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In the middle of a blank page at the beginning of her celebrated work Beloved, A Novel, Toni Morrison writes: A dedication to numbers in the preface of a superb novel exploring the inner anguish of slavery raises important and appropriate issues about the study of the slave trade: how shall we remember and learn about it? Can numbers appropriately express the magnitude of the collective and individual experiences in slavery? How correct is Morrison's number of 60 million? To whom exactly does it refer? In short, Morrison's 60 million is a reasonable figure
for the number of people whose lives were directly transformed by the slave
trade (as people enslaved, killed, displaced, or allowed to die) It is
far greater than the number of Africans who were actually landed alive
in the West Indies and America or removed from the African continent
as slaves during the nearly 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade.
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