Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South ...

1501 and 1866.¹⁸ The data includes information on vessels, enslaved groups, slave merchants, slave owners, and routes, and allows database users to produce tables and graphs. The new general estimates for slave exports between 1501 and 1866 were 12,521,336, whereas slave imports were estimated at 10,702,656, showing an increase of 1,103,656 to the estimates of 9,599,000 made in 2001. In addition, the new version—including a large amount of data on the Luso-Brazilian slave trade that was collected between 2001 and 2004, after the initial version of the database in 1999 became available—reaffirmed the importance of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade system.

Although The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database provides crucial information for the understanding of the forced migration of Africans in the Americas (such as precise data related to the embarkation and disembarkation ports) and is a point of departure in understanding the general trends of the Atlantic slave trade, the database does not provide precise information about the ethnicities, age, or languages of men, women, or children embarked in African shores and does not consider the internal trade in the Americas.

Historiographies

The discussion about the volume of the Atlantic slave trade intensified the academic debate on the demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa. During the 1960s and the 1970s, English-speaking historians dominated the debate, which was then at the heart of the scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade, but African scholars were rare. Inikori, who was a faculty member in the Department of History at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, was the only African historian who actively participated in the debate. The Journal of African History, founded in the 1960s at Cambridge University, not only became a new arena for scholarship on Africa but was also the main arena for the debate on the demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa.¹⁹

In the 1970s French scholars started participating in the debate on the demographic impact, but their areas of interest were those in