journal article The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Tentative Economic ModelThe Journal of African History Vol. 15, No. 2 (1974) , pp. 223-246 (24 pages) Published By: Cambridge University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/181070 Read and download Log in through your school or library Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. To access this article, please contact JSTOR User Support. We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free. Get StartedAlready have an account? Log in Monthly Plan
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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 pattern. Journal Information The Journal of African History (JAH) publishes articles and book reviews ranging widely over the African past, from the late Stone Age to the present. In recent years increasing prominence has been given to economic, cultural and social history and several articles have explored themes which are also of growing interest to historians of other regions such as: gender roles, demography, health and hygiene, propaganda, legal ideology, labour histories, nationalism and resistance, environmental history, the construction of ethnicity, slavery and the slave trade, and photographs as historical sources. Contributions dealing with pre-colonial historical relationships between Africa and the African diaspora are especially welcome, as are historical approaches to the post-colonial period. Publisher Information Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org) is the publishing division of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s leading research institutions and winner of 81 Nobel Prizes. Cambridge University Press is committed by its charter to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible across the globe. It publishes over 2,500 books a year for distribution in more than 200 countries. Cambridge Journals publishes over 250 peer-reviewed academic journals across a wide range of subject areas, in print and online. Many of these journals are the leading academic publications in their fields and together they form one of the most valuable and comprehensive bodies of research available today. For more information, visit http://journals.cambridge.org. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website. If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked. |
