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Appendix 2: Human Deaths and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Human Deaths and Loss, 1750–1914
Determining the number of weapons spreading across the world is challenging. Estimating human and nonhuman mortality figures is even more difficult and grim, not to mention a political football. Censuses only become widespread in the twentieth century, and in many parts of the world such as Africa they are notoriously inaccurate. Distinguishing between “natural” and “excess” death rates is similarly fraught; since the days of Malthus (1766–1834), social scientists often have mistakenly assumed that disease and famine are natural causes and “checks” on population growth. In Western Europe, where the work of demographers is richest, estimates of natural death rates in the eighteenth century extend from twenty-five to forty people per thousand yearly—a very considerable range—declining markedly in the 1800s to about twenty per thousand and today just eleven per thousand, about the same as in the United States. Death rates for other parts of the world have similar wide ranges for periods prior to the twentieth century.
Africa
Approximately 7.9 million slaves were exported from Africa from the middle of the eighteenth century. This population was “lost” to the continent, one of the reasons why scholars consider the slave trade as a kind of death. Historians estimate that 20–50 percent of people who were enslaved died before reaching the coast. We also know, based on the above information on gunpowder, that the slave trade entailed a massive arming of the continent, a process that continued into the nineteenth century. Guns invariably lead to excess deaths.
One outstanding question concerns the deaths directly or indirectly related to the processes of enslavement. I have offered a range of between one and three people who died because of enslaving a single person in the period when weapons were arriving on the continent in very large numbers. Based on these data and assumptions, for the period 1750 to the beginning of colonial conquests in the nineteenth century, Africa lost 19.2 million to 48 million people.
In some areas, estimates range as high as 50 percent for the number of Africans who died in the era of the European colonial conquests due to war, famine, or, in some areas, diseases such as sleeping sickness. There is nothing natural about diseases, including malaria; these were always already entwined with human history. Historical demographers have estimated Africa’s 1850 population at about one hundred million people. At the very upper end, this would mean that there were upwards of fifty million excess deaths, most concentrated in just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century. A conservative estimate would be twenty million excess deaths, with nearly half of this total coming just from the Congo.
As a total, then, in the period 1750–1900 Africa lost anywhere between 29.2 and nearly 100 million people; a very conservative estimate would be 50 million people. The interactive graphic below shows number of slaves transported from Africa to their final destinations, along with the number of slaves who died making the voyage itself.
Asia
India’s first modern famine unfolded in 1770 in Bengal, where the population may have declined by a third. Between 10 million and 20 million people perished. Scholars have estimated famine mortality figures for the nineteenth century, especially between 1876 and 1902, at between 12.2 million and 29.3 million. This means that in the period under study, when climate, colonialism, capitalism, and weakened governments all conspired to wreak devastation across the subcontinent, Indian famine victims numbered between 22.2 million and 49.3 million people.
These figures do not include people who died in political violence involving guns, most catastrophically in the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Here estimates are as high as 800,000 dead. A crude estimate for the entire period would be 1.4 million dead in political violence involving guns.
As a rough total, then, India needlessly lost between about 24 million and 51.7 million people. Again, distinguishing between natural and excess deaths is particularly challenging considering the climatic and other forces at work. Droughts and famines are nothing new in Asia and in other parts of the world, although we also know that weak and unresponsive states seriously compound natural disasters.
China was worse. Twenty to thirty million died in just the Taiping Rebellion. Famine victims in the period 1876–1900 range between 19.5 million and 30 million dead. China thus lost between 40 million and 60 million people.
Our information for the rest of Asia and the South Pacific is very uneven. Approximately twenty thousand died in just New Zealand’s Musket Wars in the early part of the nineteenth century. Vast numbers died in more populated places such as Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand, and the Philippines. Over three hundred thousand died in Indonesia in just the period between 1870 and the end of the century. In the Philippines, anywhere between two hundred thousand and one million died in the years around the American conquest at the close of the nineteenth century. A very rough and very conservative estimate of total deaths roughly from 1750 to 1900 for these areas stands at between two million and six million people.
As a whole, then, total Asian deaths ranged from 66 million to upwards of 118 million.
Americas
In the United States, the estimated indigenous population in 1750 was between 2.5 million and 5 million people. In 1890, it was 248,000. In other words, the population declined by between 2.25 million and 4.75 million people. Canada also experienced significant population loss, although not on the scale of the United States. In Mexico in 1750, the native population was between 4 million and 6 million. Mexico was one of the few places where the indigenous population appears to have increased, to approximately 7 million by the end of the century. In some areas, however, the population declined significantly, such as in the Yucatán, where the population declined from about 500,000 to around 300,000.
Brazilian population estimates are all over the map, especially estimates of the indigenous population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the native population likely declined by 75 percent. Argentina’s native population declined from three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand to around one hundred thousand during the same period. In some areas, these were catastrophic declines. Drought and disease did its work, but genocidal violence was one of the main factors for the steep decline in indigenous populations.
The above figures do not include the civil and other wars that engulfed nearly all of the Americas in the nineteenth century. Taken as a whole, human deaths in the Americas totaled between 5.6 million and 10.15 million.
Unnecessary human deaths, not including Europe, 1750–1900
Africa | 29-100 million |
Asia | 66-118 |
Americas | 5.6-10.15 |
Total | 100.6-228.15 |
Famine was one way by which millions died. The graphic below shows the cumulative deaths from famine (likely an underestimate) for broad regions of the global, as well as the individual famine episodes contributing to the total number of deaths. But remember, the world’s population has been growing dramatically, particularly from the twentieth century. A common misunderstanding, however, is that population growth somehow indicates general health and economic growth. We now know the picture is far more complicated. Indeed, today some of the poorest areas of the world have the highest population growth.
