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.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

African Slavery and Spanish Empire

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Demographic Situation ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Racial Slavery

This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations. Contextualizing this ideological reconfiguration within mid-eighteenth century debates, this article draws upon the works of political economists and royal councilors in Madrid and puts them in conversation with the words and actions of individuals in and from Cuba, including people of African descent themselves. Because of the central place of the island in eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and reform, as well as its particular demographic situation, Cuba served as a catalyst for these debates about the place of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Spanish empire. Ultimately, between the mid-eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth, this new mode of thought would lead to dramatic transformations in the institution of racial slavery and Spanish imperial political economy.

scholarly journals O Atlântico enfermo e os agentes da saúde no período do tráfico ilegal

Afro-Ásia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaori Kodama
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade

<p>Resenha de:<br />BARCIA, Manuel. <em>The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade</em>. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2020. 269p.</p>

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.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-216
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
True State ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Nationalism

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Vincent Carretta
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Olaudah Equiano ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Canonical Status

The backlash against challenging the origin story of Olaudah Equiano, author of the influential autobiography The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, is the subject of this chapter by Vincent Carreta. Since first being published in 1789, the text has achieved canonical status as a rare first-hand account of an African-born person describing the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. Interesting Narrative was successfully appropriated political propaganda by abolitionists to help end the transatlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. After revealing archival documents calling Equiano’s birth in Africa into question, Caretta describes the firestorm of criticism he faced, including threats of assault, from some scholars. He suggests that the unwillingness of some scholars to confront the possibility that Equiano may have lied about his birthplace is too high stakes as it opens the door to questioning how much of Interesting Narrative is fiction and how much work that relies on the text may require reexamination.

Revolution

Atlantic Wars ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 252-273
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Common ◽  
Moral Superiority

Chapter 11 traces the common origins and consequences of revolutions in various regions of the Atlantic world. In Europe and much of the Americas, a new military ethic developed, promoting patriotic and loyal service and condemning mercenaries and foreign interventionists. Campaigners against the transatlantic slave trade sought to dissociate Europeans and Americans from African violence. In the Americas, revolutionary conflict fuelled racial and communal animosity. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries sensed their own moral superiority and showed contempt for their opponents. Anger, fear, and the desire for vengeance fed on each other, in some places leading to genocidal violence. In the early nineteenth century the United States condemned British aid to indigenous American warriors and expressed general opposition to European military intervention in the newly independent American republics. National and imperial policies adopted in the revolutionary era broke the early modern pattern of transatlantic war.

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