The costs of survival: The transport of slaves in the middle passage and the profitability of the 18th-century British slave trade

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Middle Passage

Deaths of Slaves in the Middle Passage

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Over Time

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Vincent Carretta
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Olaudah Equiano ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Canonical Status

The backlash against challenging the origin story of Olaudah Equiano, author of the influential autobiography The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, is the subject of this chapter by Vincent Carreta. Since first being published in 1789, the text has achieved canonical status as a rare first-hand account of an African-born person describing the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. Interesting Narrative was successfully appropriated political propaganda by abolitionists to help end the transatlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. After revealing archival documents calling Equiano’s birth in Africa into question, Caretta describes the firestorm of criticism he faced, including threats of assault, from some scholars. He suggests that the unwillingness of some scholars to confront the possibility that Equiano may have lied about his birthplace is too high stakes as it opens the door to questioning how much of Interesting Narrative is fiction and how much work that relies on the text may require reexamination.

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

scholarly journals Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-57
Author(s):  
Thomas Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Ethnographic Writing

This paper draws upon analogy with better documented slave societies (the medieval Islamic world, and the 18th-century Caribbean) to argue, first, that the institution of slavery was a major factor in fostering a discourse on the differences among foreign peoples; and secondly, that Greek ethnographic writing was informed by the experience of slavery, containing implicit justifications of slavery as an institution. It then considers the implications of these conclusions for our understanding of Greek representations of the barbarian world and for Greek contact with non-Greeks.

The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 752
Author(s):  
David Northrup ◽  
Herbert S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Atlantic Creoles

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Chira
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
African History ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Shed Light

Berlin 1996 (cited under Overviews) introduced the term “Atlantic Creoles” to describe Afro-descendants whose experiences in the age of the Atlantic slave trade were not primarily defined by the plantation. According to Berlin, Atlantic Creoles distinguished themselves through behaviors that “were more akin to those of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” They displayed “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.” The term “Creole” is supposed to denote transformations in identity through encounters across cultural difference. Berlin applied this term to a generation that preceded the consolidation of plantation systems (prior to the 18th century), even though he alluded to the possibility of using this concept spatially, too—to describe Afro-descendants living outside plantation systems as late as the end of the 18th century. Landers 1999 (cited under Overviews) took up this latter approach systematically. Scholars have since applied the label “Atlantic Creoles” broadly to cultural and political brokers who drew on repertoires from Africa, Europe, and the Americas as seamen, traders, diplomats, litigants, settlers, wives, workers, or healers. According to Berlin, the term was not meant to obscure the violence that Afro-descendants were subjected to, but to capture a historical moment when racial categories were more fluid and some could access opportunities. Berlin’s piece has a vast legacy. It drew attention to an array of Afro-diasporic experiences and emphasized the role of West Africans in the making of early Atlantic networks. Since 1996, attention to Africans in Atlantic networks has expanded. Scholars have also examined more closely how their actions and trajectories can shed light on the arc of African history, not just the American one. Yet some scholars have critiqued the term “Atlantic Creoles” for excessive capaciousness. In Ferreira 2012 (cited under 18th Century and the Age of Revolutions), Roquinaldo Ferreira argues that it obliterates the specificity of African experiences within pluralistic communities in Africa. Other scholars have critiqued it for romanticizing mobility and insertion into state apparatuses. Upward mobility for some Afro-descendants could often only come with fewer opportunities for enslaved people. Finally, the term assumes a somewhat linear identity formation. In Sweet 2013 (cited under Healing, Religion, and Science), James Sweet argues that historians too often assume that Creole Afro-descendant identities move away from African cosmologies toward Western ones.

Doing the Slave Trade in Different Voices: Poetics and Politics in Robert Hayden’s First “Middle Passage”

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-573
Author(s):  
Carl Plasa
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage

Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage"

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Furgerson Selzer
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage
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