Questions Using Slave Trade Database

 

Before answering these question be sure to read the handout from page 228 of David Eltis' The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.

This exercise consists of questions A, B, and C. You must do all three. Question A has been broken down into steps for you; for Question B and C, you will have to both determine the proper steps on your own and write out your justifications for choosing those steps.

 

QUESTION A Sometime between 1720 and 1750, Europeans abandoned the the practice of using guardian slaves on slave trade voyages. Did this change increase the likelihood of slave revolts on board ships? You will use the data contained on the CD-ROM to explore this question.

Why do shares tell us more than totals? When assessing any historical phenomena, total numbers generally tell us simply that something occurred X or Y number of times. But much as quotations tells us more when they are in rather than out of context, to get numbers to reveal more meaning, one usually must place them into a relevant context. For example, imagine that in Time Period A, there were 10 slaving voyages, 5 of which experienced revolts. Further imagine in Time Period B there were 100 voyages and 20 of those experienced revolt. Time Number of Voyages Number of Revolts A 10 5 B 100 20 Although Time Period B experienced a larger number of total revolts than Time Period A (20 revolts for B rather than the 5 for A), the share of voyages in Time Period A that experienced a revolt is actually higher than the share or percentage of voyages in Time Period B that experienced a revolt. Time Period A Time Period B Another way to understand these relationships is to present them as percentages (shares expressed as a fraction of out of one hundred): Time Number of Voyages Number of Revolts % of Voyages with Revolts A 10 5 50% B 100 20 20%

For a variety of historical reasons, we will confine our quantitative research to the 18th
century, and so we will compare the period 1700 - 1749 to the perod 1749 - 1799. We have broken down this question into a number steps for you.

STEP 1:
Because the share of all revolts that occurred in a particular period tells us more than the total number of slave revolts in that period, we will need to calculate percentages. In turn, to calculate percentages, you will need to know totals. So STEP 1 will be to calculate the percentage of all voyages that occurred in each period.
The database has information on 27,227 voyages – so use that as your base number to calculate percentages.

A)How many voyages occurred in the first period?

B) What percentage of all voyages does the number from A represent?

C) How many voyages occurred in the second period?

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D) What percentage of all voyages does the number from C represent?

STEP 2:
Now calculate the share of slave revolts for both periods.

A) How many total insurrections were there?

B) How many insurrections occurred in the first period?

C) What percentage of all insurrections does the number of insurrections from the first period represent?

D) How many insurrections occurred in the second period?

E) What percentage of all insurrections does the number of insurrections from the second period represent?

STEP 3:

Repeat the calculations for Step 2, but this time look only at the number of successful slave revolts for both period. Look for the category "captured by slaves; ship did not reach the Americas" (refresher technical instructions here on doing searches with the database)

Step 4:

Compare the numbers from steps 2 and 3. Does the percentage of all insurrections that occurred in each period roughly correspond to that period’s percentage of all voyages? That is, if 25% of all voyages occurred in the first period, did that period also have 25% of all insurrectionsStep 5:
Write a paragraph that summarizes your conclusions.

QUESTION B:

Did slave mortality on voyages destined for what became the United States decrease over time?
Decide what steps – as we did with question 1 – that you will need to take answer this question. Write out both the steps you decided upon, the results of the queries you preformed, and your conclusions.

Some tips:

1) To filter for voyages destined for the United States, under "Select Region" choose "Region of disembarkation broadly defined." Then, from the box to the right of the first filter, scroll down and select "United States."

2) If you choose to compare just the start and end dates of the slave trade to America, you run the risk of skewing your data because one or both of those dates might be exceptional. You may wish take 10 year "snapshots" of time that you analyze, the more accurate will be your conclusions.

3) Look for general and long-term trends; not short-term fluctuations

4) How might the "graph" funciton help you?

QUESTION C:

If African leaders had significant influence over the slave trade, then we should be able to see evidence of that influence in the database. One place to look is in gender ratios.

As your readings from the Diligent suggest, Euro-American slave traders wished to purchase far more men than women. But in some regions of Africa, men played a larger productive role in agriculture than in other regions; accordingly, elites in those regions placed a higher value on male labor than did elites elsewhere. We would expect – if Africans leaders could influence the terms of the trade – that there would be a higher percentage of women on slave ships leaving from such regions.

As the African historian G. Ugo Nwokeji notes, in the Bight of Biafra region of Africa, men’s agricultural role is dramatically larger than elsewhere, in part because of their pronounced role in the production of the region’s favorite crop, yams.

Your work for this question:

Design and implement a research methodology that uses the database to determine if African leaders in the Bight of Biafra shaped the terms of the slave trade to reflect their conceptions of gender. Detail the steps you chose and the reasons for those steps then summarize the conclusions that can be drawn from your research.

Some hints:

1) use the “where slaves embarked” function in filter two to compare regions. Remember our warning about “Africa Unspecified”

2) Remember to compare similar time periods

3) Write out the reasons you adopted each step of your methodology