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

Chapter 1

Impacts of Atlantic Slavery
and the Slave Trade

This chapter surveys the scholarly debates about the volume of the Atlantic slave trade and the impact of this massive human deportation on the African continent. Although not exhaustive, this overview allows us to at least establish connections between the history and the memory of the Atlantic slave trade. The first part examines the debates that question the earliest estimates of Africans who left the African continent compared to how many effectively arrived in the Americas. Before the 1990s, prior to the availability of data processing and the Internet, the debates involving these estimates were known as the “numbers game.” For some scholars, these estimates were perceived as intrinsically “objective,” as many of them were becoming familiar with the use of statistics that supposedly conferred on history the status of being a science. Indeed, although it was necessary to establish precise estimates, for several scholars involved in this debate the numbers should be sufficiently high to confirm the suffering caused by the Atlantic slave trade. The second part of the chapter