ABSTRACT
Compared with the monstrous Atlantic traffic, the slave trade across the Sahara was never a large business, on a year-by-year basis. At its most active, probably in the mid-nineteenth century, it might have carried 8,000 slaves/ year to North African markets. The Atlantic trade in the 1780s, by contrast, was shipping more than ten times (nearly 90,000) as many black slaves every year to the American and Caribbean plantations.1 But the Saharan trade, a mainstay of Maghrebi economies for over a thousand years, was remarkably enduring. From its beginnings as a regular business in the seventh century up to the twentieth, the desert trade consigned many millions of black slaves to servitude in the Maghreb, or to other Mediterranean destinations. Estimates of the grand total of live slave transits of the Sahara up to the year 1500 range from a maximum of nearly 6 million (Mauny) to 4.32 million (Austen) down to about 3.5 million (Wright) (see Table 3.1). It is then suggested that between 1500 and the beginning of the twentieth century the trade continued as shown in Table 13.1.
