African Slavery and Spanish Empire

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Demographic Situation ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Racial Slavery

This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations. Contextualizing this ideological reconfiguration within mid-eighteenth century debates, this article draws upon the works of political economists and royal councilors in Madrid and puts them in conversation with the words and actions of individuals in and from Cuba, including people of African descent themselves. Because of the central place of the island in eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and reform, as well as its particular demographic situation, Cuba served as a catalyst for these debates about the place of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Spanish empire. Ultimately, between the mid-eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth, this new mode of thought would lead to dramatic transformations in the institution of racial slavery and Spanish imperial political economy.

Kingston

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-115
Author(s):  
Christine Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Entrepreneurs ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Valuable Property ◽  
Considerable Portion ◽  
South Sea

Chapter Two focuses on the urban and seafaring pursuits of a diverse group of women living in early eighteenth-century Kingston. Women of European, Euro-African, and African descent comprised a considerable portion of the city’s free population. They worked in a range of occupations. Some were wealthy merchants who participated in privateering ventures while others operated small-scale shops and taverns. The majority of Kingston’s women entrepreneurs were also enslavers. After gaining a monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish Empire, the South Sea Company made Kingston its base. The city’s female inhabitants readily exploited their access to the burgeoning market in captive Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaveholding was nearly ubiquitous among Kingston’s free and freed women, who treated enslaved people as crucial laborers and as valuable property.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

Abolitionism and the Back-to-Africa Movement in Britain: The Sierra Leone Experiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlin Atanasov ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Black Poor

The article focuses on the settlement of freed black slaves from England and Nova Scotia in Sierra Leone. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, plans were made for the “repatriation” of impoverished migrants of African descent to their “ancestral” land. Such plans were contextually defined by the abolitionist movement in Britain. Abolitionism gained exceptional momentum in the country that played a leading part in the transatlantic slave trade at that time. The movement aimed to end both the slave trade and slavery. The article investigates the activities of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor and especially the role of the prominent British philanthropist and abolitionist Granville Sharp (1735–1813), who made significant efforts to bring the “repatriation” plans to fruition. I argue that the Sierra Leone project was an ambivalent experiment, which should be interpreted in the light of both humanitarian compassion and imperial interests: if, at first, it was premised upon idealism and religious fervour, the desire to set foot in west Africa and to set up a colony there subsequently prevailed. For some Britons, sending impoverished free blacks to distant shores was also an opportunity to expel them from their own “white” society. In this sense, the “repatriation” of Africans was most likely to occur in the form of deportation, a form that suggests the restrictive regime of penal colonies, such as Australia.

‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-216
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
True State ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Nationalism

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Points Of Interest

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

“Legitimate commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew David Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Lower Cost ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mineral Resources ◽  
Strategic Decision ◽  
Commodity Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Slave Traders

Following the loss in 1712 of its previous monopoly over British trade with West Africa, the Royal African Company found itself unable to compete with smaller, lower-cost British slave traders and nearly collapsed entirely. Salvation seemed to arrive in 1720 in the person of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, who led a massive re-capitalization of the company and made the strategic decision to move its focus to the commodity trade between Europe and Africa and on the search for new botanical and mineral resources in Africa itself. While Chandos directed the RAC’s employees in implementing this radical new scheme, he kept it secret from his fellow shareholders, leading them to believe that his plans were aimed at revitalizing the company’s mature but declining line of business in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke’s strategy, however, proved overly ambitious and failed to reverse the company’s decline.

scholarly journals Insuring the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Pearson ◽  
David Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Relative Cost ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
First Time ◽  
Underlying Processes

One important, but overlooked, risk mitigation device that facilitated the growth of the slave trade in the eighteenth century was the increasing availability of insurance for ships and their human cargoes. In this article we explore, for the first time, the relative cost of insurance for British slave traders, the underlying processes by which this key aspect of the business of slavery was conducted, and the factors behind price and other changes over time. Comparisons are also drawn with the transatlantic slave trades of other nations. As well as analyzing the business of underwriting slave voyages, we have two other objectives. First, we explore the meaning of slave insurance from the perspective of those directly involved in the trade. Was it about insuring lives or goods? Second, we provide new estimates of the importance of the slave trade to U.K. marine insurance. Did the former drive the growth of the latter, as Joseph Inikori has claimed?

Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth to Mid-Eighteenth Centuries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The South ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Third ◽  
West Central ◽  
Major Supplier

Which of the major components of the Atlantic world — the Americas, Africa, and Europe — was most immediately affected by the integration of the Old and New Worlds that Columbian contact triggered? On epidemiological grounds alone the Americas would be the choice of most scholars, with Europe, at least prior to the eighteenth century, the least affected. In terms of dramatic economic, demographic, and social consequences of the early stages of Atlantic integration, Africa lies somewhere between the two. Yet if we shift the focus to changes in the nature and size of connections between the continents as opposed to changes within them, the most striking developments between the 1640s and the 1770s relate to Africa, not Europe or the Americas. The Slave Coast was a major supplier of slaves to transatlantic markets. West Central Africa, by far the largest supplier of slaves to the Americas, experienced two diasporas. Captives from the northern ports went to the colonies of northern Europeans, those from Luanda and Benguela in the south went to Brazil. By the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade was close to the highest level it was ever to attain.

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