Philip D. Curtin

Philip Dearmond Curtin (May 22, 1922 – June 4, 2009) was a professor at Johns Hopkins University and historian of Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. His most famous work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census was one of the first estimates of the number of slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th century and 1870, yielding an estimate of 9,566,000 African slaves imported to the Americas. ( Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. ) He also wrote about how many Africans were taken and from what location, how many died during the Middle Passage, how many actually arrived in the Americas, and to what colonies/countries they were imported. Deirdre McCloskey has described Curtin as the "doyen of African economic historians."

Biography Early life and education Curtin was born in Philadelphia on May 22, 1922, and grew up in Webster Springs, West Virginia, the site of a coal and timber company owned by his family.

Academic career After graduation, he began teaching at Swarthmore College where he remained until 1956.

Curtin was recognized in 1983 as a MacArthur Fellow, with its accompanying "genius grant". He published 19 books,

In his 1969 book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, Curtin researched the sources of frequently used estimates of the number of individuals transported across the Atlantic Ocean by the slave trade. His analysis of shipping contracts and data from the ports of entry enabled him to estimate between 9 and 10 million individuals being transported on slave ships, with a margin of error of 20%, out of the 20 to 30 million that had been loaded aboard at ports in Africa. Prior to Curtin's research, estimates of the number of individuals brought from Africa as slaves ranged from 3.5 million to numbers as high as 100 million individuals. A widely cited number of 15 million slaves used by W. E. B. Du Bois, who had gotten the number from abolitionist Edward Dunbar. Another widely quoted estimate of 20 million slaves was based on calculations using data concerning slaves in Jamaica that was adjusted for the entire Atlantic slave trade, though the original data used to make the calculations has since been lost.

Books: Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (editor, 1967) The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (1973, AHA Schuyler Prize) Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture (1974) Precolonial African History (1975, AHA pamphlet) Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (1975) African History (co-author, 1978) Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984) Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (1989) The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (1990) The Tropical Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (1991, AHA pamphlet) Why People Move: Migration in African History (1995) Disease and Empire (1998) Migration and Mortality in Africa and the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 (2001) The World and the West (2002) On the Fringes of History: A Memoir (2005)

Doctoral Supervision (University of Wisconsin-Madison):

Doctoral Supervision (Johns Hopkins University):

Awards and honors Curtin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.

Personal A resident of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Curtin died at age 87 on June 4, 2009, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with pneumonia cited as the cause of death. He was survived by his third wife, the former Anne Gilbert, as well as three sons and three grandchildren. His marriages to opera soprano singer Phyllis Curtin and Patricia Romero, who was also a historian of Africa, both ended in divorce.