イギリス奴隷貿易の一断面 : 奴隷価格の形成と推移に関して

抄録

The first who discussed the slavery in the British Economic History was Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery). His thesis was examined by S.L.Engerman at the New Economic History Conference in 1972 (The Slave and British Capital Formation in the Eighteenth Century: A Comment on the Williams' Thesis). Engerman negated the profitability of the Atlantic Slave Trade in his report. Originally the basis of quantitative grasp about the Slave Trade was built by Philip D. Curtin. His estimation methods are as follows. One method begins with import estimates from the Americas, translated into export figures by reference to an expected loss in transit. A second is based on shipping data, either for all British shipping sailing for Africa or for a particular port, incorporating in the calculation an estimate of that port's share of the total British slave trade. A third possibility is to work from the value of British exports to Africa and the ordinary price of slaves on the African coast at a particular time. Of these, the third is perhaps the most difficult and uncertain. But a valuable study about the slave price series has been presented in Richard Nelson Bean's The British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade 1650-1775. He says in it, "The purpose of this dissertation is to provide the necessary basis for an economic study of the British African Slave Trade. Prior to this study any such attempt was frustrated by the near-total absence of price and quantity information about the slave trade. The first tasks of this dissertation are to present a price series for slaves in the British West Indies and to refine recently published estimates of the quantity of slaves exported from Africa to the New World. "But there are important questions. They are 'assorting goods' and 'trade ounce', and they have a connection with the slave prices. English marchants offered various assorting goods for an African slave offered as goods. These are called 'assorting goods'. In pricing their assorting goods English merchants did twice as much as the current prices. The prices thus marked up beforehand were not called 'gold ounce' but 'trade ounce'. But neither in Curtin's estimates nor in Engerman's discussion about the profitability in the slave trade are these facts considered. In this paper, I consider the questions, 'assorting goods' and 'trade ounce', by using R.N.Bean's price series, and discuss the formation of slave prices and their series as an aspect of the Atlantic slave trade, and study Engerman's discussion on its profitability.