Legal Practitioners

Author(s):  
Fabian Klose

In the wake of the efforts to fight the transatlantic slave trade during the nineteenth century the first system of international jurisdiction emerged, the so-called Mixed Commissions for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. These courts sought to guarantee the conviction of captured slave ships by a uniform set of practices, functions, and procedures for all of the commissions established throughout the Atlantic area. However, the Mixed Commissions were far from being a body of frictionless international cooperation. Instead, they were a fiercely contested place, where each member state sought to enforce its competing national interests concerning abolition. The aim of this chapter is to focus on this rather ambiguous character of the Mixed Commissions and its members. It focuses on the ambiguous roles of the commission members as legal actors, diplomats, and advocates in order to present the first system of international courts as a fiercely contested body of early international cooperation.

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Klose

Abstract The origins of the phenomena of international jurisdiction and humanitarian intervention can already be found in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The article combines both topics and shows that these two concepts are directly related to one another. Beginning with the international ban of the slave trade in 1815 the analysis focuses on the corresponding implementation machinery created under the leadership of Great Britain. This machinery consisted of a hitherto unique combination of military and juridical measures which were directly dependent on each other. The main argument of the article is that the geneses of the concept of international jurisdiction and humanitarian intervention are significantly entangled with each other and both of their origins lie in the fight against the transatlantic slave trade in the beginning of the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. E. Harris

AbstractSlave traders forced more than 1.65 million captive Africans aboard illegal transatlantic slave ships during the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the final phase of this brutal traffic, between 1850 and 1866. It argues that slave traders sustained their illicit industry, in large part, by strategically coordinating their financial arrangements against a rising tide of international suppression. One key tactic was for slave trade investors in the United States, Cuba, Africa, and Iberia to lower the risks of interdiction by joining forces and co-financing voyages. Another was to combine with an international cast of merchants and bankers, who helped them launder slave trade capital and transmit it to their distant allies. This capital was concealed within broader currents of global commerce, which was, in turn, spurred by the growth of free trade in the nineteenth century. These myriad alliances and capital flows undergirded the trade until its final extinction in the 1860s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis

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.


Afro-Ásia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaori Kodama

<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>


Atlantic Wars ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 252-273
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank

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.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 91 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Edgardo Pérez Morales

Around 1808, Spaniards’ ability to outfit and successfully complete slaving expeditions to Africa paled in comparison to the skill of French and British slavers. In the wake of British Abolitionism and the Cuban sugar revolution, however, some Spaniards learned the tricks of the slave trade and by 1835 had brought over 300,000 captives to Cuba and Puerto Rico (most went to Cuba). This article presents evidence on the process through which some Spaniards successfully became slave traders, highlighting the transition from early trial ventures around 1809–15 to the mastering of the trade by 1830. It pays particular attention to the operations and perspectives of the Havana-based firm Cuesta Manzanal & Hermano and to the slave trading activities on the Pongo River by the crewmen of the Spanish ship La Gaceta. Although scholars have an increasingly solid perception of the magnitude and consequences of the Cuba-based trade in human beings in the nineteenth century, the small-scale dynamics of this process, ultimately inseparable from long-term developments, remain elusive. This article adds further nuance to our knowledge of the post-1808 surge in the Spanish transatlantic slave trade.


Anos 90 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (40) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roquinaldo Ferreira

This article explores slave resistance in Angola by focusing on slave flights and the formation of runaway communities during the era of the transatlantic slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It argues that slave flights and runaways communities were integral to societies under Portuguese influence in coastal and internal Angola. It demonstrates that flights occurred due to a wide variety of reasons, including opposition to shipment to Brazil, mistreatments by slave owners, and the influence of African social institutions and customs. Runaways’ fate depended on the willingness of African rulers to taken them as fugitives, and many became part of gangs that disrupted the trade between coastal Angola and slave markets in the interior. The article argues that slave flights and runaway communities became more numerous in the nineteenth century, as the transatlantic slave trade declined and commercial agriculture was established in the Luanda hinterland.


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