The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades - Social Sciences ...

ethnicities of Africans. Hall (2005) finds that in American documents, the
identification of ethnicities was made by the slaves themselves. Given the
limited role played by European slave traders and slave owners in identifying
the ethnicities of slaves, the accuracy of the documented ethnicities does
not likely depend on the extent of the Europeans’ knowledge of African
ethnicities. 13
In all, data on the ethnic identity of slaves shipped during the trans-
Atlantic slave trade come from 53 different samples, totalling 80,631 slaves,
with 229 distinct ethnic designations reported. The ethnicity data for the
Indian Ocean slave trade come from four samples, with a total of 12,885
slaves and 33 reported ethnicities. The data for the Red Sea slave trade
are from 2 samples: one from Jedda, Saudi Arabia and one from Bombay,
India. The samples provide information for 67 slaves, with 32 ethnicities
recorded. In the original documents the same ethnic designations are often
referred to by different names or different spellings, depending on the
language of the original documents or the year the documents are from. A
great amount of research by African historians and ethnographers provides
the information needed to map the ethnicities in the documents to modern
political boundaries (e.g., Murdock, 1959; Curtin, 1969; Hall, 2005). Full
details of the mapping of ethnicities to modern countries are documented in
Nunn (2006a). Table 1 summarizes information about the samples used in
the trans-Atlantic slave trades. Detailed information for the samples from
the other slave trades is reported in Nunn (2006a).
For the trans-Saharan slave trade two samples are available: one from
Central Sudan and the other from Western Sudan. The samples provide information
on the origins of 5,385 slaves, with 23 different ethnicities recorded.
The main shortcoming of the ethnicity data is that they do not provide a
sample for the whole region that slaves were taken from during this slave
trade. However, the shipping data from Austen (1992), not only provide
information on the volume of trade, but also information on which caravan
slaves were shipped on, the city or town that the caravan originated in, the
destination of the caravan, and in some cases, the ethnic identity of the
slaves being shipped. Because there were only six trade routes that crossed
the desert, the information on the volume, origins, and destinations of the
13 Given that African ethnicities were self-identified, a second concern arises. If Africans
of different ethnicities learned to communicate at different rates, then this may result in
documented ethnicities that are not representative of the population. Although this is
possible, data from slave runaway notices gathered by Gomez (1998, pp. 167–185) shows
empirically that different ethnic groups did not demonstrate different abilities to learn
European languages.
13