Happy Solstice! I’m still working on continuing my series of posts on the study of Native American population collapse, but as part of this project I’m also reading about other parts of the world that share some of the...
Delaney Park at Noon on the Winter Solstice, Anchorage, Alaska
Happy Solstice! I’m still working on continuing my series of posts on the study of Native American population collapse, but as part of this project I’m also reading about other parts of the world that share some of the same kind of history. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about Africa, which has a fascinating history that overlaps with that of the Americas in some respects but not others, and I was struck by a remarkable difference in how the topic of historical demography has been handled by Africanist scholars in the same period when it became a very large focus of attention for Americanists (i.e., the 1960s and 1970s).
Briefly, while there is historical evidence of population declines in at least some parts of Africa of the same magnitude seen in the Americas (50-90% in some cases), the implications of this decline for the societies in question seems to have aroused little interest from scholars. These declines are often mentioned offhand in footnotes or briefly in a text that goes on to discuss other historical or anthropological topics. It’s not that the scholars are dismissing the veracity of either the population numbers or the magnitude of decline mentioned in their sources, as was the case with earlier generations of Americanist scholarship. Instead they just don’t seem to care at all or to see these declines are relevant to their main interests.
But these are huge declines, often over very short periods! For example, the area that is now the Republic of Sudan is said to have lost something like 80% of its population to a combination of warfare and disease in the few years of the Mahdist uprising in the 1890s. That’s enormous! And very recent, so much so that’s the figures are likely to be pretty accurate in the absence of evidence to the contrary. But they’re so huge that it seems likely that they are exaggerated, and I’d be interested to see some informed source criticism looking at how reliable these numbers are. Studies like this from the same period, and more recently, doing just that are common in the Americas but I have hardly found any for Africa covering any period. One interesting study of the coastal Mpongwe people of Gabon, who were in close contact with Europeans for a long time, concluded that the dramatic population collapse reported was in fact plausible, due to similar contact conditions as typically obtained in the Americas (but not in most other parts of Africa). But otherwise this type of study seems to be very rare.
Not that demography was not of interest to Africanists at this time, mind you. But the main focus was on trying to quantify the impact of the slave trade to the Americas, a very different sort of concern from those of Americanists. The background here is that there was a persistent narrative, fostered especially by nineteenth-century abolitionists, that the slave trade was leading to massive depopulation of African people, with subsequent negative effects on societies within Africa. There were counterarguments and the debate went back and forth for decades, forming a crucial backdrop to the advent of direct European colonization and “pacification” of the continent, which was often justified in the name of eliminating slavery.
By the 1960s this age-old debate was starting to get some rigorous quantitative attention. The key figure here is Philip Curtin, a pioneering economic historian of Africa who was then at the University of Wisconsin. In 1969 he published a book called The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, which was as revolutionary in the study of the African slave trade as Henry Dobyns’s work on Native American population around the same time was on that field. Curtin tried to compile and evaluate whatever quantitative information was available to come up with as rigorous a set of figures as possible for the trade over the course of centuries.
Unlike Dobyns’s work, however, Curtin’s numbers ended up being significantly lower than previous estimates, which may well have been exaggerated by abolitionists trying to stir up opposition to the slave trade. This caused some controversy and pushback, especially by some African researchers who took issue with aspects of Curtin’s methodology. But overall Curtin’s figures were accepted by the field and have formed a baseline ever since for those trying to evaluate the impact of the trade.
So what was that impact? Well, it’s still hard to say. Curtin’s lower figures suggest that the direct demographic impacts of the trade were likely limited. This is not to say that the reorientation of many societies especially in West Africa, the main area of focus of the Atlantic trade for most of its existence, didn’t have important social and economic impacts. Both the exporting societies on the coast, which tended to be complex state-level entities that increased in complexity over time, and the main supply areas in the interior, which tended to be somewhat less complex, were clearly affected in various ways by slave-raiding and -trading. The exact extent of these effects and the way they shifted over time is the subject of a vast literature of which I have been able to read only a tiny portion, and there doesn’t seem to be much consensus.
One key difference between Africa and the Americas, of course, which lurks in the background of all comparisons like this, is that the “indigenous” people of most parts of Africa managed to survive both the slave trade and the period of colonialism that followed, and the continent is now divided overwhelmingly into independent post-colonial states. European colonization only took place on any significant scale in a few places, and of those societies still fewer managed to persist past independence. The Americas are like a mirror image of this situation, with only a few areas still maintaining a significant Native population and the rest of the hemisphere dominated by settler societies (which may have significantly mixed ancestry of course). Clearly these contrasting modern situations have colored the interests of scholars in complex ways, especially in a period that saw both the fall of the great colonial empires in Africa as well as a revival of interest in Native American history and traditional culture. Why the patterns of scholarship ended up how they did exactly is still a bit of a puzzle to me though.
