Philip D. Curtin

Philip Dearmond Curtin (May 22, 1922 – June 4, 2009) was a Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University and historian on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. His most famous work, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census'' (1969) 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." Provided by Wikipedia