Journal ArticleDOI
The Atlantic Slave Trade: A tentative economic model
Henry A. Gemery,Jan S. Hogendorn +1 more
TLDR
In this article, the authors present a model that shows a derived demand for labour evolving over time into a specific demand for slaves as entrepreneurs sought the lowest cost method of expanding the production of agricultural staples.Abstract:
Two necessary conditions for the existence of New World slavery and the slave trade are an acute labour shortage and an elastic supply of coerced labour. Though the former condition has been the mainstay of hypotheses on slavery where high land/labour ratios were viewed as causal determinants, less attention has been given to the role of labour supply responses. This paper joins these conditions in a model which postulates that labour demand stemming from open resource pressures induced a politico–economic supply response in West Africa. The model shows a derived demand for labour evolving over time into a specific demand for slaves as entrepreneurs sought the lowest cost method of expanding the production of agricultural staples. Free and indentured labour were both characterized by inelastic supply, but the supply of slaves was elastic due to factors discussed within a vent for surplus framework. African governments and private traders responded to the new effective demand from the Americas with improved organization which widened the pre-existing market for slaves. The desire for imported goods, with firearms especially significant, plus various technical changes in transport, money, and credit all combined to ensure the further development of the slave trade and the continued maintenance of a longrun elastic supply patternread more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Africa and the World Economy
TL;DR: The question of whether Africa's involvement in the changing world economy has led Africans along a road toward material and social progress or into a dead end is very much in dispute as mentioned in this paper.
Book
The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World
TL;DR: The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra as mentioned in this paper dissects and explains the structure, dramatic expansion, and manifold effects of the slave trade in BiaFra.
Book
The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History
TL;DR: In this paper, Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda, and shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were value as commodities.
Book ChapterDOI
Servants to slaves to servants: contract labour and European expansion
TL;DR: There have been two major intercontinental streams of movement of contract labour in the modern world as discussed by the authors : the first involved an outflow from the countries of Western Europe, mainly the British Isles and Germany, to colonial settlements in the New World, and the second, from the less developed parts of the world, particularly Asia, to other underdeveloped areas in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, plus Australia, mainly for the production of plantation crops.
References
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Book
The conditions of agricultural growth
TL;DR: In this paper, Boserup argues that changes and improvements occur from within agricultural communities, and that improvements are governed not simply by external interference, but by those communities themselves using extensive analyses of the costs and productivity of the main systems of traditional agriculture.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure
Journal ArticleDOI
The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a hypothesis regarding the causes of agricultural serfdom or slavery. But the hypothesis is limited to the Russian experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it aims at a wider applicability.