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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The Slave Trade in Seventeenth-Century Allada: A Revision |
Author: | Law, Robin R. |
Year: | 1994 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 22 |
Pages: | 59-92 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | West Africa Togo Benin |
Subjects: | slave trade Allada polity History and Exploration Economics and Trade |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601668 |
Abstract: | Recent research undertaken by the author, including work in early Dutch archives, suggests that the scale of early Portuguese slave trade on the Slave Coast of West Africa, particularly in Allada, has been underestimated in earlier studies and the significance of the entry of the Dutch into the trade in the 1630s/1640s correspondingly exaggerated. It also appears that the volume of trade in the middle decades of the 17th century has generally been overestimated; and more particularly, that insufficient weight has been given to short-term fluctuations in the trade, which reflected not only the vagaries of varying demand but also the recurrent disruption of the trade by intra-European conflicts, especially the Anglo-Dutch maritime wars of 1652-1654, 1665-1667, and 1672-1674. It is now suggested that the real takeoff into sustained growth of the slave trade on the Slave Coast came only in the later 1670s. This reassessment also modifies earlier assessments of the significance of the lower prices for slaves attested between the 1650s and 1670s, which can now be seen to be correlated more probably with depressed than with expanding exports. The real paradox of slave prices is not that they fell during a period of rising volume, but that they remained steady in the 1670s/1680s, during the initial phase of expansion of volume. Notes, ref. |