Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reassessment

2006 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 1054-1065 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID ELTIS ◽  
FRANK D. LEWIS ◽  
DAVID RICHARDSON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

scholarly journals Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: A Reply

2006 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 1066-1071 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER C. MANCALL ◽  
JOSHUA L. ROSENBLOOM ◽  
THOMAS WEISS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

The London Committee and mobilization of public opinion against the slave trade

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractDuring the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
James L. A. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
North African ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Black African ◽  
Western Sahara ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Polanyi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Two Systems

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

The African Slave Trade and the Construction of the Iberian Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
South America ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
South Atlantic ◽  
The South ◽  
African Slave ◽  
History Of

Scholarly studies of the colonization of the Americas—especially of Latin America—have tended to minimize the role played by Africans and the African slave trade, treating the history of conquest and colonialism as a story of inevitable European domination of the hemisphere. However, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, colonialism in the Americas depended upon the exportation of slaves from Africa, a massive undertaking that was supported not only by Iberian Royal families but also by convoluted ideological and theological justifications elaborated by legal and religious scholars. During this period, Portugal dominated the slave trade, raiding its colonies in Southern Africa to supply its plantations (many run by Jesuits) in South America. In this sense, the story of the South Atlantic is a story of encounters and exchanges between Africa and the Americas.

The Decline of Caribbean Smuggling

1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore C. Hinckley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
African Slave ◽  
The North ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
High Esteem

In the 1760's, the commerce of the British West Indies followed four general channels: (1) the trade with the Mother Country; (2) the exchange of goods and money with continental sister colonies to the north; (3) the African slave trade; and (4) the illegal intercourse with Spain's New World possessions. So extensive was the last that Josiah Tucker referred to it as “that prodigious clandestine trade.” This paper will explore one facet of that traffic: its eclipse in Jamaica in the years immediately after the 1763 Peace of Paris.Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only Bridgetown in Barbados and Kingston in Jamaica were markets of “conspicuous size and wide commercial connections.” The unloading of only a few cargoes would glut the capital towns of the lesser islands. Notwithstanding this fact, these islands held a coveted position in the Empire. London's high esteem for these possessions rested on their agricultural value, their importance in the crucial bullion exchange, and their utility as naval bases.

The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789-1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
English Language ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Financial Transactions

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.

Restoration Legacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-151
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Impact

This chapter looks at William Congreve's enormously popular but now unfamiliar play The Mourning Bride (1697) alongside Aphra Behn's play about an Indian queen, The Widow Ranter, and her heroic novella about an enslaved African prince, Oroonoko. The Mourning Bride has become almost invisible in scholarship, but it remained one of the most frequently performed tragedies throughout the eighteenth century and consolidated Congreve's reputation as a serious artist. This tragedy persists mostly through the misquotation “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. The discussion focuses on Zara, a powerful African queen reduced to captivity and humiliated by her European lover for whom she betrays her nation. Zara echoes the powerful Indian queens created by John Dryden. Dryden's Mesoamerican plays first appeared at the beginning of England's entry into the African slave trade in the form of a royal monopoly; The Mourning Bride appeared in the midst of a pamphlet war over the fate of the Royal African Company generated by the threat to its monopoly when its governor, James II, fled the country. While The Mourning Bride does not depict plantation slavery or the slave trade itself, it nevertheless registers the impact of trafficking in African bodies. Congreve's Zara evokes the exotic queens of the Restoration, but is a more complicated figure who demands respect for her dignity and empathy over her abuse. As the chapter suggests, Zara moved audiences not just as a “woman scorned,” but as an African who has been deracinated and enslaved.

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