Nunn (2008) found a negative relationship between past slave exports and economic performance within Africa. Here we investigate these findings and the suggested causal pathway in further detail. Extending the sample period back in time we reveal that the coefficient on slave exports did not...

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans....

This article examines the enslaved African population in early New York City, with a particular focus on those who may have been Muslims. Beyond exceptional individuals, the information on African Muslims is scarce and speculative, but it would appear that there were such individuals, mostly...

The conventional historiography claims that the East African slave trade came to an end in the 1880s as a result of the British Royal Navy’s diligent patrols in the Indian Ocean. This paper argues instead that the slave trade from East Africa to Eastern Arabia endured long after the 1880s, in...

The trans-Atlantic slave trade is considered by many to have been a major shock to Africa, one that transformed African economies and contributed to long-term poverty. In this paper I combine data from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and the Anglo-African Trade Statistics to document some...

The profits of the Liverpool slave trade are infamous, if somewhat more realistically represented in recent literature. Contemporaries and historians have posited that these higher profits were required to entice merchants into the trade because of the higher risks. However, there is very little...