10. The Dispersal of African Slaves in the West by Dutch Slave Traders, 163°-18°3

AbstractThe Yoruba are an important ethnic group mainly occupying Southwestern Nigeria. Mainly for genetic reasons, this very large tribe happens to present the highest dizygotic twinning rate in the world (4.4 % of all maternities). The high perinatal mortality rate associated with such pregnancies has contributed to the integration of a special twin belief system within the African traditional religion of this tribe. The latter is based on the concept of a supreme deity called Olodumare or Olorun, assisted by a series of secondary gods (Orisha) while Yoruba religion also involves immortality and reincarnation of the soul based on the animistic cult of ancestors. Twins are therefore given special names and believed to detain special preternatural powers. In keeping with their refined artistic tradition, the Yoruba have produced numerous wooden statuettes called Ibejis that represent the souls of deceased newborn twins and are involved in elaborate rituals. Among Yoruba traditional beliefs and lore some twin-related themes are represented which are also found in other parts of the world. Basic features of the original Yoruba beliefs have found their way into the religious traditions of descendants of African slaves imported in the West Indies and in South America.

Download Full-text

“In this Trade, No Places are Held:” Involvement of Portuguese slave traders in the slave trade between Africa and Brazil (1818-1828)

História (São Paulo) ◽

10.1590/1980-436920170000000039 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 36 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Jaime Rodrigues

Keyword(s):

Slave Trade ◽

International Treaties ◽

Slave Traders ◽

African Slaves

ABSTRACT Between 1818 and 1828, the Portuguese Board of Trade (known locally as the Junta do Comércio) gave ships departing from Lisbon permission to traffic African slaves to Brazil. This authorization was the result of international treaties signed between the monarchies of Portugal and Britain in 1815 and 1817. This article discusses the context in which the slave traders functioned, the ways in which they received license to trade, and how the source documents from the Portuguese Board of Trade during this period provide important information on the slave traders based in Portuguese harbors.

Download Full-text

The Return of the Bandeira: Economic Calamity, Historical Memory, and Armed Expeditions to the Sertão in Minas Gerais, 1750-1808

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.1353/tam.2005.0025 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 61 (3) ◽

pp. 429-461 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Hal Langfur

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Historical Memory ◽

Minas Gerais ◽

Colonial Period ◽

The West ◽

Critical Feature ◽

Agricultural Export ◽

Mato Grosso ◽

African Slaves

Historians of colonial Brazil have conventionally located the conclusion of the great era of bandeira-led conquest somewhere near the end of the seventeenth century. The onset of the colony's gold cycle, corresponding with a series of major inland mineral strikes, reoriented those most actively engaged in the bandeira enterprise. Concentrated in the southern coastal captaincy of São Vicente, later, São Paulo, these wilderness adventurers had explored Portuguese America's immense interior and hunted its indigenous inhabitants. When their accompanying search for alluvial riches finally had born fruit, the Paulista backwoodsmen remade themselves into miners and merchants. The bandeirantes had first discovered gold in 1693 in Brazil's southeastern interior, the region that would soon acquire the name Minas Gerais or the General Mines; they made secondary strikes far to the west in Mato Grosso and Goiás in 1718 and 1725. Many then found themselves quickly displaced by the tide of Portuguese fortune-seekers and their African slaves who followed the paths now opened to the mining zones. As gold and then diamonds flooded the Atlantic world in unprecedented quantities, the colony's subsequent historical legacy would accrue not to São Paulo's peripatetic rustics but to those who consolidated control over the flow of riches. During the second half of the eighteenth century, with the mineral washings already in decline, attention would shift still further away from wilderness exploits, supposed to reflect a bygone era, back toward the coastal agricultural export enclaves that had traditionally preoccupied the Portuguese crown. The scholarly concerns of a later era would generally follow suit. As a consequence, the persistence of armed expeditions of exploration and conquest, which continued to roam the unmapped interior of Portuguese America, would go all but unnoticed as a critical feature of the late colonial period.

Download Full-text

British Industry and the West Indies Plantations

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/s014555320002068x ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 117-149 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

William Darity

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

West Indies ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Well Being ◽

The West ◽

British Industry ◽

Economic Progress ◽

Mother Country ◽

African Slaves ◽

British Colonies

Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British Colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce? And the greater the Number of Negroes imported into our Colonies, from Africa, will not the Exportation of British Manufactures among the Africans be in Proportion, they being paid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise our Plantations abound in Negroes, will not more Land become cultivated, and both better and greater Variety of Plantation Commodities be produced? As those Trades are subservient to the Well Being and Prosperity of each other; so the more either flourishes or declines, the other must be necessarily affected; and the general Trade and Navigation of their Mother Country, will be proportionably benefited or injured. May we not therefore say, with equal Truth, as the French do in their before cited Memorial, that the general Navigation of Great Britain owes all its Encrease and Splendor to the Commerce of its American and African Colonies; and that it cannot be maintained and enlarged otherwise than from the constant Prosperity of both those branches, whose Interests are mutual and inseparable?[Postlethwayt 1968c: 6]The atlantic slave trade remains oddly invisible in the commentaries of historians who have specialized in the sources and causes of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiosity contrasts sharply with the perspective of eighteenth-century strategists who, on the eve of the industrial revolution, placed great stock in both the trade and the colonial plantations as vital instruments for British economic progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, once described by the imperial historian Charles Ryle Fay (1934: 2–3) as Britain’s major “spokesmen” for the eighteenth century, both placed the importation of African slaves into the Americas at the core of their visions of the requirements for national expansion. Fay (ibid.: 3) also described both of them as “mercantilists hardening into a manufacturers’ imperialism.” For such a “manufacturers’ imperialism” to be a success, both Gee and Postlethwayt saw the need for extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies.

Download Full-text

Língua de Preto, the language of the African slave community in Portugal (16th–19th centuries)

Language Ecology ◽

10.1075/le.18001.kih ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 (1-2) ◽

pp. 77-90

Author(s):

Alain Kihm

Keyword(s):

18Th Century ◽

West African ◽

16Th Century ◽

The West ◽

Portuguese Population ◽

African Slave ◽

15Th Century ◽

Folk Literature ◽

African Slaves ◽

The 19Th Century

Abstract Língua de Preto ‘language of the Blacks’ (LdP) is the conventional name for the basic variety of Portuguese spoken by the West African slaves deported to Portugal from the end of the 15th century onwards, who formed an important and visible minority within the Portuguese population until the end of the 19th century. The restructured Portuguese they used with the white Portuguese and among themselves is partially known to us through theatre and folk literature. Although its heyday was the 16th century, it apparently continued in use until the 18th century. The present article tries to account for its emergence and continuance and to assess its possible contribution to the formation of West African Portuguese Creoles. What LdP implies for the Portuguese attitude toward language issues is also examined.

Download Full-text

Contested enslavement: the Portuguese in Angola and the problem of debt, c. 1600–1800

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115315000467 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 39 (2) ◽

pp. 247-275

Author(s):

Judith Spicksley

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Roman Law ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

The West ◽

Central Coast ◽

Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽

Modern Period ◽

Slave Traders

The Portuguese were keen slave traders on the west central coast of Africa in the early modern period, but governors in Angola appear to have been increasingly unhappy about certain aspects of enslavement in relation to debt, and in particular that of children. Slavery for debt was uncommon in early modern Europe, where three arguments, drawn from Roman law, were usually cited by way of justification: birth; war; and self-sale. Cavazzi, an Italian Capuchin missionary travelling around Angola between 1654 and 1665, suggested several similarities between the legal justifications for slavery in Africa and Europe, but also pointed up a major difference: while in Angola in the early modern period enslavement could result from a number of instances of default, in Portugal at the same time - and in Europe more widely – debtors tended to find themselves imprisoned if they defaulted on a payment, rather than enslaved. This paper will consider the nature of debt enslavement in Angola in the early modern period, and how it impacted on the transatlantic slave trade.

Download Full-text

Negotiation, Trade and the Rituals of Encounter: An Examination of the Slave-Trading Voyage of De Zon, 1775–1776

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300001182 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 39-58 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Andrew Alexander

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

West Coast ◽

English Language ◽

Close Reading ◽

The West ◽

Historical Experience ◽

Daily Experiences ◽

Slave Traders

AbstractThe intention of this paper is to fill a gap in a rich yet underrepresented aspect of Indian Ocean slave history. I have elected to found this study on a close reading of a journal from a slave-trading vessel that sought slaves for the Cape in Madagascar in the mid-1770s. This vessel, De Zon, conducted a slave-trading operation on behalf of the VOC along the west coast of Madagascar from May 1775 to January 1776. I have undertaken a close reading of the journal maintained by the merchant of De Zon, so as to write a history sensitive to the daily experiences of the slave traders in Madagascar, as well as to the codes and discourse through which this experience was filtered.This paper is primarily concerned with the experience of negotiation and trading as it was recorded by the VOC merchants on the vessels, and is drawn predominantly from the first trading encounter of the crew of De Zon when they arrived in Madagascar in 1775. In contrast to the surveys that comprise the majority of the English-language scholarship on slave trading in Madagascar, this paper is founded on a close reading of particular episodes; it thus represents an attempt at a micronarrative that illustrates and details the historical experience of VOC slave trading on the island at a particular juncture.

Download Full-text

Antislavery and Imperialism: The British Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Opening of Fernando Po, 1827–1829

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115320000108 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 178-195

Author(s):

Jeff Pardue

Keyword(s):

Slave Trade ◽

West African ◽

Short Term ◽

The West ◽

Slave Traders

AbstractThis article chronicles the construction of the first permanent foreign settlement on the West African island of Fernando Po (today called Bioko) as part of the British effort to suppress the slave trade in the 1820s. The settlement ended centuries of relative isolation by the indigenous Bubi who hitherto had successfully navigated between occasional trade with outsiders and repelling slave traders. Although British plans ultimately failed, the settlement remained, as did a large portion of the settlers. This article argues that the disruptive power of suppression created the conditions for a colonial shift toward integration of the island into the larger Euro–West African world. While the settlement's influence grew in the short term through its successful leveraging of economic and military resources, it was the landing of liberated slaves that would have the greatest long-term significance, and highlights the (often unintentional) connection between antislavery and imperialism.

Download Full-text