scholarly journals White Cannibalism in the Illegal Slave Trade

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Manuel Barcia
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Actual Event

Abstract The Portuguese schooner Arrogante was captured in late November 1837 by HMS Snake, off the coast of Cuba. At the time, the Arrogante had more than 330 Africans on board, who had been shipped from the Upper Guinea coast. Once the vessel arrived in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the British authorities apprenticed those who had survived. Shortly after landing, however, the Arrogante’s sailors were accused of slaughtering an African man, cooking his flesh, and forcing the rest of those enslaved on board to eat it. Furthermore, they were also accused of cooking and eating themselves the heart and liver of the same man. This article focuses not so much on the actual event, as on the transatlantic process that followed, during which knowledge was produced and contested, and relative meanings and predetermined cultural notions associated with Europeans and Africans were probed and queried.

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

Bartering for Slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Early Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA A. NEWSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Trading Network

In the context of debates about the definition and origins of globalisation and the role of African agency in the Atlantic slave trade, this chapter examines the commodities traded by Portuguese New Christian slave traders on the Upper Guinea coast in the early 17th century. Based on detailed account books of three slave traders discovered in the Inquisition section of the Archivo General de la Nación in Lima, Peru, it shows how Africans often determined the types and prices of goods exchanged and forced Europeans to adapt to local trade networks. Hence while commodities such as Indian textiles and beads reflected the position of the Portuguese slave traders in a global trading network, at the same time they were actively involved in trading locally produced cloth and beeswax as well as slaves.

scholarly journals Fact and fetish in creolization studies: Herskovits and the problem of induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593

2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Maurer
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

Focuses on the way Melville Herkovits used facts and facticity in his scientific work on creolization, and how these facts related to the theories in his work. Author relates this to the idea of fact as a stand-alone datum, or "fetish", independent of any theory for its existence. He describes how Herkovits in his work presented classifications of intensity of African retentions in different parts of the Americas, as well as of cultural elements, which Herkovits meant to be heuristic, yet, the author argues, seemed to precede the data. Further, the author discusses criticisms on this "economic anthropology". In addition, he sketches how the data as fetish, and related induction, developed out of the scientific revolution in Europe, separating arguments from facts, but also out of colonial ventures and the history of the slave trade in West Africa, making it a part of the study of creolization, of African slavery and the African diaspora. He points out, and applaudes, that Herkovits' theoretical stance changed from a strict empiricism to an awareness of the place of argument, or social convention, in the making of the facts themselves.

What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 5-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley B. Alpern
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Master List ◽  
African Coast ◽  
European Trade

A great deal has been written in recent decades about the Atlantic slave trade, including the mechanics and terms of purchase, but relatively little about what Africans received in return for the slaves and other exports such as gold and ivory. And yet, if one is trying to reconstruct the material culture of, say, the Guinea Coast of West Africa during the slave-trade period, the vast European input cannot be ignored.The written evidence consists of many thousands of surviving bills of lading, cargo manifests, port records, logbooks, invoices, quittances, trading-post inventories, account books, shipping recommendations, and orders from African traders. English customs records of commerce with Africa during the eighteenth century, when the slave trade peaked, alone contain hundreds of thousands of facts. A thorough analysis of all available data would call for the services of a research team equipped with computers, and fill many volumes. Using a portable typewriter (now finally abandoned for WordPerfect) and a card file, and sifting hundreds of published sources, I have over the years compiled an annotated master list of European trade goods sold on a portion of the Guinea Coast from Portuguese times to the mid-nineteenth century. The geographic focus is the shoreline from Liberia to Nigeria; from it more slaves left for the New World than from any comparable stretch of the African coast. I call the area “Kwaland” for the Kwa language family to which nearly all the indigenous peoples belong.

Sortings and ‘Ounce Trade’ in the West African Slave Trade

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Polanyi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Two Systems

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.

African Merchants, Notables and the Slave Trade at Old Calabar, 1720: Evidence from the National Archives of Scotland

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt ◽  
Eric J. Graham
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Detailed List ◽  
British Colonies

In late 1719 the brigantine Hannover sailed from Port Glasgow on a slaving voyage to the Guinea coast. Shipowner Robert Bogle jr. and partners hired surgeon Alexander Horsburgh as supercargo to supervise their trade for provisions and slaves along the Windward Coast, Gold Coast, and at Old Calabar. The Hannover arrived off the Windward Coast in early March 1720, and during three weeks Horsburgh purchased two tons of rice and 21 enslaved Africans on Bogle's behalf. From 5 April to 2 May he traded on the Gold Coast, loading 75 chests of corn and an additional 22 slaves. The Hannover then proceeded to Old Calabar, and from late May to early July Horsburgh purchased 75 more slaves and 11,400 yams—stowing 6,000 tubers in the week before departure to the Americas. Horsburgh also purchased sixteen slaves on his own account—eight along the Windward and Gold Coasts and eight at Calabar. Illness and death followed the Hannover on its “unaccountable long passage” to the Portuguese island Anno Bom (31 August-4 September) and British colonies Barbados (arriving 31 October) and St. Kitts (November-December).Eighty-seven of 134 Africans survived the voyage, only to be sold as slaves in the West Indies.The journey of the Hannover, noteworthy as one of the few Scottish-based voyages in the British slave trade, is important for Africanists because the surviving ship's accounts contain the first detailed list of African traders and notables in Old Calabar history.

scholarly journals William Davenport, the Slave Trade, and Merchant Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century Liverpool

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nicholas James Radburn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Business History ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ivory Trade ◽  
Financial Securities ◽  
Merchant Community

<p>This thesis examines the business history of William Davenport (1725-1797), a Liverpool slave trading merchant from 1748 until 1786. Through an examination of a recently discovered collection of Davenport's business papers and personal letters, this thesis places Davenport in the context of Liverpool's development as a slaving port, and the growth of the town's slaving merchant community. It explains how Davenport became one of the largest slaving merchants of his generation, and one of the wealthiest Guinea merchants in Liverpool's history. To explain Davenport's rise the thesis focuses on how he managed his slaving company. It studies two distinct areas of the Guinea coast where he traded for slaves - Old Calabar and Cameroon - and demonstrates how he cultivated merchant partners, and developed a supply chain of trading goods, to suit the unique conditions of both African markets. The thesis also explores Davenport's business profits by examining his returns from several different areas of investment, including the slave trade, the ivory trade and his speculation in financial securities. By building a composite picture of Davenport's diverse business concerns the thesis argues that the profits of the slave trade were crucial to his financial success. Davenport's enterprising expansion of the slave trade into the Cameroon in the 1750s was decisive in generating his slaving profits, and ultimately his wealth.</p>

Everyday Commodities, the Rivers of Guinea, and the Atlantic World: The Beeswax Export Trade, c.1450–c.1800

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL W. TUCK
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Export Trade ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Common People ◽  
Commodity Export ◽  
The Subject

This chapter argues that it was the actions of many common people in West Africa that created the trade systems linking the Atlantic World and the Upper Guinea coast. On one hand, Africans of the region were largely subsistence agriculturalists, but their need or desire for goods beyond what they could produce (or produce easily) led them to develop a commodity export trade. Important among these Africans were producers of non-slave commodities such as beeswax, which was exported from many locations along the coast but has not been the subject of study. The chapter traces the development of the beeswax export trade and the effects it had on local communities. In particular, it shows that as the slave trade grew to dominate commerce, the production and trade of beeswax by stateless people such as the Diola allowed them both to defend their communities from slave raiders and participate as raiders themselves.

scholarly journals The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 836-867
Author(s):  
Jake Subryan Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Coercive Intervention

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.

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