Cycles

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Natural Histories

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.

The Black Market

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-108
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Market ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Illegal Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Black Subject

This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these pages argue that Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass suggest that slaves too should engage in piratical economic behaviors as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. By exploring the economic impact of enslaved subjects as thieves, Black participation in the market emerges as a strategy that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a “b/Black” market. Illegal trade, in the hands of an enslaved population, is a way for enslaved bodies to stake claims to personhood and, ultimately, freedom. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) frame an interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Slaves and Slavery in Kingston, 1770–1815

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
British America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Town

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.

Sources of the Nineteenth-Century Slave Trade: Two Comments

1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Chilver ◽  
P. M. Kaberry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Recent Issue ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Available Information

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.

Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin ◽  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Different Parts

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.

GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS: SLAVERY AND SLAVE LIFEWAYS ON NINETEENTH CENTURY DANISH PLANTATIONS ON THE GOLD COAST, GHANA

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaw Bredwa-Mensah
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Tropical Crops ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Oral Information

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).

Numbers

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Regular Practice

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. R. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Historical Controversy ◽  
Sophisticated Analysis

The most recent as well as the most comprehensive book on the statistics of the Atlantic slave trade has been written by Professor Philip D. Curtin. The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census is a work which applies modern techniques and sophisticated analysis to the very difficult historical problem of the magnitude of the Atlantic slave trade. As Curtin himself states: ‘The dimensions of the nineteenth century slave trade have always been a matter of controversy — political controversy at the time and historical controversy since’. Professor Curtin's book will not put an end to the controversy, but it does suggest further areas for research. More work needs to be done on the historical sources from which the statistics of the slave trade are derived. This article examines the main sources available for assessing the importation of slaves into Cuba from 1790 to 1867 and analyses the statistics which these sources yield in the light of Curtin's conclusions.

scholarly journals Myths and Lessons of Liberal Intervention: the British Campaign for the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade to Brazil

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
John MacMillan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Target State ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
Cultural Constraints

This article takes issue with recent references to the British nineteenth century campaign for the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil that serve to bolster interventionist or imperialist agendas. In particular, such accounts reproduce two and a half myths about the campaign: that it can serve as a model for the present age; that the success of the campaign can be explained through the actions of the intervening party alone (with a corresponding neglect of those of the ‘target’ state); and the half-myth that the campaign’s success was due to military action (at the expense of institutional (legal) and normative factors and the capacity of the target state). I argue instead that this case – and interventions more generally – would benefit from an analysis that considers the role of force in relation to a series of residual institutional and cultural constraints within the liberal state and to political conditions in the target state. In light of the complexities and contingencies that these factors present the underlying lesson is that military force should be used sparingly, if at all.

Social and Demographic Changes in the Birim Valley, southern Ghana, c. 1450–c. 1800

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Kiyaga-Mulindwa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Southern Ghana ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

Recent archaeological excavations have revealed two distinct pottery traditions in the Birim Valley, southern Ghana. These have been classified as the ‘Earthworks Ware’ and the ‘Atwea Ware’. In certain archaeological contexts, the ‘Atwea Ware’ succeeds ‘Earthworks Ware’, and it also continues into present-day ethnography. The discontinuity between these two pottery traditions suggests a change in population. It is therefore suggested here that the population of ‘Earthworks Ware’ makers was one of the early victims of the Atlantic slave trade from about the mid-sixteenth century and that they were replaced in this area of the Birim Valley around a.d. 1700 by the Atweafo, a Twi-speaking group, whose descendants live there to this day. From the eighteenth century until close to the end of the nineteenth century a number of Denkyira, Asini and Asante migrants also moved into this valley. During this time the militarily weak Atweafo lived at the mercy of four major powers – the Asante, Akim Abuakwa, Akim Kotoku and the Akwamu. However, the Atweafo found means to survive under what seems to have been a highly volatile political environment by shifting their loyalty amongst these powers as situations dictated.

The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Way

As a contribution to the history of Britain's campaign for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century this article examines, first, the creation of various mixed commissions for the adjudication of vessels captured on suspicion of trading in slaves after the trade had been declared illegal; secondly, the composition of these mixed commissions and the way in which they functioned, with special reference to the several commissions sitting in Sierra Leone which for 25 years dealt with the majority of captured slave vessels; and thirdly, the reasons why after 1839, and especially after 1845, captured ships were increasingly taken before British vice-admiralty courts with the result that the mixed commissions were gradually allowed to run down, although most of them were not abolished until the Atlantic slave trade had been finally suppressed.

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