Skip to main content Accessibility help
×

Maintenance update

Due to planned maintenance, between 07:00 - 16:00 (UTC) purchasing will not be available. We apologise for any inconvenience.

  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Traders, Planters and Slaves
  • Cited by 102
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      18 September 2009
      31 March 1986
      ISBN:
      9780511528637
      9780521894142
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511528637
      Dimensions:
      Weight & Pages:
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.402kg, 248 Pages
      • Subjects:
      History, Colonial American History, Economic History
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    History, Colonial American History, Economic History
    Information

    Book description

    The explosive growth of the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the seventeenth century made the international trade in Africans one of the world's largest industries. This book explores the operation of that industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, focusing on the market behaviour of the Royal African Company - the largest English company engaged in the slave trade - and the sugar planters of the Caribbean, who were the trade's principal customers in English America. A richly detailed portrayal of the slave trade to English America emerges, one that shows it to have been a highly competitive and efficient transatlantic market. In revealing the existence of sophisticated and complex market behaviour in this early period of black slavery in the New World, the book adds to our understanding of the development of large-scale competitive markets, as well as to our knowledge of the efficiency of resource allocation in early English America.

    Reviews

    ‘Galenson’s book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on economic institutions. Using a blend of cliometric techniques and institutional analyses, he mines the economic and demographic data in the records of the Royal African Company to reconstruct the organization of the seventeenth-century slave trade. The result is a detailed demonstration that this trade took place in a highly organized and sophisticated market. The book will be of interest not just to economic historians of slavery, but to everyone interested in the evolution of modern economic organization and exchange.’

    Douglass C. North - Washington University

    ‘Traders, Planters, and Slaves analyzes nearly 75,000 transactions of the Royal African Company to explore the operations of the slave trade, the economy of the sugar islands, and the efficiency of markets in early modern history. It illuminates all three subjects and is essential reading for students of the Atlantic world during the colonial era. In the best tradition of cliometrics, Galenson combines a historian’s careful reading of archival material with an economist’s theoretical precision to produce a model of social science history.’

    Russell R. Menard - University of Minnesota

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.