Net migration (c. 1820)
African European
British W. Indies 1,600,000 210,000
French, 2,235,000 254,000
Danish,
Dutch
W. Indies
Brazil 2,942,000 500,000
Spanish America 1,072,000 750,000
(excluding Peru)
Totals 8,399,000 2,365,000
(D. Eltis, Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations, American Historical
Review, 88, 1983)
Of course: "Far more important than the number of Africans taken from their
homeland and sold into slavery are the labor of African peoples and the
profitability of their products in the various sites where they were enlaved and
exploited." (Bailey, "The Slave[ry] Trade and the Development of Capitalism in
the United States")
"Not until the second wave of mass migration began in the 1880s did the sum of
net European immigration start to match and then exceed the cumulative influx
from Africa." (Eltis, 1983).
"If there had been no West Indies, how much trade would New England and the
Middle Colonies have had?...If there had been no slavery, would there have been
any West Indies trade? What about Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas? I
detect a certain impatience with counterfactual propositions in much recent
critical literature. These nevertheless are not unreasonable questions, even
though we may never obtain answers to them that will give general satisfaction."
(J. M. Price, "The transatlantic economy" in COLONIAL BRITISH AMERICA, 1984).
Bailey on this passage from Price: "It is not so much "impatience with
counterfactual propositions" as distaste with hypothetical history, especially
when the historical record is so abundantly clear about what actually happened."
