The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell

As a contribution to the history of Britain's campaign for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century this article examines, first, the creation of various mixed commissions for the adjudication of vessels captured on suspicion of trading in slaves after the trade had been declared illegal; secondly, the composition of these mixed commissions and the way in which they functioned, with special reference to the several commissions sitting in Sierra Leone which for 25 years dealt with the majority of captured slave vessels; and thirdly, the reasons why after 1839, and especially after 1845, captured ships were increasingly taken before British vice-admiralty courts with the result that the mixed commissions were gradually allowed to run down, although most of them were not abolished until the Atlantic slave trade had been finally suppressed.

Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard

AbstractHistorians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.


1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin ◽  
Jan Vansina

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-312
Author(s):  
Anna Seiderer

AbstractThis article analyses the ambivalent legacy of Pierre Verger in the Whydah Historical Museum (Benin). Created in the Portuguese fort once used for the Atlantic slave trade and transformed into a museum in 1967, it is dedicated to the history of the region and its cultural consequences. This article examines the distinction between the way Verger used his photographs as a tool for anthropological exploration and the reinterpretation of those pictures by way of an ideological discourse once they were fixed in a museological context.


1990 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winston McGowan

One of the principal objectives of foreign settlements in nineteenth-century West Africa was the establishment of extensive regular trade with Africans, especially residents of the distant, fabled interior. The attainment of this goal, however, proved very difficult. The most spectacular success was achieved by the British settlement at Sierra Leone, which in the early 1820s managed to establish substantial regular trade with the distant hinterland. Its early efforts to achieve this objective, however, were unsuccessful. Until 1818 the development of long-distance trade with the hinterland was impeded by the desultory nature of such efforts, Sierra Leone's opposition to slave trading, competition from established coastal marts, obstructions caused by intermediate states and peoples, and the weaknesses and limitations of the Colony's policy towards commerce and the interior. By 1821, however, the marked decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, the active co-operation of Futa Jallon and Segu, two major trading states in the hinterland, and certain other important developments in the Colony and the interior, combined to establish such trade on a regular basis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.


Kick It ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 9-54
Author(s):  
Matt Brennan

This chapter documents the prehistory of drum kit performance practice and the invention of the trap drummer’s outfit. First, it examines the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on American musical culture. Second, it explores the history of the snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals, and how they come together in ensemble performance. Third, it discusses the emergence of highbrow and lowbrow culture and the consequences for the status of drummers. Fourth, it discusses the types of music that a drummer was likely to play working in nineteenth-century USA. Fifth, it examines the tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who developed the key components of the early drum kit, known in its time as the ‘trap drummer’s outfit’.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 793-812 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henio Hoyo

In his highly influential work on the “small,” stateless European nations, Hroch seems to assume that patriotic movements have a homogeneous view about the core relations or “ties” that constitute and identify their nations. This assumption seems generally correct for the cases Hroch studies. However, is it correct if applied to the study of those patriotic movements developing in comparatively larger, heterogeneous and underdeveloped societies, comprising several ethnic groups bound together by the colonialist rule of an autocratic empire? I argue that, while the colonial experience can lead to the creation of some ties among the dominated populations, it also affects the way patriotic movements perceive their own nations. As a result, the phase of patriotic agitation can involve diverse movements addressing the same nation, but each having a particular view on the features and history of it. Such contested patriotic doctrines can lead to very important variations in the political agendas and goals of those movements, especially when they reach the mass phase. To exemplify this, the nineteenth century movements in New Spain/Mexico will be used as an example.


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