Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1840

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Financial Strategy ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Salvador Da Bahia ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Women And Children

Between 1500 and 1840, ships under Portuguese colors embarked more than 5 million enslaved men, women and children from the coasts of Africa. Despite its position as the preeminent slave trading empire in the Atlantic World, no studies have systematically traced the evolution in maritime investment practices in Portugal and its American colonies which propelled this massive forced transportation of captive Africans. Beginning with Portuguese merchants’ earliest forays into Atlantic trade, on the West African island of Cabo Verde in the fifteenth century, maritime cargoes were collectively owned through the distribution of small shares. Drawing on medieval Mediterranean precedents, these collective, legally constructed partnerships opened early transoceanic trading opportunities to a diverse group of traders, colonists, and mariners, creating a decentralized mercantile trade which diffused profits throughout slave trading communities. Slaving merchants in Salvador da Bahia adopted this collectivist model of investment by the early eighteenth century, converting commercial disadvantages into a prosperous and durable trade which wove together the economic interests of a heterogeneous cross-section of Salvador’s inhabitants—including merchants, their families and slaves, and mariners—within the business of slaving. This article traces the persistence of this financial strategy, and argues that it enabled the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador.

Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Fage
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
African Society ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
Central Sudan ◽  
Contrary View

This paper examines three views which have been widely held about slavery and the slave trade in West Africa, and which have tended to mould interpretations of its history, especially for the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These are:(1) That the institution of slavery was endemic in, and a natural feature of, indigenous West African society, so that when foreigners arrived in West Africa with a demand for slaves, West Africans were able immediately to organize an export trade in slaves on an ever-increasing scale.(2) A contrary view, that it was the external demands for labour which led to a great growth of the institution of slavery in West Africa, and so corrupted its indigenous society.(3) A view which may or may not be combined with (2), namely that the external demand for slaves became so considerable that there was a disastrous effect on its population.Relevant evidence is touched upon from about the eleventh century onwards, and a fourth interpretation is developed which seems better to fit the economic and social realities which can be ascertained.In essence this is that economic and commercial slavery and slave-trading were not natural features of West African society, but that they developed, along with the growth of states, as a form of labour mobilization to meet the needs of a growing system of foreign trade in which, initially, the demand for slaves as trade goods was relatively insignificant. What might be termed a ‘slave economy’ was generally established in the Western and Central Sudan by about the fourteenth century at least, and had certainly spread to the coasts around the Senegal and in Lower Guinea by the fifteenth century.The European demand for slaves for the Americas, which reached its peak from about 1650 to about 1850, accentuated and expanded the internal growth of both slavery and the slave trade. But this was essentially only one aspect of a very wide process of economic and political development and social change, in West Africa. The data recently assembled and analysed by Curtin for the volume and distribution of the export slave trade do not suggest that the loss of population and other effects of the export of labour to the Americas need have had universally damaging effects on the development of West Africa. Rather, it is suggested, West African rulers and merchants reacted to the demand with economic reasoning, and used it to strengthen streams of economic and political development that were already current before the Atlantic slave trade began.

Africa in the Atlantic World, C.1760 – C. 1840

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Sahara Desert ◽  
The West ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Third ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

The transatlantic slave trade peaked in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when more than 80,000 slaves annually were being shipped from Africa for the Americas. This overshadowed the older-established trade in slaves northwards from West Africa across the Sahara Desert to the Muslim world, which was probably under 10,000 annually. Despite the long history of commerce, direct European involvement in Africa remained limited. In contrast to the Americas, European colonial occupation of African territory was minimal before the later nineteenth century. Some African states maintained diplomatic relations with their trading partners across the Atlantic. The operation of the Atlantic trade had the effect of linking up different parts of Africa with each other, as well as with Europe and the Americas. The autonomous (or northern-oriented) character of the West African historical process might seem to be self-evidently illustrated by one of the major developments of this period, a series of jihads, or ‘Islamic Revolutions’, in which Muslim clerics seized power from existing ruling groups.

Reversals of Exile: Williams Sassine’s Wirriyamu and Tierno Monénembo’s Pelourinho

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Audrey Small
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
West African ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Point Of Reference

Abstract:This essay examines two novels by exiled Guinean writers in which physical space functions as a central point of reference for very different, though related, considerations of traumatized memory, identity, and exile. In Williams Sassine’s Wirriyamu (1976), a violent and violated rural landscape becomes emblematic of a specific traumatic event occurring within the time frame of the novel and of contemporary political reality; while in Tierno Monénembo’s Pelourinho (1995), a present-day cityscape provides consistently uncertain territory for thinking through a trauma that transcends history, that of the transatlantic slave trade. This article seeks to examine some of the ways in which contemporary trauma theory may be useful in reading Francophone West African fiction as well as some of the limitations of this theory in its applications to this corpus.

scholarly journals “We Are Suffering Here”

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Maarten Bedert
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
West African ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Physical Point ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Local Levels ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Liberia is a state built on a history of migration. From the transatlantic slave trade to its contemporary generation of transnational citizens, images of elsewhere have always informed this West African country’s local and national discussions of integration and exclusion. This paper shows how historical imaginations and representations of ‘here’ and ‘there’, of ‘suffering’ and ‘escape’, inform contemporary discourses of belonging in Liberia. I argue that the imagination of civilisation – kwii – and distinction plays an important role in the ways distance and mobility are perceived and articulated, both from a physical point of view and a moral-social point of view, at transnational and local levels. Rather than being merely tied to a national elite, the imagination of mobility is, I demonstrate, linked to an ethos of suffering articulated at all levels of society, informed by the experience of structural violence and crises over time.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Carmen Fracchia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Mediterranean

The African presence in imperial Spain, from the last quarter of the fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, was due to institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought 700,000–800,000 Africans as slaves to the Crowns of Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. During the same period and in the same territories, the Mediterranean slave trade was responsible for the presence of 300,000–400,000 Moor, Berber, and Turk slaves. According to Alessandro Stella, if we add those born in these European territories, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula and islands during the early modern period. The black presence was ubiquitous in the south of these territories and in the main cities of the centre and the north, as we shall see in ...

scholarly journals Bringing Slavery into the Light in Postcolonial Portugal

Museum Worlds ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Paula Mota Santos
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
City Council ◽  
Theoretical Construct ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Colonial Order

In 2009, in Lagos, Portugal, the remains of 158 bodies of fifteenth-century enslaved Africans were unearthed. In 2016, Lagos City Council inaugurated a slavery-themed exhibition in collaboration with the Portuguese Committee of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Through an analysis of the exhibition’s rhetoric and poetics, I argue that the former is yet another instance of Lusotropicalism, a theoretical construct developed by Gilberto Freyre throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to support the construct of Brazil as a racial democracy, and appropriated by Portugal to support the “benign” character of its colonial system. As a consequence, slavery and Portugal’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, although apparently brought into the light in this exhibition, are in fact hidden in plain sight because both the rhetorical and poetic devices at play conspire to evade addressing the colonial order and its historical consequences, both past and present.

scholarly journals Genetic Diversity of the Hepatitis B Virus Strains in Cuba: Absence of West-African Genotypes despite the Transatlantic Slave Trade

PLoS ONE ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. e0125052 ◽  
Author(s):  
Licel A. Rodríguez Lay ◽  
Marité B. Corredor ◽  
Maria C. Villalba ◽  
Susel S. Frómeta ◽  
Meilin S. Wong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Diversity ◽  
Hepatitis B Virus ◽  
Hepatitis B ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
B Virus ◽  
Virus Strains

From Trinidad and Tobago to the World: Determining the role of Calypso in a new Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 7-11
Author(s):  
Malek Abdel-Shehid
Keyword(s):  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
West African ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
New Era ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Cultural Sovereignty ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
Musical Cultures

Calypso is a popular Caribbean musical genre that originated in the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The genre was developed primarily by enslaved West Africans brought to the region via the transatlantic slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although West-African Kaiso music was a major influence, the genre has also been shaped by other African genres, and by Indian, British, French, and Spanish musical cultures. Emerging in the early twentieth century, Calypso became a tool of resistance by Afro-Caribbean working-class Trinbagonians. Calypso flourished in Trinidad due to a combination of factors—namely, the migration of Afro-Caribbean people from across the region in search of upward social mobility. These people sought to expose the injustices perpetrated by a foreign European and a domestic elite against labourers in industries such as petroleum extraction. The genre is heavily anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-elitist, and it advocated for regional integration. Although this did not occur immediately, Calypsonians sought to establish unity across the region regardless of race, nationality, and class through their songwriting and performing. Today, Calypso remains a unifying force and an important part of Caribbean culture. Considering Calypso's history and purpose, as well as its ever-changing creators and audiences, this essay will demonstrate that the goal of regional integration is not possible without cultural sovereignty.

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