The Slave Trade to the English West Indies, 1673‐1724
ECONOMIC historians concerned with the supply of labour to the New World colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long taken an interest in the operation of the transatlantic slave trade. African slaves were of major importance to the economy of colonial America, and their central role makes a knowledge of the conditions of their supply and the factors that determined those conditions critical to an understanding of the economic history of the regions that depended on them. This article will present some new evidence bearing on the economics of the trade to the English West Indies between i673 and I 724, and briefly consider the implications of these data for an understanding of the functioning of the slave trade in the period. The new evidence comes from one of the most important single known sources for the study of the slave trade, the surviving invoice account books of the Royal African Company.2 While these books have long been known to historians, and have served as a principal source for a classic study of the Royal African Company,3 they are a rich source, and still contain much unexploited material. What follows is only a first step towards a systematic presentation of some of the quantitative information the invoices contain. Tables I-3 present a set of price series which consist of the mean prices paid for adult men and women slaves in Barbados, Jamaica, and Nevis, combining quotations from all recorded auctions in a given colony in each year.4 In addition to the prices, the tables show the number of observations-i.e. the number of slaves sold-on which each annual mean is based. The relative completeness of each series roughly reflects the volume of shipments by the Royal African Company to the three colonies.5