Traders, Planters and Slaves

• List of tables; Preface; 1. The Atlantic slave trade and the early development of the English West Indies; 2. Shipping and mortality; 3. Slave prices in the Barbados market, 1673–1723; 4. On the order of purchases by characteristics at slave sales; 5. The demographic composition of the slave trade: an economic investigation; 6. Establishing geographic persistence from market observations: population turnover among estate owners and managers in Barbados and Jamaica, 1673–1725; 7. The economic structure of the early Atlantic slave trade: the challenge of Adam Smith's analysis; Appendices; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.

'Galenson's book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on economic institutions. Using a blend of cliometric techniques and institutional analyses, he mines the economic and demographic data in the records of the Royal African Company to reconstruct the organization of the seventeenth-century slave trade. The result is a detailed demonstration that this trade took place in a highly organized and sophisticated market. The book will be of interest not just to economic historians of slavery, but to everyone interested in the evolution of modern economic organization and exchange.' Douglass C. North, Washington University