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.

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).

Religion and Slavery

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Ambrose
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Forced Relocation ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This article reviews scholarship on the religious lives of slaves. The emergent field of Atlantic history has profoundly influenced scholarship on the response of African slaves to Christianity, the nature of black Christianity in the Americas, and the ways that black Christianity differed from that of whites. The study of the religious lives of enslaved peoples in the Americas has benefited enormously from the work of historians and anthropologists who have studied Africa during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. In articles and books, John Thornton, most notably, a historian of pre-colonial Africa, has argued for the need to understand the religious lives of Africans before their enslavement and forced relocation to the Americas. Thornton's work underscores that many enslaved Africans were in fact believing and practicing Christians before the Middle Passage. This recognition has implications for the ways in which African Christianity informed slave life and culture in the New World.

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.

The Atlantic Slave Trade : New Approaches. An Introduction

1975 ◽  
Vol 62 (226) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Walter E. Minchinton ◽  
Pieter C. Emmer
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

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.

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