfirst of these two wider counterfactuals is an absence of African resistanceof any kind. In this event there would have been little or no transatlanticslave trading. Europeans would have established a lower-cost plantationsector in parts of West Africa and obtained the labour they needed inmuch the same way as they did in the early colonial period, for examplein the Belgian Congo. The historical reality, of course, was high fixedcosts in Africa that first held the plantation complex at bay, and thenforced it across the Atlantic. The second wider counterfactual is effectiveAfrican resistance to the establishment on African soil of plantations, butan unequal relationship (or no business relationship at all) in the matterof moving slaves to the Americas. Historical examples of this in differentcontexts 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 oftenresulted in a tributary relationship where slaves were given to ward offfurther attacks. In this scenario-closest to reality on the eastern fringesof Portuguese Angola-Europeans would have organized punitive militaryraids 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 militaryexpeditions would have been much less than the cost of paying eliteAfricans what amounted to full market value for their human commodi-ties. If this situation had held, then the resulting slave trade would havebeen much greater than the historical reality.If it is assumed, for the sake of developing an example, that the cost ofobtaining slaves through tribute would have been half that of buying themon the open market, then we can estimate how much greater the slavetrade might have been. In the period from 1680 to 1800, African pricesof slaves averagedabout 35 per cent of American prices (in terms of primecost, to use the contemporary terminology). A halving of the African priceof slaves would thus have meant a fall in costs (or a shift rightwards inthe supply curve) of 17.5 per cent. This would mean an increase of about9 per cent in the number of slaves carried off from Africa (again another600,000 persons), a result similar to the previous exercise based on theabsence of shipboard resistance. Combining the two effects means that theAfrican capacity to resist and deal with Europeans as equals resulted inthe preservation of well over 1 million Africans from the stark alternativesof 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 plantationcomplex in the Americas rather than in Africa itself, but that power alsoput a cap on the number of slaves carried across the Atlantic. And, as wehave shown, it was not just the numbers of slaves carried across the Atlanticthat African agency helped to shape; it was also the direction and structureof the trade. The regional distribution of the slave trade was just as mucha product of Africa as of Europe.Victoria Universityof WellingtonQueen's University,Kingston, OntarioUniversityof Hull? EconomicHistory Society 2001

475


24/24

S. D. BEHRENDT, D. ELTIS, AND D. RICHARDSONFootnote referencesAtkins, 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, 1780-1807', J. Afr. Hist., 38 (1997), pp. 187-211.Behrendt, S. D., Eltis, D., and Richardson, D., Shipboardslave revolts,African agency and Atlantichistory (forthcoming).Brooke, R., Liverpoolas 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 f thefugitive slave law, 1850-1860 (1950).Curtin, P. D., The rise and fall of the plantation complex(Cambridge, 1990).Donnan, E., ed., Documents illustrativeof the historyof the slave trade to America, 4 vols. (1930-5).Eltis, D., 'The British contribution to the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade', Econ. HistRev., 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 databaseon 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 AmericanNegro slavery (1974).Franklin, J. H., From slavery to freedom:a historyof Negro Americans (1980).Inikori, J. E., 'Measuring the unmeasured hazards of the Atlantic slave trade: documents relating tothe British trade', Revue Franfaise d'Histoired'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 thetransatlantic 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 expeditionsnegrieresranfaises au XVIIIe siecle, eds. S. and M. Daget, 2 vols.(1978, 1984).Mullin, M., Africa in America: slave acculturationand resistance n the American South and the BritishCaribbean, 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, Collectionof voyages and travels, 6 vols. (1746), VI, pp. 187-255.Pierson, W. D., 'White cannibals, Black martyrs: fear, depression, and religious faith as causes ofsuicide 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., Liberationd'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 differencesand similarities', in T. Brass and M. van der Linden, eds., Free and unfree labor: the debatecontinues (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 documents rom thegeneral state archive at The Hague (1978).Verlinden, C., The beginnings of moderncivilisation:eleven essays with an introduction 1970).Wokeck, M., Trade in strangers: he beginnings of mass migrationto North America (1999).

C EconomicHistorySociety 2001

476