The Numbers Game

Of all the topics we are to cover in seminar, the Atlantic slave trade is the one I know best. A year ago I did a historiography for Emily Clark's Atlantic World seminar on the project of quantifying the slave trade and the use and misuse of quantitative history in discussing slavery and diaspora.

Therefore, I am more acquainted with Curtin and Eltis than I would perhaps like to be.

While Curtin's project was a game changer in the study of Atlantic/American/European (I still haven't decided which term I prefer) slavery, it was equal parts mainstream and innovative. Curtin's work was only a smaller part of a broader shift toward quantitative history--think Fogel & Engerman  or the New England town studies (Greven especially) for the US or Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran for Mexico. This shift toward cliometrics was driven by an attempt to emphasize the conception of history as a social science and as a means to get at history from below. If subalterns left only minor traces in the archival record, perhaps by aggregating them into large data sets we could say something about their lives and experiences.

Unlike some cliometricians, Curtin was more circumspect and admitted the fallacy of assuming that numbers were "more 'scientific' and reliable than other kinds of data." (Curtin, 272) The aspect of Curtin's work that attracted the most attention and controversy, his new aggregate estimate for the scale of the slave trade, is, in my estimation, the least interesting aspect of his work.

Curtin's data set reveals several important trends. For instance, Curtin shows conclusively that their were major ebbs and flows in the source of enslave person over time. Regions, ports, and empires entered, left, and reentered the slave trade. Curtin's numbers do not explain this, but they do reveal it. This revelation invites further inquiry into the causes--European, African, and American--that led to these developments. Likewise, the revelation that the slave trade was not random--Africans from specific regions were brought en masse to specific places--has great relevance for how we conceive of diaspora. That slave ships did not bring disaggregated masses of people, but rather, people who shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic traits, has important bearings on the discussion of Africanisms and retentions in the Americas that preoccupied Herskovitz, Price, and Mintz. Again, however, the revelations of the data are suggestive and not final.

Numbers tell a story of the Atlantic slave trade, they do not tell THE story.