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>

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>

Sierra Leone

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.

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.

The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Set Up

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

The Gaigneur Clan in the Seventeenth-Century Canada Trade

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.F. Bosher
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Business History ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trading Firm ◽  
Maritime Community

This essay follows the development of Franco-Canadian maritime trade over the course of the seventeenth century, by documenting the business history of the Gaigneur merchant family, headed by Pierre Gaigneur. The Gaigneurs trading firm sent more ships, goods, and people to Canada during the seventeenth century than any other firm of the era; this essay seeks to determine the reasons for their success. It considers the maritime community of La Rochelle; the Huguenot community; potential signs of religious compromise by the Roman Catholic Gaigneurs when faced with business pressure. The conclusion claims the dual support of both Church and State permitted the expansion of trade and the financial success of the Gaigneut family.

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.

Imagining the Conquest

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-62
Author(s):  
Elena A. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Regional Autonomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Overseas Territories ◽  
The City

Chapter 1 gives a history of British expansion into Caribbean waters claimed by Spain and developing conflict over commercial access to and political control over the island of Cuba. A deep-seated obsession with capturing Havana developed as early as the sixteenth century, during these years of English and later British advance. In the early eighteenth century, the British-dominated slave trade to Spanish America and the contraband traffic that accompanied it led to conflicts with Spain that precipitated a cycle of wars. The Spanish monarchy sought exclusive political and commercial control over its overseas territories, yet, to its dismay, the local dynamics of these wars led to even more regional autonomy and integration for its overseas possessions. Through a cycle of eighteenth-century wars targeting Spanish America, British subjects developed closer commercial ties with Havana, and British commanders gained better knowledge of how to attack the city with each failed attempt.

The African Slave Trade and the Construction of the Iberian Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
South America ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
South Atlantic ◽  
The South ◽  
African Slave ◽  
History Of

Scholarly studies of the colonization of the Americas—especially of Latin America—have tended to minimize the role played by Africans and the African slave trade, treating the history of conquest and colonialism as a story of inevitable European domination of the hemisphere. However, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, colonialism in the Americas depended upon the exportation of slaves from Africa, a massive undertaking that was supported not only by Iberian Royal families but also by convoluted ideological and theological justifications elaborated by legal and religious scholars. During this period, Portugal dominated the slave trade, raiding its colonies in Southern Africa to supply its plantations (many run by Jesuits) in South America. In this sense, the story of the South Atlantic is a story of encounters and exchanges between Africa and the Americas.

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