Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America

'Galenson's book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on economic institutions. Using a blend of cliometric techniques and institutional analyses, he mines the economic and demographic data in the records of the Royal African Company to reconstruct the organization of the seventeenth-century slave trade. The result is a detailed demonstration that this trade took place in a highly organized and sophisticated market. The book will be of interest not just to economic historians of slavery, but to everyone interested in the evolution of modern economic organization and exchange.' Douglass C. North, Washington University 'Traders, Planters, and Slaves analyzes nearly 75,000 transactions of the Royal African Company to explore the operations of the slave trade, the economy of the sugar islands, and the efficiency of markets in early modern history. It illuminates all three subjects and is essential reading for students of the Atlantic world during the colonial era. In the best tradition of cliometrics, Galenson combines a historian's careful reading of archival material with an economist's theoretical precision to produce a model of social science history.'