Slavery and Antislavery, 1760–1820

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Leslie Brown
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Critique ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

In 1760, the ownership of African slaves was common across the Americas, ubiquitous in Atlantic Africa, and tolerated if not always officially permitted in much of Western Europe. By 1820, a new moral critique of colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave had led to the first organised efforts for their abolition. It would seem that the revolutionary era brought with it the beginning of the end for slavery in the Atlantic world. Yet, at the same time, there had never been more slaves in the Americas than there were in 1820. The expansion of the Atlantic slave trade and its increasing concentration on Brazil had profound consequences for the peoples and societies of West Africa. The Age of Revolutions was an era of spectacular growth in the institution of slavery in the Americas, when considered from a hemispheric perspective. This article suggests that the history of warfare has particular relevance to the history of slavery, and, as will become apparent, anti-slavery, in the Atlantic world.

Women's Work and Women's Property: Household Social Relations in the Maraka Textile Industry of the Nineteenth Century

1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Islamic Militancy

A history of the Maraka textile industry provides a glimpse into the fitful and uneven social and economic changes taking place during the nineteenth century in the area of the Western Sudan that is now part of Mali. Although the major historical events of this period are well understood, historians know very little about the social and economic history of the West African interior. Exactly how the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, renewed Islamic militancy, and European territorial encroachment influenced African societies remains poorly understood. This is even more apparent for the Middle Niger valley, located near the geographical center of continental West Africa. Paradoxically, the gradual end of the Atlantic slave trade and the coincident expansion of the so-called legitimate trade in agricultural crops increased the use of slaves within Africa to meet demand for all types of African goods. The nineteenth century was thus an era of commodity production and market activity which was probably unparalleled in the history of West Africa prior to this period. The inhabitants of the Middle Niger participated in these changes, and this study describes what these changes meant to one group of African men and women.

Slave Traders by Invitation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.

The Politics of Reproduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This book examines the history and politics of childbearing in the British Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British politicians became increasingly concerned to promote motherhood among Afro-Caribbean women during the era of abolitionism. These politicians hoped that a homegrown labor force would allow for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade without any disruption to the pace of labor on Caribbean plantations. The plans for reform generated by British politicians were shaped by their ideas about race, medicine, demography, and religion, and so the book explores these fields of comprehension as they related to reproductive reform. While making a broad survey of the politics of reproduction in Atlantic world, the book also focuses in on the story of a Barbadian midwife and three generations of her family. The experiences of Doll and her female kin illustrate how the campaign to promote fertility affected Afro-Caribbean women, and also how they were able to carve out room to maneuver within the constraints of life in a Caribbean slave society.

Biology and African Slavery

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth F. Kiple
Keyword(s):  
Falciparum Malaria ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Black People ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Separate Branch ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Tropical Plantation ◽  
Indentured Servants

This article reviews scholarship on the biology of African slaves. Mother Africa ensured that her sons and daughters could tolerate a disease environment sufficiently harsh that it served as a barrier to European outsiders for many centuries, keeping them confined to the coast and, save for some notable exceptions, away from the interior. Falciparum malaria and yellow fever, however, the chief ramparts in this barrier, did not remain confined to Africa. Rather, they reached the Americas with the Atlantic slave trade to rage among non-immune white and red people alike. But they largely spared blacks who were relatively resistant to these African illnesses, as well as to the bulk of those Eurasian diseases whose ravages were mostly directed at indigenous peoples. The sum of these pathogenic susceptibilities and immunities added up to the elimination of the latter (and white indentured servants) as contenders for tropical plantation labourers, and placed that onus squarely on the shoulders of the Africans. Yet, such a nomination in an age of rationalism bore with it the notion that black people, because of their ability to resist fevers, were sufficiently different biologically from Europeans as to constitute a separate branch of humankind and a lower one at that.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther, 1806–1891

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oluwatoyin Oduntan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
The 19Th Century

The case for narrating the history of slavery and emancipation through the biography of enslaved Africans is strongly supported by the life and experiences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Kidnapped into slavery in 1821, recaptured and settled in Sierra Leone in 1822, he became a missionary in 1845, founder of the Niger mission in 1857, and Bishop of the Niger Mission in 1864. His life and career covered the span of the 19th century during which revolutionary forces like jihadist revolutions, the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of a new Westernized elite, and European colonization created the roots of the modern state system in West Africa. He was intricately tied to the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Britain’s antislavery evangelical movement, resulting in Ajayi becoming the poster face of slavery, its acclaimed product of abolitionism, the preeminent advocate of evangelical emancipation, and the organizer of practical emancipation in West Africa. The leader of a very small group of Africans who worked diligently against the slave trade and domestic slavery, Ajayi also became a victim of the use of that agenda by imperialists. Thus, the contrasts of his life (i.e., slavery/freedom, nationalist/hybrid, preacher/investor, leader/weakling, linguist/literalist, etc.) were celebrated by himself, his patrons, and his evangelical followers on one hand, and denounced by his critics on the other. They underline the disagreements over his legacy, and indeed over the understanding of the institution of slavery, abolition, and emancipation in West Africa.

France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

The Persistence of Mutual Influence: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Brown ◽  
Gabriel Paquette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Old World ◽  
History Of

The independence of Latin America from colonial rule in the first decades of the nineteenth century is generally held to have broken the bonds which had linked Europe to the Americas for three centuries. This article contends that a re-examination of the decade of the 1820s reveals the persistence, as well as the reconfiguration, of connections between the Old World and the New after the dissolution of the Iberian Atlantic monarchies. Some of these multi-faceted connections are introduced and explored, most notably commercial ties, intellectual and cultural influences, immigration, financial obligations, the slave trade and its suppression, and diplomatic negotiations. Recognition and appreciation of these connections has important consequences for our understandings of the history of the Atlantic World, the ‘Age of Revolutions’, and Latin American Independence itself.

Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryle Williams
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Humanities Computing ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The 1960S

The robust, sustained interest in the history of the transatlantic slave trade has been a defining feature of the intersection of African studies and digital scholarship since the advent of humanities computing in the 1960s. The pioneering work of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, first made widely available in CD-ROM in 1999, is one of several major projects to use digital tools in the research and analysis of the Atlantic trade from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Over the past two decades, computing technologies have also been applied to the exploration of African bondage outside the maritime Atlantic frame. In the 2010s, Slave Voyages (the online successor to the original Slave Trade Database compact disc) joined many other projects in and outside the academy that deploy digital tools in the reconstruction of the large-scale structural history of the trade as well as the microhistorical understandings of individual lives, the biography of notables, and family ancestry.

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.

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