Diets, Food Supplies, and the African Slave Trade in Early Seventeenth-Century Spanish America

2014 ◽  
pp. 54-89
Author(s):  
Linda Newson ◽  
Susie Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
African Slave

Diets, Food Supplies and the African Slave Trade in Early Seventeenth-Century Spanish America

2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda A. Newson ◽  
Susie Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Labor Income ◽  
Common People ◽  
African Slave ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Common

Much has been written about the spread of Old World crops and livestock in the Americas. However, very little is known, except in very general terms, about the availability of different foods, diets and nutrition, particularly among the common people, in different regions of Spanish America in the early colonial period. This derives in part from the shortage of evidence, but it also reflects the difficulties of researching these complex issues, where environmental conditions, access to land and labor, income distribution, regulation of food supplies and prices, as well as food traditions, all interact.

THE FIRST GREAT WAVES: AFRICAN PROVENANCE ZONES FOR THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE TO CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, 1570–1640

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID WHEAT
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

ABSTRACTDrawing on port entry records for 487 ships disembarking nearly 80,000 captives in Cartagena de Indias, the primary slaving port in early colonial Spanish America, this article provides a new assessment of the relative importance of major African provenance zones for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Upper Guinea and Angola furnished roughly equal shares of forced migrants to Cartagena between 1570 and 1640, with a smaller wave of captives from Lower Guinea. While Angola eventually replaced Upper Guinea as the main source of slave traffic to Cartagena, the shift was more gradual than scholars have previously believed.

The Domestic Slave Trade in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

1968 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Brady
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Domestic Trade ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Considerable Detail

The International slave trade which developed between the African slave depots and Spanish America during the sixteenth century has been the subject of several significant studies. These indicate in considerable detail the origins of the slave trade, the sources from which Negro slaves were obtained, and the historical development of the commerce within the Spanish imperial system. There emerges a broad view of the flow of human merchandize, in generally increasing volume, across the Atlantic and of the increasing refinement of its regulation. Other studies of mining, agricultural and pastoral occupations, the encomienda, and the urban guild system reveal the utilization of the Negro slaves as a labor force in New Spain. The distribution of the slaves among the various occupations resulted in a dispersion which makes classification by type of work or location tenuous. This combination of a unified pattern of international trade and a disparate utilization of the slaves suggests an area of fruitful investigation. That area is the domestic trade by which the slaves arriving at the ports of New Spain ultimately reached the consumers who used their labor.

Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.

1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (59) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein ◽  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

Mooring Aslima

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Zainab Cheema
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Sex Worker

Abstract In Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, the entanglement of Spain and Morocco emerges through the diasporic figure of Aslima, the Moroccan sex worker. This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pandiasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.

To “experiment with a parcel of negros”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-69
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Maika
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Collaborative Model ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Private Investors

Abstract In late 1659, the Dutch West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber began an “experiment” intended to bring a regularized slave trade to New Amsterdam. With Curaçao as a reliable source of enslaved Africans, the Amsterdam Chamber opened the slave trade to independent investors and merchants, following a collaborative model between a state-sponsored corporation and private investors used elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic world. A variety of commercial actors responded to the experiment, devising speculative strategies to incorporate enslaved people into their commercial portfolios. This essay tracks the strategies conceived by New Amsterdam merchants, local wic representatives, and some independent Amsterdam investors, and reveals the experiment’s uneven progression, modulated by changing regional conditions and regular adjustments and reversals by the Amsterdam Chamber. This article adds a new dimension to studies of the early North American regional slave trade, typically seen from an English perspective, by appreciating Dutch New Amsterdam’s legacy.

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