Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Vincent Carretta
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Olaudah Equiano ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Canonical Status

The backlash against challenging the origin story of Olaudah Equiano, author of the influential autobiography The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, is the subject of this chapter by Vincent Carreta. Since first being published in 1789, the text has achieved canonical status as a rare first-hand account of an African-born person describing the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery. Interesting Narrative was successfully appropriated political propaganda by abolitionists to help end the transatlantic slave trade and abolish slavery. After revealing archival documents calling Equiano’s birth in Africa into question, Caretta describes the firestorm of criticism he faced, including threats of assault, from some scholars. He suggests that the unwillingness of some scholars to confront the possibility that Equiano may have lied about his birthplace is too high stakes as it opens the door to questioning how much of Interesting Narrative is fiction and how much work that relies on the text may require reexamination.

The Independence of Brazil and the Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Anglo-Brazilian Relations, 1822–1826

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The West ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

For 300 years, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade—the forced migration of Africans to work as slaves on the plantations and in the mines of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean—was carried on legally, and on an everincreasing scale, by the merchants of most Western European countries and their colonial counterparts, aided and abetted by African middlemen. On. 25 March 1807, however, after a lengthy struggle, inside and outside Parliament, it was declared illegal for British subjects (and at this point during the Napoleonic Wars at least half the trade was in British hands) to trade in slaves after 1 May 1808. During the previous twenty years there had been a marked growth of intellectual and moral revulsion against the trade (and, in particular, the horrors of the ‘middle passage’) and changing economic conditions, which to some extent reduced the importance to the British economy of the West Indian colonies for whom the trade was a major lifeline and created new interest groups unconnected with and even hostile to them, facilitated its abolition.

‘The “ghost” of it all’: Tragedy, Trauma and a ‘people there and not there’ in Le Rodeur (2016)

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-296
Author(s):  
Celeste-Marie Bernier ◽  
Alan Rice ◽  
Lubaina Himid ◽  
Hannah Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Academic Paper ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cultural Historian

Working with a painterly rather than a poetic language, Himid made the radical decision to do justice not to ‘fettered and blind’ bodies and souls as torn apart by ‘agony and blood’, but to reimagine and recreate empowering narratives of Black diasporic artistry, agency and authority across Le Rodeur (2016–18), a series of acrylic on canvas works which is the subject of this chapter. She was inspired to create these paintings by listening to the pioneering cultural historian Anita Rupprecht deliver an academic paper, entitled ‘Modernity, Melancholy and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Story of the Slave Ship, Le Rodeur (1819)’, in Preston in 2015. As Himid admits, Rupprecht’s talk had an immediate impact by inspiring her own imaginative response. ‘I was having to make pictures while I was listening to her’, she confirms, remembering that ‘I was just listening to her and making pictures in my head about the actual occurrence’. And yet she was all too aware that ‘I couldn’t make paintings of hundreds of people going blind as it was too horrible’. This chapter examines her powerful statement that, ‘I was struck by the horror of the incident but also by the dread of losing sight, especially as a visual artist’, she readily confides, admitting that ‘[i]t was the most frightening thing I could think of’.

Deaths of Slaves in the Middle Passage

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Over Time

It is widely accepted by students of the slave trade that slave mortality during the Middle Passage fell between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first person to make the claim of declining mortality was Philip Curtin, who reopened research on slave mortality in his book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Curtin examined a number of sources, and his conclusion was that “… there is a decreasing rate of loss over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Curtin's book stimulated a great deal of further research, much of it by Herbert Klein. Klein's conclusion was the same as Curtin's: “it is undoubtedly true that over the whole of the 18th century, mortality in the Middle Passage was on the decline.” This result has since been repeated in a number of places. Riley has recently summed up the consensus view on the subject: “Most students of this question report that mortality declined over time, but the available data are sporadic in time and place.” The only dissenting view has come from Postma who found “no discernible trend toward decrease or increase in the overall pattern” in the Dutch trade.

Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Board Ship ◽  
Complex Dataset

The slave trade, death, and misery were inseparable long before abolitionist writers took up the slave trade as a subject in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the historiography there has been widespread recognition that Africans entering the trade died not only during the middle passage but during the process of enslavement and travel in the interior, on the African littoral awaiting shipment, and after arrival in the Americas. Europeans directly involved in the traffic were at risk in the last three of these four phases of transition between life in Africa and life in the Americas, and tended to die at rates comparable to their human cargoes. In the shipboard phase, and probably also in other stages of the journey, mortality in the slave trade normally exceeded that in other long-distance population movements. In the nineteenth century this differential widened as rates on other long-distance routes fell (Cohn, 1984; Eltis, 1984; Grubb, 1987; Klein, 1978; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1989, forthcoming). To date, most explanations have focused on morbidity and mortality on board ship; data on the preembarkation phases are no more available to us today than to the abolitionists 150 years ago. For shipboard mortality, overcrowding on the ship, psychic shock, and violence have not fared well as explanations in the work of the last two decades, although the interplay between the first two and resistance to disease suggests further consideration. The present study focuses on shipboard mortality, but it is based on a large and complex dataset. It begins with a discussion and preliminary analysis of the nineteenth-century data. This is followed by a review of the various hypotheses on mortality in the slave trade.

scholarly journals Theatre activity in the southern Urals at the initial period of the thaw

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-173
Author(s):  
Irina Pavlovna Morozova
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
Southern Urals ◽  
The Political ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
The Southern Urals ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Subject

The paper deals with the problems of theatre activity development in the southern Urals at the initial period of the thaw. The research objective is to define what changes happened in the theatre activity in the Southern Urals after Stalins repressions in 1953-1964. For the research the author used periodicals, archival documents, books about the theater. The research has shown that after Stalins personality cult exposure there were big theater changes in the southern Urals. People became more interested in the theatre. It was in Bashkiria where the theater developed greatly. The paper examines the creative activity of theatres in the southern Urals, Orenburg Region and Bashkortostan, reveals specific features and problems in the functioning of the studied institutions in the era of the thaw, studies repertoire policy of theaters. The repertoire updated and new theaters opened. Actors and directors found new forms of art self-expression. Drama art stops being the weapon of the political propaganda. The author has no opportunity to carry out a comparative analysis of this research with other researches as the subject has not been investigated by anybody yet.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

Greek Slavery

Classics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Economic Class ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
The Subject

The earliest Greek texts known to us already attest to the existence of unfree labor. Despite being widespread and considered essential for the well-being of the dominant elite, even in Antiquity slavery in its various forms sparked debates, and writers speculated about its origins, nature, and justification. The theme gained new impetus in modern times with the transatlantic slave trade and later with the abolitionist movements. But even after slavery was formally abolished, the subject never ceased to engage the minds of historians, sociologists, archaeologists, and philosophers. Writing about slavery has always been affected by contemporary ideologies and their underlying values, as well as by historiographical trends. Thus, in the 20th century, one of the central issues of debate was the question whether, as Marxists believed, slaves comprised an economic class, or, as Neo-Marxists and others have argued, slavery should rather be seen as a social status. In modern times, studies tended initially to be historical and general, but from the mid-20th century monographs on various aspects of slavery have been written by scholars from various disciplines. This article cannot cover all the thousands of publications on slavery or all the trends and approaches, but must be selective. It focuses on the main issues raised by the subject and is meant to provide tools to navigate through the vast scholarship in this area, but also to point to controversies. Some old publications are also cited because they echo the ideologies and concerns of their time. Here, “Greek slavery” means slavery in all areas of Greek settlement and culture, including Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.

Prize voyages and ideas of freedom

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-132
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
African People ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
St Helena ◽  
Naval Officers

To witness the human trauma of the transatlantic slave trade was extraordinary employment for British naval officers, and this chapter examines rare surviving accounts of life on prize voyages, whereby naval officers were tasked with transporting captured slave ships to Admiralty courts for adjudication. It explores the extent to which officers engaged with the individuals they were ‘liberating’ – on captured slavers, on HM ships, or while stationed at the British territories of Sierra Leone or St Helena. Officers’ ideas about freedom, its limits, and its applicability to African people were concepts bound to racial attitudes. A prize voyage could constitute an alternative ‘Middle Passage’ for captive Africans, a state of affairs naval officers could contribute to. This chapter looks at the experiences of captive Africans, and at cases where individual Africans were taken into British guardianship by naval officers.

Slavery Memorials

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
Anny-Dominique Curtius
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Meaningful Use ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Naked Body ◽  
The City

This essay focuses on the beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine along with visual and performance artist Sarah Trouche’s reappropriations of the politically motivated beheading, the Memorial Cap 110 Mémoire et Fraternité, and the traveling Memorial of the Names of Abolition. The study contends that these memorials encapsulate the entangled history and memory of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and interrogate the traditional definition of archives, museums and the institutionalized aesthetics of marble memorials. Hence, the statue of Joséphine is examined as a palimpsestic memorial because of the ideological repurposing of the city scape surrounding the statue, as well as Sarah Trouche’s meaningful use of her naked body as a theatrical canvass to map out cogent solidarities about the turbulent memory of slavery. The historical distinctiveness of the Cap110 Memorial is explored for its power to serve as an intangible witness to the Middle Passage and excavate from under the beauty of its natural environment traces of historical turbulence. As palimpsestic anarchives and post-museums, the Cap110 Memorial along with the Memorial of the Names of the Abolition foster post and decolonial performances of remembrance.

scholarly journals Ship Crowding and Slave Mortality: Missing Observations or Incorrect Measurement?

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1177-1202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Solar ◽  
Nicolas J. Duquette
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Missing Observations ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Incorrect Measurement ◽  
Over Time

Inconsistent measurement of ship tonnage, the denominator in the usual measures of crowded conditions on slave vessels, may confound estimated associations between crowding and slave mortality on the Middle Passage. The tonnages reported inLloyd's Registersare shown to be consistent over time and are used to demonstrate that both the unstandardized and standardized tonnages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database are deeply flawed. Using corrected tonnages, we find that crowding increased mortality only on British slave ships and only before the passage of Dolben's Act in 1788.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document