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.

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>

Archaeological Perspectives on the Atlantic Slave Trade: Contrasts in Time and Space in Benin and Guinea

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This chapter explores the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the European settlements of the New World on two settings along the West African coast. The Atlantic slave trade engaged societies ranging from complexly organised ‘states’ to loosely organised societies based on diverse local leadership. The chapter discusses archaeological investigations of one complex setting, that of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Hueda and Dahomey societies of the Bight of Benin, and contrasts those findings with preliminary results from the nineteenth-century sites along the Rio Pongo, Guinea, where the slave trade was conducted by a range of societies of less complex organisation. These investigations demonstrate that the specific responses of local African people to the Atlantic slave trade were highly variable.

The Decline of Caribbean Smuggling

1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore C. Hinckley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
African Slave ◽  
The North ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
High Esteem

In the 1760's, the commerce of the British West Indies followed four general channels: (1) the trade with the Mother Country; (2) the exchange of goods and money with continental sister colonies to the north; (3) the African slave trade; and (4) the illegal intercourse with Spain's New World possessions. So extensive was the last that Josiah Tucker referred to it as “that prodigious clandestine trade.” This paper will explore one facet of that traffic: its eclipse in Jamaica in the years immediately after the 1763 Peace of Paris.Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only Bridgetown in Barbados and Kingston in Jamaica were markets of “conspicuous size and wide commercial connections.” The unloading of only a few cargoes would glut the capital towns of the lesser islands. Notwithstanding this fact, these islands held a coveted position in the Empire. London's high esteem for these possessions rested on their agricultural value, their importance in the crucial bullion exchange, and their utility as naval bases.

PAWNS ON THE GOLD COAST: THE RISE OF ASANTE AND SHIFTS IN SECURITY FOR DEBT, 1680–1750

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH SPICKSLEY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
Secure Control ◽  
African Coast ◽  
European Trade ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Debt Recovery

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Europeans on the Gold Coast took gold pawns as security for debt, but from the early eighteenth century, they turned increasingly toward the use of human pawns. This shift was the result of a transformation in levels of demand for gold amongst African sellers, most notably the Asante, who began to secure control over local gold sources from c. 1700. The change in demand for gold was accompanied by a rise in slave prices on the West African coast, but it was the indigenous system of debt recovery that proved crucial to the success of European trade.

Mortality in the Eighteenth-Century French Slave Trade

1980 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Stein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Rate ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Death Rate ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
African Coast

The eighteenth-century French slave trade claimed the lives of at least 150,000 African captives and 20,000 French crewmembers. Traditionally, the ‘Middle Passage’ has been held responsible for these deaths, but detailed information from the port of Nantes shows that the time spent on the African coast could be just as deadly as the crossing, at least for the crew. During the century nearly 8 percent of the crews died along the coast, compared with 5 per cent at sea. The African death rate for the crew actually rose in the second half of the century because increased competition made for longer stays in Africa. At the same time, faster crossing times led to a decline in the death rate at sea and yielded a fairly constant overall rate for the century.The situation was somewhat different for the captives. Although the data are less comprehensive, they indicate a generally declining mortality rate during the century. This was due ultimately to reduced sailing times from Africa to the West Indies. Like the crewmembers, the captives benefited from the quicker crossings of the post-1763 period. Unlike the crew, however, captives were less affected by the increased time in African waters. More familiar with the African environment, they did not suffer as much from the extended stay along the coast, and by the end of the century slave mortality was lower than crew mortality. Unfortunately, the data are lacking to relate mortality either to trading sites in Africa or to Caribbean destinations.

The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Age And Sex ◽  
Numbers Game

The “numbers game” (Curtin, 1969: ch. 1; Darity, 1985) remains a favorite event in academic jousting over the Atlantic slave trade, not only because unexpectedly detailed quantitative records continue to turn up in archival repositories but also, more recently, because of the suppleness with which scholars have applied data discovered by the first generation of researchers to new, and increasingly more sophisticated, historical problems. Old, relatively formal, analytical categories—decades; large, internally diverse stretches of the African coast; colonial/national aggregates on the American side of the Atlantic—although comparable among themselves, now seem more revealing of the data than of the history of the trade and are very salutarily giving way to questions and issues arising more directly from the experience itself: the causes of slave mortality, the economic strategies of slavers, age and sex distinctions among the slaves, the meaning of slaving for specific regions in Africa, and the trade’s contributions to events in Europe and the Americas. Use of quantitative data now presupposes the discovery of historically relevant categories of analysis and at the same time informs the meaning of the categories employed.

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>

THE ANNUAL VOLUME AND REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE, 1780–1807

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN D. BEHRENDT
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower Bound ◽  
Upper Bound ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Regional Distribution ◽  
Extended Year ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Annual Volume

In a recent article David Richardson revised estimates of the volume and African regional distribution of the eighteenth-century British slave trade. Richardson calculated that British slave vessels sailing between 1698 and 1807 – to the year of Abolition – embarked 3,052,509 slaves on the African coast. This figure falls at the midpoint between lower-bound estimates made by Curtin in 1969 and upper-bound estimates published by Inikori seven years later. Further, Richardson provided historians with the first extended year-by-year series of British slave exports; and he separated the trading data of the three principal British slaving ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol, which comprised 50, 28 and 18 per cent of the trade, respectively.

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