Recaptive nations: Evidence concerning the demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century

1990 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Jones
2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard

AbstractHistorians have mostly ignored Kingston and its enslaved population, despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. The result of such historiographical neglect is a lacuna in scholarship. In this article, I examine one period of the history of slavery in Kingston, from when the slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early nineteenth century, and then after the slave trade was abolished but when slavery in the town became especially important. One question I especially want to explore is how Kingston maintained its prosperity even after its major trade – the Atlantic slave trade – was stopped by legislative fiat in 1807.


1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin ◽  
Jan Vansina

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Ryan Espersen

Abstract From 1816 to the 1830s, the islands of St. Eustatius, Saba, St. Thomas, St. Maarten, and St. Barts were actively engaged with illicit trade in ships, prize goods, and the transatlantic slave trade. Ships’ crews, governors, and merchants took advantage of the islands’ physical, political, and legal environments to effectively launder goods, ships, and people that were actively involved in these activities. St. Thomas stands out due to the longevity of its status as a regional and international hub for illicit trade at the end of Atlantic and Caribbean privateering and piracy. Within this social and political environment, this paper will unveil the tensions between international, regional, and local interests that drove merchants and colonial officials on St. Thomas to engage with illegal transatlantic slave traders, privateers, and pirates, during the early nineteenth century. Secondly, this paper will reveal the processes through which these relations occurred.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINELL CHEWINS ◽  
PETER DELIUS

AbstractThis article, largely on the basis of in-depth research in archives in Lisbon, provides an account of the trading systems linking Delagoa Bay to its southern hinterland. Within this framework we argue that the role of the slave trade has been previously underestimated. There is evidence that the booming demand for slaves in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands hit this region with force. The scale of that trade is difficult to establish because it was, by and large, illicit and so not systematically recorded. There are indications of a significant trade prior to 1823 and a substantial one after that date. There is also evidence that northern Nguni groups, including the Zulu kingdom, were deeply involved in this trading system. The main sources of captives, however, were militarily weak societies, like the Tembe, which lived closer to the Bay.


1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Chilver ◽  
P. M. Kaberry

Professors Curtin and Vansina in a recent issue of this journal (V (1964), 2, pp. 185–208) have put us in their debt by synthesizing the available information on the sources of the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. For the Cameroons Highlands, a source well represented in Koelle's Polyglotta Africana, we have some corrections to make and comments to add.


2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaw Bredwa-Mensah

The global processes unleashed due to the European maritime exploration and commercial activities as from 1500 AD onwards affected indigenous peoples and cultures of the Atlantic world. In West Africa, the European presence precipitated the Atlantic slave trade, which involved the exportation of millions of Africans into slavery. In the nineteenth century a so-called legitimate trade in colonial agricultural commodities replaced the Atlantic slave trade. As a result, the Danes established agricultural plantations on the Gold Coast and exported tropical crops for processing and consumption in Denmark and the West Indies. Enslaved Africans were used by the Danes to cultivate the plantations in the foothills of the Akuapem Mountains and along the estuary of the Volta River. This paper combines information from written sources, ethnography, oral information and archaeology to investigate the living conditions of the enslaved workers on the plantations. The archaeological data was recovered from the Frederiksgave plantation at Sesemi near Abokobi in the Akuapem Mountains of southeastern Gold Coast (Ghana).


Author(s):  
Christen Mucher

This essay argues that rhetorical and material gaps have limited scholars’ ability to see the connections between Atlantic slavery and the War of 1812, and it outlines these limits as created by contemporary conceptual changes in the meaning of trade, ideologies of neutrality and “free trade,” as well as current-day nation-centered historiography and the problem of missing archival records. By turning to French shipping records, the essay outlines the difficulty of documenting contraband and illicit activities, and draws connections between neutrality disagreements, early nineteenth century U.S.-French commerce, slavery, and the War of 1812. The essay suggests that a better understanding of wartime trade agreements and the related issue of neutrality, more careful attention to the conceptual disaggregation of foreign from internal slave trade, and an awareness of the gaps in the archive are all necessary to challenge and amend the heretofore-isolated narratives of the Atlantic slave trade and the War of 1812.


Author(s):  
Mary Wills

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.


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document