Curtin’s revised slave trade estimate was under half the commonly cited figure

Evidence

In 1969, Curtin authoritatively calculated that between 1451 and 1870, 9,566,000 African workers were brought to the Western Hemisphere. He further concluded that “it is extremely unlikely that the ultimate total will turn out to be less than 8,000,000 or more than 10,500,000.” This significantly lowered the figure most commonly used, 50,000,000. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 565

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the historiography has since settled on an upward or downward revision of Curtin; Inikori’s 1976 critique argued for at least a third more.
• XREF: Ties into the reader’s interest in the material scale that underlay the Black radical tradition’s emergence.