The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1993)

1999 ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Seymour Drescher
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 247-269
Author(s):  
Luke Moffett ◽  
Katarina Schwarz

The debate around reparations for the transatlantic slave trade has been discussed for centuries with no end in sight. This article does not intend to cover the historical or political aspects of this debate, but instead to shed more light on the legal options with regards to reparations. In particular this article examines the role of politically negotiated reparations in transitional societies and the limits of avenues of redress in international law. Key to such discussions is the identification of eligible victims and appropriate measures of redress from responsible actors. With the so-called ‘transatlantic slave trade’ the passage of time has strained legal principles of causation to identify those victimised by atrocities of the past. Instead this article argues that reparations beyond the international law construct can be politically negotiated to at least acknowledge the past and offer some symbolic measures of redress to victimised populations of transatlantic enslavement.


Author(s):  
Ty M. Reese

Slavery is viewed as an ancient and universal institution and thus it can be found in a diversity of forms throughout Africa. During the period of the Atlantic world, slavery served multiple roles within Africa and provided a foundation for the transatlantic slave trade in that Europeans found slaves for sale within Africa. In many parts of Africa, land was held in common and therefore people’s ability to work the land, and their position within their society, related to the number of people whom they controlled. This patron-client system meant that patrons were always looking for more clients, both free and unfree, as a way to increase their power. The nature of this agricultural and political system made slavery and pawnship (debt peonage) a common system in Africa, yet it was a system that is hard to generalize about and one that possessed great differences from the African slavery that developed in the Americas. While the role of African slavery in the Americas has been more thoroughly studied, and is better known, than slavery in Africa, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and then its gradual abolition in the 19th century, had important consequences for slavery within Africa.


Author(s):  
José Baptista de Sousa

This article investigates the role of Lord Holland in the abolition of the Slave Trade and in the enforcement of abolition on other nations. Holland, nephew of Charles James Fox, was the embodiment of Whig idealism, yet there was ambiguity in his position. In the frst place much of Holland’s income came from a sugar plantation in Jamaica so that his support for the abolition of slavery itself was highly qualifed. Secondly, Holland was an ardent lusophile and British attempts to suppress the Portuguese Slave Trade produced strains in an alliance that had lasted since the fourteenth century.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Marques

This book explores U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas from the American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War. It shows how U.S. citizens engaged in multiple forms of participation in the slave trade and how these forms changed over time. The book discusses the emergence of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of independence and its quick dismantling in the early nineteenth century. It then looks at the forms of U.S. participation in a highly internationalized contraband slave trade that supplied captives to Brazil and Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of these forms of U.S. participation resonated in the U.S. public sphere, contributing to growing tensions around the slavery issue in the 1850s, and in the international arena, stimulating frictions between the British Empire and the United States. This work explores these national and international tensions and the role of slave-trading networks in exploiting and prolonging them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Carolina Monteiro ◽  
Erik Odegard

Abstract From 1630 until its fall in 1654, the Dutch West India Company maintained a colony in northeastern Brazil where it tried to profit from the cultivation of sugar using enslaved African labor. Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen served as this colony’s governor-general from 1636 until 1644, this being the most heavily studied period of the colony’s existence. But the role of Johan Maurits in the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement in Brazil is poorly covered by research, with some historians recently arguing that there is ‘no proof’ of any personal involvement. This article presents a clear argument for the personal involvement of Johan Maurits in the slave trade and shows his involvement in slave-smuggling. Understanding the social relations between the count, his court and the Luso-Brazilian elite is in fact simply impossible without bringing in the trade and smuggling of enslaved Africans.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1.2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Adeniyi

Studies in African Diaspora ofen privilege the transatlantic slavery, Columbus’ discovery of the New World, and African cultural codes in the Americas. To expand the scope of the studies, this article examines the metaphysical and ontological questions on the enslavement of the Yorùbá – an African ethno-nation whose members were condemned to slavery and servitude in the Americas during the inglorious transatlantic slave trade. I used metaphysical fatalism as a theoretical model to interrogate prognostications about dispersion of the Yorùbá from their matrix as expressed in their mythology. Being a predestining agent, I examined the role of orí (destiny) within the context of rigid fatalism and its textualisation in Prince Justice’s Tutuoba: Salem’s Black Shango Slave Queen. The article argues that the transatlantic enslavement of the Yorùbá is a fait accompli willed by their Supreme Deity. Tough traumatic, transatlantic slavery reworlded Yorùbá cultural codes, birthed the Atlantic sub-group of the ethno-nation, and aided the emergence of Yorùbá-centric religions in the New World.


Author(s):  
Mary Wills

This chapter situates the activities of the West Africa squadron within several interconnected themes and contexts relating to the impact of the Britain’s Abolition Act of 1807. Britain’s abolitionist cause was regarded as an indicator of the national character, dedicated to morality, humanitarianism and freedom, and naval suppression fitted neatly into this narrative. The role of the Royal Navy in enforcing the 1807 Act transformed notions of British identity and evolving ideas of imperialism on the international stage. This chapter positions the book within the existing literature on the nineteenth-century campaign against the transatlantic slave trade, the role of the Royal Navy in the post-Napoleonic Wars period, and the British role in Africa more widely.


Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.


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