Restoration Legacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-151
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Impact

This chapter looks at William Congreve's enormously popular but now unfamiliar play The Mourning Bride (1697) alongside Aphra Behn's play about an Indian queen, The Widow Ranter, and her heroic novella about an enslaved African prince, Oroonoko. The Mourning Bride has become almost invisible in scholarship, but it remained one of the most frequently performed tragedies throughout the eighteenth century and consolidated Congreve's reputation as a serious artist. This tragedy persists mostly through the misquotation “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. The discussion focuses on Zara, a powerful African queen reduced to captivity and humiliated by her European lover for whom she betrays her nation. Zara echoes the powerful Indian queens created by John Dryden. Dryden's Mesoamerican plays first appeared at the beginning of England's entry into the African slave trade in the form of a royal monopoly; The Mourning Bride appeared in the midst of a pamphlet war over the fate of the Royal African Company generated by the threat to its monopoly when its governor, James II, fled the country. While The Mourning Bride does not depict plantation slavery or the slave trade itself, it nevertheless registers the impact of trafficking in African bodies. Congreve's Zara evokes the exotic queens of the Restoration, but is a more complicated figure who demands respect for her dignity and empathy over her abuse. As the chapter suggests, Zara moved audiences not just as a “woman scorned,” but as an African who has been deracinated and enslaved.

The London Committee and mobilization of public opinion against the slave trade

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractDuring the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

scholarly journals Slave Markets and Exchange in the Malay World: The Sulu Sultanate, 1770–1878

1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Significant Bearing

The impact of the West's commercial intrusion in China towards the end of the eighteenth century had significant bearing on the growth of the slave trade in Southeast Asia. It led to the crystallization of a permanent slave traffic around organized markets and depots in the Sulu Archipelago. Jolo Island, as the centre of a redistributive network encompassing the Sulu zone, became the most important slave centre by 1800. This had not always been the case. Most accounts of the Sulu Sultanate written before 1780 indicate that the internal demand for slaves at Jolo was on a much smaller scale than it was destined to become in the nineteenth century. These early writers reported that it was often more profitable for the Taosug, the dominant ethnic group in the Sulu Archipelago, to deliver slaves to the Magindanao and Bugis merchants of Cotabato (Mindanao) and Pasir (Borneo) for trans-shipment to Makassar and Batavia, than employ them in their own settlements.

The African Slave Trade and Modern Household Finance

2020 ◽  
Vol 130 (630) ◽  
pp. 1817-1841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Levine ◽  
Chen Lin ◽  
Wensi Xie
Keyword(s):  
Financial Services ◽  
Deleterious Effect ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Household Finance ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Access To Credit ◽  
Ethnic Group Differences ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
The Impact

Abstract We evaluate the impact of the African slave trade between 1400 and 1900 on modern household finance. Exploiting cross-country and cross-ethnic group differences in the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa, we find that slave exports during the 1400–1900 period are negatively associated with current measures of household (a) access to financial services, (b) access to credit, (c) use of mobile finance and (d) trust in financial institutions, suggesting that the slave trade has had an enduring, deleterious effect on household finance.

The Horse and Slave Trade Between the Western Sahara and Senegambia

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
James L. A. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
North African ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Black African ◽  
Western Sahara ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Following the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cavalry revolution in Senegambia, the horse and slave trade became a major sector of the desert-edge political economy. Black African states imported horses from North Africa and the western Sahara in exchange for slaves. Over time, under conditions of increasing aridity, the zone of desert horse-breeding was pushed south, and through crossbreeding with the small disease-resistant indigenous horses of the savanna, new breeds were created. Although the savanna remained an epidemiologically hostile environment for the larger and more desirable horses bred in North Africa, in the high desert and along the desert fringe, Black African states continued to import horses in exchange for slaves into the period of French colonial rule.The evidence assembled on the horse trade into northern Senegambia raises the difficult issue of the relative quantitative importance of the Atlantic and Saharan/North African slave trades and calls into question the assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was the larger of the two. Most available evidence concerns the Wolof kingdoms of Waalo and Kajoor. It suggests that the volume of slaves exported north into the desert from Waalo in the late seventeenth century was probably at least ten times as great as the volume of slaves exported into the Atlantic slave trade. For both Waalo and Kajoor, this ratio declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as slave exports into the Atlantic markets increased. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in predatory raiding from the desert which produced an additional flow of north-bound slaves. For Waalo and Kajoor – and probably for the other Black African states of northern Senegambia – the flow of slaves north to Saharan and North African markets probably remained the larger of the two export volumes over the eighteenth century. This northward flow of slaves continued strong after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and was only shut down with the imposition of French colonial authority.

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.

The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Minor Importance ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
West Central ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
The Impact

Recent revisions of estimates for the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade suggest that approximately 11,863,000 slaves were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade, which is a small upward revision of my 1982 synthesis and still well within the range projected by Curtin in 1969. More accurate studies of the French and British sectors indicate that some revision in the temporal and regional distribution of slave exports is required, especially for the eighteenth century. First, the Bight of Biafra was more important and its involvement in the trade began several decades earlier than previously thought. Secondly, the French and British were more active on the Loango coast than earlier statistics revealed. The southward shift of the trade now appears to have been more gradual and to have begun earlier than I argued in 1982. The greater precision in the regional breakdown of slave shipments is confirmed by new data on the ethnic origins of slaves. The analysis also allows a new assessment of the gender and age profile of the exported population. There was a trend toward greater proportions of males and children. In the seventeenth century, slavers purchased relatively balanced proportions of males and females, and children were under-represented. By the eighteenth century, west-central Africa was exporting twice as many males as females, while West Africa was far from attaining such ratios. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, slavers could achieve those ratios almost anywhere slaves were available for export, and in parts of west-central and south-eastern Africa the percentage of males reached unprecedented levels of 70 per cent or more. Furthermore, increasing numbers of slaves were children, and again west-central Africa led the way in this shift while West Africa lagged behind considerably.This review of the literature on the demography of the slave trade provides a context to assess the revisionist interpretation of David Eltis, who has argued recently that the slave trade and its suppression were of minor importance in African history. It is shown that Eltis' economic arguments, based on an assessment of per capita income and the value of the export trade, are flawed. The demography of the trade involved an absolute loss of population and a large increase in the enslaved population that was retained in Africa. A rough comparison of slave populations in West Africa and the Americas indicates that the scale of slavery in Africa was extremely large.

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.

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.

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