scholarly journals EXTRAVERSION, CREOLIZATION, AND DEPENDENCY IN THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
New Goods ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
External Connections

AbstractThis article considers the Atlantic slave trade in relation to ‘extraversion’ in African history. Drawing especially on the work of Jean-François Bayart, it argues that slaving fit a long-term pattern in which elites drew on external connections in order to further their wealth and power at home. In doing so, they also opened their societies to new goods and ideas, thus bringing about cultural creolization. This is a different approach to the question of creolization than is commonly found among Americanist studies of Atlantic slavery, which tend to treat cultural change without consideration of politics. The concept of extraversion thus helps to link culture and political economy. Nevertheless, it also bears refinement. Recent scholarship on African involvement in the Atlantic slave trade – some of it detailed in this article – makes clear that extraversion may have reflected African agency, as Bayart insisted, but that it also entangled African societies in destructive relationships of dependency.

Slave Traders by Invitation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.

scholarly journals Money and Currency in African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane I. Guyer ◽  
Karin Pallaver
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
African History ◽  
Mobile Money ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Phase ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

African peoples have managed multiple currencies, for all the classic four functions of money, for at least a thousand years: within each society’s own circuits, in regional exchange, and across the continent’s borders with the rest of the world. Given the materials of some of these currencies, and the general absence of formalized denominations until the colonial period, some early European accounts defined certain transactions as barter. The management of multiplicity is traced through four eras: a) the precolonial period, with some monies locally produced and acquired, and others imported through intercontinental trades, such as the Atlantic slave trade, and eventually under the expansion of capitalism to Africa; b) the colonial period, when precolonial monies, in some places, still circulated with official monies; c) postcolonial national monies for the new African states; and d) the most recent phase of multiplicity in use, due to migration and sales across borders as well as to the use of new technologies, such as mobile money. The management of multiplicity thereby has a long history and continues to be an inventive frontier. History and ethnography meet on common ground to address these dynamics through empirical study of money in practice, and broader scholarship has drawn on a large variety of original sources.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
African History ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Do So ◽  
State Of The Field

This book critically reflects upon the current state of the field of modern African history. It focuses on the history of the continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although also looks back to the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Its aim is to consider the evolution of the field and to set out where, after fifty years of sustained research, it has arrived. To do so, each of its twenty-six chapters explores a particular theme, organized in five sections: Key Themes in African History; The Colonial Encounter; Religion and Belief; Society and Economy; and Arts and the Media.

Slave

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-132
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
The Political ◽  
Long Term Conditions ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Twinned with the first chapter, this takes up the subject of American slavery and its intricate connections to the political philosophies of Roman slavery. The subject here is both the racialized figure of the Atlantic slave trade and the metaphorized “slave” as the coerced and oppressed subject of capitalist modernity. Engaging with the fields of Black classicism and theoretical history, the chapter begins with the photography of Carrie Mae Weems before moving into a series of textual engagements with the Roman slave: Toni Morrison, Howard Fast, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Robert Montgomery Bird all feature, amongst a host of other writers. The chapter argues that Rome has proved to be a way of suturing the embodied and contingent experience of American slavery and subjugation into a fuller apprehension of imperial sovereignty and its long-term conditions.

Creating Lasting Meaningful Social Reform

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-220
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade

This chapter analyzes the possibility to produce cultural change that produces long-term improvement in human life, looking at the case of the abolition of slavery. Early attempts to restrict slavery were based on both cynical and idealistic forces. Cynically, reformers wanted to protect people on their own territories from being enslaved, but they had fewer objections to making money from slavery in distant places. In Britain in the 1700s, however, there arose a small group of reformers who wished to see slavery abolished for all people in all places. By 1807, Britain had banned the transatlantic slave trade. Social movement organizing and the force of transmission of ideas were fundamental to the elimination of slavery in Britain. Once Britain was committed to the abolition of slavery, it used its economic and diplomatic muscle to obtain reform elsewhere.

The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 295-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Gambia ◽  
The Body ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin A. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
African History ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Being Moved ◽  
Working Out

Studies of the history of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa have focused on demography and within it on the number of slaves exported from Africa (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1983; Manning 1981). Seen from the perspective of African history, the question of the number exported is a window on larger fields of inquiry and an area open to research, but it is only a small part of the larger question of the impact of the trade on Africa. Working out a reasonable estimate of the number exported does not give us the number lost, for we can only estimate the number killed in wars and raids or the number who died while being moved toward slave markets. Even if the demographic question were the most important one, the most crucial aspect of it would not be the raw statistics of exports but the question of reproduction (Gregory and Cordell 1987). Reproduction involves a host of variables: nutrition, disease, agricultural productivity, security, political stability, and quality of life among others. Most of these are not amenable to precise answers. Furthermore, the question of reproduction leads us to the larger questions of political, social, and economic relationships. This article examines the effects of the slave trade on the institutional structure of Senegambia and the western Sudan and the reproduction of the societies involved.

THE SLAVE TRADE, ABOLITION AND PUBLIC MEMORY

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 139-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Walvin
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
National Curriculum ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Political Interest ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Educational Debate ◽  
Key Events

ABSTRACTThe bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 prompted a remarkable wave of public commemorations across Britain. In contrast to the low-key events of 1907, 2007 saw a sustained and nation-wide urge to commemorate, publicise and discuss the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition. Government interest proved an important influence, and was reflected in a lively educational debate (resulting in changes to the National Curriculum.) This political interest may have stemmed from the parallel debate about modern human trafficking, and contemporary slave systems. Equally, the availability of funding (from the Heritage Lottery Fund) may have persuaded a host of institutions to devise exhibitions, displays and debates about events of 1807. Perhaps the most striking forms of commemoration were in broadcasting and publishing: the BBC was especially active. There were few regions or localities which remained unaffected by the year's commemorations.But why was there such interest? Was 1807, with the outlawing of an unquestioned evil, seen as a moment of national virtue? But if so, how are we to recall the role played by the British in the perfection of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade? The lively debates in 2007, from major national institutions to small local gatherings, revealed the problematic nature of abolition itself. After all, slavery survived, and even the slave trade continued after 1807. So what was important about 1807? The commemorations of 2007 raised public awareness about an important transformation in the British past; it also exposed those intellectual and political complexities about the ending of the Atlantic slave trade which have proved so fascinating to academic historians.

Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin During the Era of the Slave Trade

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Piot
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Close Relatives

While numerous reports in the ethnographic and historical literature on West African societies document the sale of kin into slavery during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, theorists of the trade have not dealt with the logic of selling close relatives. This article examines an instance of such sale among a Voltaic people, the Kabre, located in the hinterland of Dahomey and Ashanti, and attempts to theorize its meaning as a way of maneuvering between complementing sets of values, both human and material, that emerge at the intersection of the local Kabre ‘gift’ economy with the larger regional political economy of slaving. The essay thus examines Kabre prestational forms – and the complex conceptions of value, wealth, alienation and personhood that accompany them – and the ways in which they interacted with the currencies and slaving practices, and the distinctive forms of alienation these entailed, that entered the area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Understanding such local forms and practices, however, requires us to depart from neoclassical modes of analysis like those typically employed by economic historians of the slave trade.

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