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Sex Ratio and Ethnicity: a Reply to Paul E. Lovejoy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David Geggus
David Geggus
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Extract

I feel I should make clear that the ethnicity data in my article were intended only to shed light on the question of sex ratio. They do not provide an accurate reflection of the ethnic make-up of the eighteenth-century French slave trade, nor even of the trade to Saint Domingue. For this reason, I would hesitate to compare them, as Professor Lovejoy does, to Patrick Manning's projections based on decennial samples of plantation papers. The relatively high proportion of Hausa, Nupe and Voltaic slaves that Lovejoy remarks on was caused by the preponderance of post-1780 sources in my sample.

Type
The Atlantic Slave Trade: survey and debte
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , November 1989 , pp. 395 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 Geggus, D., ‘The demographic composition of the French Caribbean slave trade’, in Boucher, P., (ed.), French Colonial Historical Society: 13th and 14th Annual Conferences (Washington, D.C., 1989)Google Scholar, tables 6 and 7.

2 Geggus, D., ‘Sugar and coffee cultivation in Saint Domingue and the shaping of the slave labor force’, Slavery & Abolition, forthcoming, table 8.Google Scholar

3 Sample of 2,115 Africans drawn from the Bermondet de Cromieres, Baudin, and Beaunay papers, cited in Geggus, D., ‘Sex ratio, age and ethnicity in the Atlantic slave trade: data from French shipping and plantation records’, J. Afr. Hist., xxx, (1989), 32Google Scholar, table 4, and Gautier, A., ‘Les origines ethniques des esclaves déportés à Nippes’, Revue de la société haitienne d'histoire, no. 156/7 (1987).Google Scholar

4 In addition to the sources cited in Geggus, ‘Sex ratio’, note 76, see also Debien, G., ‘Esclaves sur les plantations au xviie siècle’, Revue de la société haitienne d'histoire, no. 143 (1984)Google Scholar, which includes a sample of 400 plantation slaves equally balanced between male and female. Half of them lived on an estate called ‘La Cour d'Angole’ and many of their names appear to be Bantu (Macaya, Bomba, Moussougou, Cablinda, Sango).

5 Geggus, ‘Sex ratio’ notes 7 and 79; Kiple, K., Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774–1899 (Gainesville, 1976), 26Google Scholar; Lemus, G. Bell, (ed.), El Caribe Colombiano (Barranquilla, 1988).Google Scholar

6 Eltis, D., Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 243–5Google Scholar; Eltis, D., ‘Fluctuations in the age and sex ratios of slaves in the nineteenth century transatlantic slave traffic’, vii, Slavery & Abolition 3 (1986), 265.Google Scholar

7 In the first decade of the century the British and North Americans were facing abolition of the trade, circumstances under which imports were high and sex ratios unusually low, as Eltis demonstrated for Brazil and Cuba. In addition, low sex ratios were characteristic of the British trade, and appear to have been so in the trade to North America. Fragmentary information on the nineteenth-century French traffic suggests a very low proportion of males: Eltis, ‘Fluctuations’, 265.

8 Miller, J., Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988), 116, 155–6.Google Scholar