Appendix 1 in The Killing Age (pp. 539-45) provided detailed information on the total volume of British gunpowder exports and especially exports to Africa based on the extraordinary work of Professor Nick Radburn. Here is additional information on other parts of the world as well as Professor Radburn’s raw data. I extended his research in multiple trips to the National Archives (UK). With Professor Radburn’s photographs of the archival documents on British exports, Dr. Madelyn Stone was able to explore regions beyond Africa. Dr. Stone, a graduate from the Department of History at Emory University, focused on three broad regions: North America, the West Indies, and the East Indies. The latter term is exceptionally vague and generally referred to the region from what is today India all the way to Borneo; nineteenth century data typically was more precise, indicating individual ports and areas across this vast area of the planet.

We wanted to know where the gunpowder, lead and shot was going and when. We also wanted to develop a comparative understanding of the export data. This information helps us understand the predominance of Africa in official British exports, which were far greater than the other regions. Combined with the data from the West Indies, we can see very clearly the correlation of weapons and slavery. Finally, the data help us understand the relationship between gunpowder exports and political events such as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the American Revolution (1775-1783). Bradley Erickson, a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Emory working on the historical political economy of authoritarian regimes and data visualization analyst, took Stone’s figures and the original Radburn data to produce various charts on weapons exports. Mr. Erickson also combined this information with other databases, especially the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade available at https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database.