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

Until the 1960s, historians studied slavery in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade as two independent topics. The absence of comparative studies prevented historians from considering the slave trade as part of a larger system in which each region involved had its own role and particularities. National historiographies did not seek to determine the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade in the original places of enslavement and embarkation, in the destination regions, or in the European metropoles and colonies controlling the trade. Moreover, the trans-Saharan slave trade and the trade within the African continent did not receive historians' attention. As Philip D. Curtin articulated, most academic work relied on bibliographical research and not on archival research or fieldwork in Africa.³ At the beginning of the 1960s, when historians began doing archival research, they limited it to the documents available in European and North American archives. During this period, historians did not explore African archives and African sources. Indeed, Jan Vansina and Pierre Verger were among the first scholars to conduct extensive fieldwork and to explore oral tradition in Africa.⁴

Before the 1960s, few scholars were able to establish accurate slave import estimates covering the period between 1448 and 1867.⁵ As Paul E. Lovejoy pointed out, in 1861, Edward E. Dunbar estimated slave imports to the Americas as 13,887,500; in 1864, Robert Dale Owen estimated slave imports as 15,520,000; in 1936, Robert R. Kuczynski estimated 14,650,000; and in 1950, Noel Deer estimated 11,970,000.⁶ By the end of the 1960s, scholars were paying more attention to the volume of the Atlantic slave trade and its demographic impact on Africa. For these scholars, the estimated numbers could vary between 8 million and 25 million, depending on the variable mortality rates and whether historians took into consideration the volume of enslaved persons who left Africa or only those who arrived in the Americas. Historians were mainly interested in the embarkment lists, and from this type of source they were able to start determining how many ships left European ports for the African coast and how many of them sailed to the Americas transporting enslaved men, women, and children. Historians also sought to know under which flags the vessels were traveling, the structure of