Traders, Planters and Slaves
Market Behavior in Early English America

The explosive growth of the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the seventeenth century made the international trade in Africans one of the world's largest industries. This book explores the operation of that industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, focusing on the market behaviour of the Royal African Company - the largest English company engaged in the slave trade - and the sugar planters of the Caribbean, who were the trade's principal customers in English America. A richly detailed portrayal of the slave trade to English America emerges, one that shows it to have been a highly competitive and efficient transatlantic market. In revealing the existence of sophisticated and complex market behaviour in this early period of black slavery in the New World, the book adds to our understanding of the development of large-scale competitive markets, as well as to our knowledge of the efficiency of resource allocation in early English America.

List of tables; Preface; 1. The Atlantic slave trade and the early development of the English West Indies; 2. Shipping and mortality; 3. Slave prices in the Barbados market, 1673–1723; 4. On the order of purchases by characteristics at slave sales; 5. The demographic composition of the slave trade: an economic investigation; 6. Establishing geographic persistence from market observations: population turnover among estate owners and managers in Barbados and Jamaica, 1673–1725; 7. The economic structure of the early Atlantic slave trade: the challenge of Adam Smith's analysis; Appendices; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.