Benefitting from brutality? Profits of north-western Europe’s slave trade at the eve of the industrial revolution

One of the most contentious issues in the study of the Atlantic slave trade is the profitability of the trade. In this paper, we contribute by pooling all available data on transatlantic slave ship voyage accounts into a joint dataset. This dataset includes data from a period of 100 years (1730–1830) and from five nations (Denmark, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain). It permits calculation of the trade’s profitability (total net returns over net outlays). Using weight calibration sampling methods, we compute a representative profit rate between 1750 and 1795 for France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Our results suggest that the average profitability (net returns over net outlay) was not remarkably high (around 11–14 per cent for multi-year ventures), with a very high variance. Some observations allow the computation of internal rates of return, which we then apply to the rest of the dataset. This shows that profits were low compared with alternative investment opportunities.