Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality: Day-to-Day Evidence from the Dutch African Trade, 1751–1797
利用荷兰公司39次航行的记录，研究了奴隶购买策略与跨大西洋航行中死亡率的关系，发现购买奴隶的年龄和性别差异影响死亡率，揭示了非洲和船上条件对生存率的相对重要性。
The mortality of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic crossing has long preoccupied historians but the relationship between slave traders' purchasing strategies and slave mortality rates in transit has escaped close investigation. We address these issues by using records of 39 eighteenth-century voyages of the Dutch Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. These allow shipboard mortality rates of enslaved Africans to be estimated. They also reveal previously un-noticed age- and gender-based variations in slave purchase and mortality patterns, which in turn shed light on the relative importance of African and shipboard conditions in determining slave survival rates in the middle passage.