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. Although subsequent authors have disputed this number (Joseph E. Inikori, for example, argues for an estimate of about 15 million), his work remains the most commonly cited. 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.