British shipping alone transported 3.7 million Africans across the Atlantic

Evidence

By the end of the eighteenth century and the abolition of the legal British slave trade in 1807, British factors, merchants, and traders alone were to account for the transportation of 3,699,572 more Africans to the New World. If we were to accept Curtin’s argument concerning the levels of death in transit during this period, then perhaps as many as 400,000 or more of these people never saw the western end of the Atlantic. They died “in transit,” and thereby produced one profoundly tragic measure of the extent to which the development of the capitalist world system depended on labor its metropolis could not produce. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 591

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s causal arc of the Black radical tradition by quantifying the scale of the labor force whose resistance would define the tradition.