The trade in slaves is perhaps the most notorious feature of the era of European expansion. Though begun in ancient times, and continued well after 1800, in the early modern period there developed a particular nexus in which it boomed. This volume distinguishes between procurement and trade, and the exploitation of settled slaves (the subject of a separate volume in the series, edited by Judy Bieber), and underscores the importance of the slave trade as a factor in world history. A rank redistribution of wealth and power, it permitted the exploitation and reconstruction of much of the globe. The articles address issues of the volume and flow of trade, the various populations enslaved, factors of sex, age, and ethnicity, and its impact on economic change, as in the monetization of Africa or economic growth in England.

Contents: Introduction; Overviews: The Mediterranean Islamic slave trade out of Africa: a tentative census, Ralph A. Austen; The volume of the Atlantic slave trade: a synthesis, Paul E. Lovejoy; Migrations of Africans to the Americas: the impact on Africans, Africa, and the New World, Patrick Manning; 15th to 17th centuries: The apprenticeship of colonization, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro; From Indian to slave: forced native labour and colonial society in São Paulo during the 17th century, John M. Monteiro; Sexual demography: the impact of the slave trade on family structure, John Thornton; The African presence in Portuguese India, Ann M. Pescatello; Black slaves and free blacks in Ottoman Cyprus, 1590-1640, Ronald C. Jennings;18th-century Atlantic trade in humans: Resistance to enslavement in West Africa, Richard Rathbone; 'By farr the most profitable trade': slave trading in British colonial north America, Steven Deyle; A marginal institution on the margin of the Atlantic system: the Portuguese southern Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century, Joseph C. Miller; La traite vers l'IIe de France, Jean-Michel Filliot; Sex ratio, age and ethnicity in the Atlantic slave trade: data from French shipping and plantation records, David Geggus; Slaves and slave traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th centuries: an assessment, Thomas M. Ricks; Effects of the slave trade: Survival and resistance: slave women and coercive labour regimes in the British Caribbean, 1750 to 1838, Barbara Bush; The slave trade, sugar, and British economic growth, 1748-1776, David Richardson; The slaving capital of the world: Liverpool and national opinion in the age of abolition, Seymour Drescher; Index.