British slavers transported over 3.6 million Africans, 400,000 dying in transit

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

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The scale figures here could connect to Eric Williams’ ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ and the broader quantitative history of the slave trade.

Related

• British shipping alone transported 3.7 million Africans across the Atlantic (similarity 0.93)
• Over 150,000 enslaved Africans died before reaching the New World (similarity 0.88)
• Up to twenty million enslaved Africans died in transit and bondage. (similarity 0.83)
• French slave trade crews died at higher rates than enslaved captives (similarity 0.82)
• Curtin’s 1969 estimate put the slave trade total near 9.5 million (similarity 0.82)
• British traders transported over 3.6 million Africans to the New World. (similarity 0.81)
• For 300 years more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually (similarity 0.81)
• More Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic before the nineteenth century. (similarity 0.80)
• Curtin’s revised slave trade estimate was under half the commonly cited figure (similarity 0.80)
• Arab slave traders removed perhaps 17 million Africans over 900 years (similarity 0.79)
• European demand overwhelmed Africa’s own slaving commerce from an early date (similarity 0.79)
• Curtin’s 1969 estimate cut the accepted slave-trade totals roughly fivefold. (similarity 0.78)