Introduction：
Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slavetrades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historicaldocuments reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades had an
adverse effect on economic development