Extending the Frontiers

“Based on historical information compiled and extensively analyzed over the last decade, these essays expand our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade as nothing has done in the last two generations.”—James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and the Making of America

~James Oliver Horton

“Only in recent decades have we recognized the absolutely central and indispensable role of the transatlantic slave trade in creating the New World as we know it. And only since 1999 have historians acquired massive new data that wholly revises our understanding of that historical crime. Now David Eltis and David Richardson, the two leading experts on the subject, have provided the first crucial collection of essays interpreting and explaining the new findings.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 

~David Brion Davis

"The greatest mystery in the history of the West, I believe, has always been the number of Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World. Who were these Africans? From whence did they hail? Where did they embark in Africa and disembark in the Americas? Five hundred years after that heinous trade commenced, this collection of essays, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, has finally answered these questions. Together with the new slave trade database, this project has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could. It is a scholarly miracle. Twelve and a half million slaves were lost; now, thanks to Eltis, Richardson and their contributors, they are found."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

~Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"The complexity of all these chapters, liberally sprinkled with charts and graphs and rigorous logic, make clear both the enormous analytical power of the database and the great subtlety of method required to use its content responsibly to try to write history. . . . Editors Eltis and Richardson are clear on this vital distinction, and the studies in this book constitute an exemplory extension of the existing frontiers of knowledge and a solid base from which to advance them even further."—Joseph C. Miller, New West Indian Guide

~Joseph C. Miller, New West Indian Guide