Madagascar and the Slave Trade, 1810–1895

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
The One

The distinguishing feature of the Malagasy slave trade in the nineteenth century was the co-existence of two competitive slave networks, the one feeding Malagasy slaves to meet the demand of long-distance and regional markets in the western Indian Ocean, and the other channelling Malagasy war captives and East African slaves on to the markets of Imerina. The export of slaves from Madagascar had long existed, but the import of slaves was a new and distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon, the result of the rise of the Merina empire, whose economy was based on a huge, unremunerated and servile labour force. As the empire expanded, so its labour requirements grew, to conflict sharply with the increasing demand for labour on the neighbouring plantation islands as they shifted over to the production of sugar. Creole merchants found themselves obliged to find alternative labour supplies, and from the 1830s they were moving rapidly down the west coast of Madagascar, where they purchased slaves from chiefs independent of Merina control. Until the outbreak of the Franco-Merina war of 1882–5, the slave-trade networks remained remarkably stable, despite local rivalries. This was due largely to the presence of the Arab Antalaotra, an experienced body of middlemen, and the Indian Karany who supplied the capital for the trade. The war effectively broke the power of the Merina regime, and as the imperial economy crumbled, so security of trade collapsed across the island. Though the disruption of legitimate commerce initially spurred the slave trade, it also strengthened creole calls for French intervention. This occurred in 1895, and the following year the French authorities abolished slavery in Madagascar. This, and the effective military occupation of the island by the French, reduced the Malagasy slave trade to a trickle by the first years of the twentieth century.

The growth of trade among the Igbo before 1880

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Northrup
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Regional Trade ◽  
Early Date ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Niger River ◽  
Trading Networks

The peoples of south-eastern Nigeria have been involved in trade for as long as there are any records. The archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu and other evidence reveal long distance trade in metal and beads, as well as regional trade in salt, cloth, and beads at an early date. The lower Niger River and its Delta featured prominently in this early trade, and evidence is offered to suggest a continuity in the basic modes of trade on the lower Niger from c. A.D. 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century. An attempt to sketch the basic economic institutions of the Igbo hinterland before the height of the slave trade stresses regional trading networks in salt, cloth, and metal, the use of currencies, and a nexus of religious and economic institutions and persons. It is argued that while the growth of the slave trade appears to have been handled without major changes in the overall patterns of trade along the lower Niger, in the Igbo hinterland a new marketing ‘grid’, dominated by the Arochuku traders, was created using the pre-existent regional trading networks and religious values as a base.

Crimes Against Humanity

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Vasuki Nesiah
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
The One ◽  
Absent Presence

Race and racism have a schizophrenic life in international criminal law (ICL) histories, both ever-present, and ever-elusive. This chapter excavates this double-life by tracing, not race, but its repression, in ICL historians’ projection of ICL’s origins to the mid-nineteenth century regime instituted to implement the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in the name of ‘humanity’. This regime included treaty born transnational tribunals (‘Mixed Commissions’) with jurisdictional authority that extended beyond national borders. Racialized structures and imaginaries hide in plain sight in histories of these tribunals as an embryonic ICL—present everywhere yet not acknowledged anywhere. This chapter argues that this absent presence is constituted, on the one hand, by juridification, and on the other, by moralization. Troubling legacies of juridification and moralization entails unpacking continuities and discontinuities with contemporary ICL and the work of race-invisibility in putting wind in the sails of humanity’s racially mal-distributive global dynamics.

LICENTIOUS AND UNBRIDLED PROCEEDINGS: THE ILLEGAL SLAVE TRADE TO MAURITIUS AND THE SEYCHELLES DURING THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD B. ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
East African ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Economic Considerations ◽  
Illicit Traffic

Census and other demographic data are used to estimate the volume of the illegal slave trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles from Madagascar and the East African coast between 1811 and c. 1827. The structure and dynamics of this illicit traffic, as well as governmental attempts to suppress it, are also discussed. The Mauritian and Seychellois trade is revealed to have played a greater role in shaping Anglo-Merina and Anglo-Omani relations between 1816 and the early 1820s than previously supposed. Domestic economic considerations, together with British pressure on the trade's sources of supply, contributed to its demise.

Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in East and Central Africa

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ecological Zones ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
African Slaves

Disease, we have argued, influenced patterns of colonization, especially in West Africa, the Americas, and Australia (Chapter 2). In turn, imperial transport routes facilitated the spread of certain diseases, such as bubonic plague. This chapter expands our discussion of environmentally related diseases by focusing on trypanosomiasis, carried by tsetse fly, in East and Central Africa. Unlike plague, this disease of humans and livestock was endemic and restricted to particular ecological zones in Africa. But as in the case of plague, the changing incidence of trypanosomiasis was at least in part related to imperialism and colonial intrusion in Africa. Coastal East Africa presented some of the same barriers to colonization as West Africa. Portugal maintained a foothold in South-East Africa for centuries, and its agents expanded briefly onto the Zimbabwean plateau in the seventeenth century, but could not command the interior. Had these early incursions been more successful, southern Africa may have been colonized from the north, rather than by the Dutch and British from the south. Parts of East Africa were a source of slaves and ivory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The trading routes, commanded by Arab and Swahili African networks, as well as Afro-Portuguese further south, were linked with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slave-holding expanded within enclaves of East Africa, such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. When Britain attempted to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and policed the West African coast, East and Central African sources briefly became more important for the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves from these areas were taken to Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Britain did not have the same intensity of contact with East Africa as with West and southern Africa until the late nineteenth century. There was no major natural resource that commanded a market in Europe and British traders had limited involvement in these slave markets. But between the 1880s and 1910s, most of East and Central Africa was taken under colonial rule, sometimes initially as protectorates: by Britain in Kenya and Uganda; Germany in Tanzania; Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi; and by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.

why brazil did not develop a merchant marine; brazilian shipping and the world in the 19t h century

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgitte Holten
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Merchant Marine ◽  
The World ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
External Sector

The weak performance of the Brazilian merchant marine is surprising, as a huge external sector is normally expected to gohand in hand with the development of anational merchant marine. To elucidate this question, the article proposes an analysis and discussion of the development of the Brazilian merchant marine in the nineteenth century. The early focus on the extremely specialized importation of African slaves led to a near abandon of long distance shipping when this trade was banned in 1830. The same tendency to desist from exterior shipping can also be found in the United States in the late 19th century. A comparison of the two countries demonstrates, that the need for developing the national territory and for providing transportation facilities for the growing interior economies diverted the concentration from exterior ventures tonational ones.

The Establishment of Long-Distance Trade Between Sierra Leone and its Hinterland, 1787–1821

1990 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winston McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Intermediate States ◽  
Marked Decline ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

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.

Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Board Ship ◽  
Complex Dataset

The slave trade, death, and misery were inseparable long before abolitionist writers took up the slave trade as a subject in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the historiography there has been widespread recognition that Africans entering the trade died not only during the middle passage but during the process of enslavement and travel in the interior, on the African littoral awaiting shipment, and after arrival in the Americas. Europeans directly involved in the traffic were at risk in the last three of these four phases of transition between life in Africa and life in the Americas, and tended to die at rates comparable to their human cargoes. In the shipboard phase, and probably also in other stages of the journey, mortality in the slave trade normally exceeded that in other long-distance population movements. In the nineteenth century this differential widened as rates on other long-distance routes fell (Cohn, 1984; Eltis, 1984; Grubb, 1987; Klein, 1978; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1989, forthcoming). To date, most explanations have focused on morbidity and mortality on board ship; data on the preembarkation phases are no more available to us today than to the abolitionists 150 years ago. For shipboard mortality, overcrowding on the ship, psychic shock, and violence have not fared well as explanations in the work of the last two decades, although the interplay between the first two and resistance to disease suggests further consideration. The present study focuses on shipboard mortality, but it is based on a large and complex dataset. It begins with a discussion and preliminary analysis of the nineteenth-century data. This is followed by a review of the various hypotheses on mortality in the slave trade.

Beyond the Bazaars: Geographies of the slave trade in Central Asia

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 919-955
Author(s):  
JEFF EDEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Decentralized Trade ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Motivating Factor

AbstractThe slave trade in nineteenth-century Central Asia involved hundreds of thousands of slaves, predominantly Persian Shīʿites, and stopping the trade was alleged to be a major motivating factor in the Russian conquest of the region. Nevertheless, Central Asian slavery remains little-studied and little-understood. In this article I will argue, first, that the region's slave trade was characterized by decentralized trade networks and by abundant inter-nomadic trade; and, second, that Russian efforts to end the slave trade by decree and through military force in the 1860s and 70s were not as successful as has often been assumed.

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