ABSTRACT
A materialist approach focuses on discontinuity, contradiction, and interaction rather than on continuity, harmony, and social inertia. Many contributors to the literature on African slavery still manifest a remarkable tendency to minimize the damage inflicted on Africa by the slave trade, and to allow for African consequences of slave trade only in the moral and ideological spheres. The continental level, the whole of the African continent or some large portion of it, is useful for intercontinental comparisons and the assessment of broad trends in the Atlantic economy. The numbers of slave exports by region from 1700 to 1850 are now known within tolerable confidence limits. The simulation model, in addition to projecting growth rates of African regional population, projects the ratio of males to females in that population. Population decline was far more serious in the Bight of Benin, and began three decades before Danhome made its conquest to the coast between 1724 and 1727.
