Weight o f Numbers

43

million) and the very high figure of 330 rather hastily accepted by Carr Saunders. Africa certainly had a hardy population in the middle of the seventeenth century. It withstood the increasing drain caused from the middle of the sixteenth century by the slave trade to America, while the earlier drain towards Islamic countries did not cease until the twentieth century. It can only have done so by virtue of some sort of biological strength. Its resistance to European penetration provides a further proof of health. The Black continent, unlike Brazil, did not open up to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century without defending itself. Travellers tales afford glimpses of fairly close-knit peasant communities living in pleasant harmonious villages, later spoiled by the nineteenth-century Euro pean advance.2 2 The European might, however, have persisted in his attempts to seize lands in Black Africa if he had not been halted at the coasts by disease, the white mans burden. Intermittent or continuous fevers, dysentery, phthisis and dropsy, as well as numerous parasites, all took a very heavy toll23 of Europeans. They were as great an obstacle to advance as the bravery of the warlike tribes. Furthermore the rivers were broken by rapids and bars: who would sail up the wild waters of the Congo? Again, the American adventure and trade with the Far East were mobilizing all available energy in Europe, whose interests in any case lay else where. The Black continent supplied of its own accord gold dust, ivory and men, and cheaply too. Why ask more of it? As for the slave trade, it did not represent the vast numbers of people we too readily assume. It was limited in extent even towards America, if only by the capacity of the transport ships. By way of comparison, total Irish immigration between 1769 and 1774 only amounted to 44,000, or fewer than 8000 a year.24 Likewise one or two thousand Spaniards on average left Seville for America annually in the sixteenth century.25 But, even if we assume that the slave trade represented the completely unthinkable figure of 50.000 a year (it would in fact only have reached this level - if at all - in the nineteenth century, as the trade came to an end), such a total would only accord with an African population of 25 million at the most. In fact the population of 100 million attributed to Africa has no reliable basis. It probably relates to the first very dubious overall estimate suggested by Gregory King in 1696 (95 million). Thereafter, everybody has been content to repeat his figure. But where did he get it from himself? However, some population estimates are available. For example J.C. Russell26 estimates the population of North Africa in the sixteenth century at 3.500.000 (I had personally estimated it at about two million, but without any very sound arguments). There is still no data on sixteenth-century Egypt. Is two or three million a reasonable figure, given that the first solid estimates in 1798 refer to 2,400,000 inhabitants for Egypt, and that the present-day populations of Egypt and North Africa are roughly equivalent, each representing about a tenth of the entire African population? If we accept that the same proportions obtained in the sixteenth century, then the population of Africa might have been anywhere