David Galenson's fine study addresses the important problem of the role of the slave trade in the development of modern capitalism. He is particularly interested in whether market conditions operated in the trade to English America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the years which saw its introduction and growth in these colonies. Basing his analysis on the voluminous records of the Royal African Company, Galenson answers this question affirmatively, and, in the process, produces a pathbreaking work in economic history. It is a work that is at once creative, probing, balanced, and informative.
Galenson’s examination of the economic structure of the trade, the organization of the markets, and the market behavior of the traders and the planters shows convincingly that all of the participants responded rationally to market forces and conditions. Royal African Company traders selected their slave cargoes carefully, with due regard for the status of their health, the preferences of the planters, and the changing condition of the markets in the colonies. Galenson provides fresh data on the sizes of slave cargoes and the ships that transported them, the mortality rate of the bondmen, and the seasonality of the trade. Between 1623 and 1725, for example, the mean size of the cargoes delivered was 231 slaves. Contrary to the findings of earlier scholars, Galenson’s data suggest that the length of a ship’s voyage “had no effect on the average daily mortality rate experienced by the slaves on the ship” (p. 40). The author speculates that the absence of a correlation between the two was the result of a “generally successful planning of slaving voyages” (p. 51). Similarly, the marked differences in the seasonality of the arrivals of slaves in the West Indies “suggests the use of strategies in marketing slave cargoes aimed at maximizing revenues” (p. 51).
The author sheds considerable light on the reasons for the eventual failure of the Royal African Company. He takes issue with Adam Smith, who maintained that the company was destined to fail because directors of monopolies lacked the motivation to succeed in an enterprise as demanding as foreign trade. Galenson, on the other hand, concludes that technological constraints, principally the company’s inability to conduct rapid long-distance communications with its agents in the field, made effective supervision difficult and hampered swift responses to changing market conditions. Another factor contributing to the company’s demise was the high maintenance cost of its forts in Africa and the growing floating debt owed to it by its West Indian customers.
Galenson combines a wealth of quantitative data with qualitative evidence to illuminate the behavior of an important company in the slave-trading business. The result is a severe blow to the traditional view that competitive economic markets and profit motivation on the part of economic agents did not emerge as early as the seventeenth century.
