The Atlantic Slave Trade - A Summary of its Historiography

This resource provides a detailed summary of the key trends in the historiography of slavery since the publication of Philip Curtin’s seminal work, 'The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census' in 1969. Designed for use with A Level students, this PowerPoint presentation takes as its central theme the tension between ‘quantitative’ and ‘cultural’ approaches, a defining theme in the subject’s historiography. The presentation is fully illustrated and the information is presented in an accessible and easy-to-digest format, including short quotations from the key texts discussed. Both a PowerPoint and PDF version of the resource is provided so it can simply be printed out as a useful set of notes for students or used as a lesson presentation on the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade.

The following areas are discussed in detail in the resource:

Philip Curtin’s 'The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census' (1969) and the beginnings of revisionism

Stephen Behrendt and David Eltis’s 'Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database' and a quantitative approach

Toby Green’s critique of the quantitative approach

Marcus Rediker’s 'The Slave Ship: A Human History' (2007)

Gregory E. O’Malley’s 'Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807' (2014)

Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann’s 'The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World' (2016)

There is a sufficient amount of challenging content in the resource to stretch even the most able A Level student.