This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship captains considered these differences when electing where to land enslaved Africans. Our dataset also shows that credit terms were highly erratic, especially in the last quarter of the century, contributing to both surges and collapses in the slave trade to individual colonies, and in the trade as a whole. Four such instances are examined in detail to show that instability in credit terms played an important and hitherto unacknowledged role in the volume and direction of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade in the second one-half of the eighteenth century.

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Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

Slave trading merchants played a crucial role in the creation of the Atlantic World. Their ships carried off almost thirteen million captive Africans, doing much to shape the histories of Europe, Africa and the Americas. Historians have, as a result, been drawn to the study of slave trading merchants, and have explained how they organized their businesses and profited by the trade Although profits from the slave trade were not, as Eric Williams postulated, sufficient to drive British industrial development, more recent scholarship has shown that slaving merchants still played an important role in the creation of Britain's commercial empire. As David Hancock demonstrated in his seminal Citizens of the World, slave traders "integrated the empire as they integrated their businesses," by linking plantations in the Americas with African slaving depots via British capital and ships. Other historians have turned their attention to African slave traders, and explored how they created complicated cross-cultural credit mechanisms to facilitate the slave trade that relied, in particular, on personal family and trust networks. We thus possess a thorough understanding of how slave traders operated their businesses in Europe and, to a lesser extent, Africa, and their role in forcibly shipping millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. 2 1 Nicholas Radburn is a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. He would like to thank the participants in the Johns Hopkins Early American Seminar for their insightful comments on an early draft of this article. He would also like to thank

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.