A GREAT DEBATE REVISITED From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa. Edited by ROBIN LAW. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 279. £35 (ISBN 0-521-48127-9).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
RALPH A. AUSTEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
West African ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Great Debate ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of

One of the great debates running through the first decades of academic research on West African history concerned the degree to which the unilateral ending of the Atlantic slave trade constituted a crisis for local societies and what link there was between this change and the imposition of formal European rule in the late 1800s. In its original form this debate has been over for some time. Most historians now agree that there was no long-term ‘crisis of transition’ on the West African coast in the early nineteenth century. Robin Law justifies the present volume by shifting attention to two secondary issues associated with the end of the slave trade: first, the transformations around inland production rather than coastal-dominated bulking and transport of vegetable exports; and second, the relationship of all these changes to the advent of colonialism. All the authors in this volume do discuss the connection between the end of the slave trade and internal systems of African production in the nineteenth century (including issues of indigenous slavery and gender relationships). Only a few concern themselves with colonial partition, although this becomes the main theme of Hopkins' concluding essay.

Archaeological Perspectives on the Atlantic Slave Trade: Contrasts in Time and Space in Benin and Guinea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This chapter explores the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the European settlements of the New World on two settings along the West African coast. The Atlantic slave trade engaged societies ranging from complexly organised ‘states’ to loosely organised societies based on diverse local leadership. The chapter discusses archaeological investigations of one complex setting, that of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Hueda and Dahomey societies of the Bight of Benin, and contrasts those findings with preliminary results from the nineteenth-century sites along the Rio Pongo, Guinea, where the slave trade was conducted by a range of societies of less complex organisation. These investigations demonstrate that the specific responses of local African people to the Atlantic slave trade were highly variable.

The Royal African Company of England's West African Correspondence, 1681-1699

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
General Terms ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

The Dahomean Middleman System, 1727–c. 1818

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Supply Problem ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Trading Partners

During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, European merchants bought more slaves in the Bight of Benin than on any other part of the West African coast. From c. 1720 until 1727 much of their buying was concentrated in Savi, the capital of a small Aja state called Whydah. When the Dahomeans overran Savi in 1727 they stopped the inland slave suppliers from travelling to the coast, prevented the local Hueda from going inland to collect slaves, and insisted that the Europeans bought slaves only from Dahomean dealers. In an attempt to make sure that the Europeans had nothing more to do with their former trading partners the Dahomeans burned the factories in Savi and forced their European occupants to retire to Grehue, Savi's port, a spot on the coast where the Europeans maintained a number of fortified warehouses.The middleman policy did not at first operate satisfactorily. There were two reasons for this. The first was that the Dahomeans were, in practice, unable to prevent the Europeans from continuing to trade with the Hueda. The second was that the inland suppliers refused to sell slaves to Savi's conquerors. The Dahomeans solved their ‘coastal’ problem in the 1740S by placing a garrison in Grehue. This garrison kept the exiled Hueda at bay and held the Europeans in what amounted to open captivity. The Dahomeans were never able completely to solve their ‘supply’ problem. In the 1730s and 1740S the inland merchants took their slaves to ports which opened up on the Bight to the east of Grehue. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did they channel substantial numbers of slaves through Dahomey. In the last decades of the century they again boycotted the Dahomean market. Dahomey therefore prospered as a middleman state only between c. 1748 and c. 1770.An examination of their eighteenth century trading suggests that the Dahomeans were a slave-raiding community whose members realised in 1727 that they would soon run out of fresh raiding grounds. They appear to have introduced their middleman policy in an attempt to ensure that they would continue to profit from slave trading even after they had ceased to be able to take large numbers of captives themselves. Although the policy was by no means a complete success, it was important in that it seems to have led the Dahomeans to begin placing garrisons in the territories they ravaged. It appears, in fact, to have been the pursuit of their middleman goals that led them to begin creating the often described nineteenth century ‘greater’ Dahomean state. The middleman programme ceased to be of much importance after c. 1818, when the fall of Oyo enabled the Dahomeans to resume raiding widely in unexploited territory.

Officers’ contributions to Britain’s anti-slavery culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Naval Officers

This chapter examines officers’ contributions to the metropolitan discourses about slavery and abolition taking place in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Furthering the theme of naval officers playing an important part in the social and cultural history of the West African campaign, it uncovers connections between the Royal Navy and domestic anti-slavery networks, and the extent to which abolitionist societies and interest groups operating in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships with naval officers in the field. Officers contributed to this ever-evolving anti-slavery culture: through support of societies and by providing key testimonies and evidence about the unrelenting transatlantic slave trade. Their representations of the slave trade were used to champion the abolitionist cause, as well as the role of the Royal Navy, in parliament, the press and other public arenas.

Drake's Fake: A Curiosity Concerning a Spurious Visit to Asante in 1839

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
T. C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Present Note ◽  
West African ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Intellectual Interest ◽  
Unusual Occurrence

A wholly fraudulent source is an unusual occurrence in historical research. What is much more common and of much more intellectual interest is the discovery of a source that skilfully combines spurious invention with some regard for accuracy and convincing detail. This second kind of source is of course very familiar to historians of Africa, and the present note deals with a document of this type that, among other things, purports to offer a brief first-hand account of life in Kumase in 1839. I am chiefly concerned hare with the accuracy or inaccuracy of this piece of reportage; and--unusually for precolonial Africa--the document presently under review can be directly compared with a number of other precisely contemporary written accounts of life in Kumase.In his pioneering work published over thirty years ago on the suppression of the illicit nineteenth-century slave trade from Africa, Christopher Lloyd remarked on the paucity of first-hand accounts authored by slave traders. He also offered a number of judicious observations respecting the veracity or reliability of such accounts of this type as did exist. In his treatment of the workings of the illegal West African slave trade, Lloyd relied very heavily on one of the annotated editions of the memoirs of Théodore Canot (alias Théophile Conneau). Canot or Conneau is justly famous, and in the intervening years since the appearance of Lloyd's book this important source has become something of an exegetical industry among historians of West Africa.

The Slave Trade and Coastal West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Archaeological Work

The Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of archaeological work in a number of West African countries. Much of the work has emphasized the impressive trade castles of the Ghana coast, where extensive European constructions demonstrate the importance of the slave trade in the regions’ history. Work has also been conducted on other settings, including in Bénin, where African agency manifested itself differently than on the Gold Coast of modern Ghana; Sierra Leone and Gambia, where European trading establishments were typically smaller; and Guinea, where the ‘illegal’ slave trade of the nineteenth century blossomed. Many of these sites of enslavement have become important parts of local heritage, as well as a global heritage of African-descended people and the heritage tourism associated with the African Diaspora.

Abolition on shore

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Naval Officers

Naval officers played a part in a reconfiguration of relations between Britain and West Africa in the early nineteenth century, as British abolitionist ideals and policies were introduced in the colony of Sierra Leone and increasingly rolled out along the coast. This chapter details the role of naval officers in the pursuit of anti-slavery treaties with African rulers, the encouragement of ‘legitimate’ trade (as non-slave-based trade was termed) and assisting increased exploration and missionary efforts. All were tied to the desire to end the slave trade at source in West African societies via the spread of European ideas of ‘civilization’ among African peoples. Officers’ narratives are revealing of increasing British intervention in West Africa, and how economic and strategic advantages for Britain became inextricable from humanitarian incentives.

The Anti-Slave Trade Theme in Dahoman History: An Examination of the Evidence

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 263-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
The 1960S

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers who described pre-colonial Dahomey all stressed that the Dahomans were dedicated, enthusiastic slavers. The kingdom's first historian, Archibald Dalzel, remarked, for example, that the Dahomans were “bred solely to war and rapine.” F.E. Forbes, the author of one of the best-known nineteenth-century accounts of the kingdom, in a similar vein, declared of Dahomey that “strange and contradictory as it may sound, this great nation is no nation, but a banditti.”The views of these and other similarly-minded writers were, until the 1960s, everywhere accepted. In that decade, however, Isaac A. Akinjogbin published a series of works in which he gave an account of a long-lived Dahoman anti-slave trade tradition. Dahomey was, he claims, founded ca 1620 by a group of “highly principled and far-seeing” Aja in the Abomey area. These Aja founded the kingdom so as to be able to wage war effectively against those of their countrymen who traded in slaves.Akinjogbin believed that the Dahomans spent about ninety years making war on their slave trading neighbors. It was, he claims, only in 1730 that the European slavers and their African allies were able to force the Dahomans to abandon their anti-slave trade campaign and to begin trading in slaves themselves. The very destructive wars of the 1720s, the wars which made Dahomey a major west African power, were, it seems undertaken as part of a virtuous, anti-slave trade crusade.Although the Dahomans were forced to begin trading in slaves in 1730, they did not, Aknjogbin implies, entirely abandon their anti-slave trade ideals.

Mid-Nineteenth Century Dahomey: Recent Views vs. Contemporary Evidence

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 307-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Way

Three mid-nineteenth century English travellers, F.E. Forbes, R.F. Burton, and J.A. Skertchly, published books which contain detailed descriptions of the way in which the Dahoman state was then organized. The three authors' works, when taken together, form the most coherent, best researched, precolonial account of the Dahoman kingdom.Dahomey's more recent historians, while purporting to rely on Forbes', Burton's, and Skertchly's evidence, have nevertheless advanced arguments which are incompatible with that evidence. The three authors believed that Dahomey was an Abomey area slave-raiding community, whereas the kingdom's new historians claim that Dahomey was a European-like nation state. They have, it appears, while searching for their new interpretations, lost sight of their source material. As a means of drawing attention back to these sources there follows an analysis of Forbes', Burton's, and Skertchly's testimony.F.E. Forbes was a naval officer who became interested in Dahomey while serving on board one of the anti-slave squadron's ships. R.F. Burton, the well-known explorer and author, made a study of the kingdom while he held the position of British Consul for the Bight of Biafra. J.A. Skertchly was an entomologist who developed an interest in Dahomey while on a West African specimen collecting trip.Forbes gathered his material in 1849/50, while Burton collected his in 1863/64. Both visited Dahomey as members of anti-slave trade factfinding missions and both considered that their instructions obliged them to find out as much as they could about the way in which the kingdom was organized. Forbes' and Burton's books are published versions of their official reports.3 Skertchly, who collected his evidence in 1871, had intended to spend only about a week in Dahomey but was detained there for almost eight months, during which he was unable to collect specimens.

scholarly journals Senegal, the African Slave Trade, and the Door of No Return: Giving Witness to Gorée Island

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Dalla Malé Fofana
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
African Slave ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Visual Rhetorics ◽  
Early Schooling ◽  
History Of

Recently, the Senegalese people have learned to speak more openly of their history. But, as late as the 1980s—the years of my youth and early schooling—the wounds of colonialism were still fresh. I contend that slavery had been so powerful a blow to the Senegalese ethos that we—my family, friends, and schoolmates—did not speak about it. The collective trauma and shame of slavery was apparently so powerful that we sought to repress it, keeping it hidden from ourselves. We were surrounded by its evidence, but chose not to see it. Such was my childhood experience. As an adult, I understand that repression never heals wounds. The trauma remains as a haunting presence. But one can discover its “living presence,” should one choose to look. Just 5.2 km off the west African coast of Senegal lies Gorée Island, where millions of Africans were held captive while awaiting transport into slavery. Much of the four-century history of the African slave trade passed through Senegal, where I grew up. In this essay, I explore the history of the island and its role in the slave trade. I describe my own coming to terms with this history—how it has haunted me since my youth. And I argue for the role of visual rhetorics in the formation (and affirmation) of Senegalese ethos. As Baumlin and Meyer (2018) remind us, we need to speak, in order to be heard, in order to be seen: Such is an assumption of rhetorical ethos. And the reverse, as I shall argue, may be true, too: Sometimes we need to see (or be seen), in order to know what to speak and how to be heard. It is for this reason that we need more films written, directed, produced, and performed by Africans (Senegalese especially).

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