William Davenport, the Slave Trade, and Merchant Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century Liverpool

<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>

William Davenport, the Slave Trade, and Merchant Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century Liverpool

<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>

Cascading effects of elephant-human interactions in a savanna ecosystem and the implications for ecology and conservation

Our study monitored the changes in elephant numbers, distribution and ecological impact over a fifty-year period as the free-ranging intermingled movements of wildlife and traditional subsistence pastoralists across the Amboseli ecosystem were disrupted by a national park, livestock ranches, farms, settlements and changing lifestyles and economies. Elephants compressed into the national park by poaching and settlement turned woodlands to grassland and shrublands and swamps into short grazing lawns, causing a reduction of plant and herbivore diversity and resilience to extreme events. The results echo the ecological findings of high-density elephant populations in protected areas across eastern and southern Africa. The impact has led to the view of elephants in parks being incompatible with biodiversity and to population control measures. In contrast to Amboseli National Park, we found woody vegetation grew and plant diversity fell in areas abandoned by elephants. We therefore used naturalist and exclosure experiments to determine the density-dependent response of vegetation to elephants. We found plant richness to peak at the park boundary where elephants and livestock jostled spatially, setting up a creative browsing-grazing tension and a patchwork of habitats explaining the plant richness. A review of prehistorical and historical literature lends support to the Amboseli findings that elephants and people, the two dominant keystone species in the savannas, have been intimately entangled prior to the global ivory trade and colonialism. The findings point to the inadequacy of parks for conserving mega herbivores and as ecological baselines. The Amboseli study underlines the significance of space and mobility in expressing the keystone role of elephants, and to community-based conservation as a way to win space and mobility for elephants, alleviate the ecological disruption of compressed populations and minimize population management.

The Conservation of African Elephants under the CITES International Ivory Trade Ban

1989 CITES decision to put a total ban on international trade in ivory and the decisions to allow the 1999 and 2008 one-off-sales have generated polarized debates on whether or not these decisions are the reasons behind increasing levels of poaching in Africa. An undisputed fact is that; international illegal ivory trade has promoted rampant elephant poaching in Africa. What has and is contested is whether the ban or the one-off sales have a role to play in the current elephant poaching and increase in the illegal ivory trade. The Southern African range countries blame the international ivory trade ban for the current ivory poaching levels, while Countries such as Kenya, Benin and Uganda have blamed the sales for reigniting international appetite for ivory. The available evidence suggests that the international ivory trade ban with an unbanned domestic market has promoted poaching and negatively impacted on range countries’ ability to effectively and sustainably protect elephants. Besides the reduction or elimination of revenue, the ban undermined the economic incentives associated with elephant conservation, thereby making elephant conservation unattractive, unachievable and subsequently opening up to poaching and illegal trade.

Blockchain Technology Concept for Improving Supply Chain Traceability in the Ivory Market

Supply chain traceability is gaining momentum as a means to gain visibility across the supply chain. In order to curb poaching in wildlife sector and harvesting of resources such as ivory, there is need to introduce full proof technologies. This article proposes use of blockchain in tracing the supply chain of ivory and other wildlife products, from source to destination. The article is based on literature review on wildlife practices. Ivory trade participants were identified and mapped into a blockchain model using blockchain modeling techniques. The proposed blockchain approach allows transaction recording as blocks and visibility to relevant participants.

Sixth- and Seventh-Century Elephant Ivory Finds from the Carpathian Basin •

Jelen tanulmány célja az elefántcsont mint nyersanyag lehetséges forrásaira és értékére vonatkozó, a római és a késő ókori mediterrán világból származó adatok áttekintése, információkat nyerve ezáltal a 6–7. századi Kárpát-medence régészeti hagyatékából előkerült elefántcsonttárgyak eredetére, elérhetőségére és árára vonatkozólag. A hellenisztikus kortól a kora középkorig terjedő időszakban a Földközi-tenger vidéki elefántcsont-kereskedelem dinamikáját megvilágító írott és tárgyi források áttekintése nyomán úgy tűnik, hogy a 6–7. századi Közép-Duna-vidéki elefántcsonttárgyak nyersanyaga a Földközi-tenger medencéjén keresztül Afrikából, ezen belül is talán a kontinens keleti feléről érkezett. Megállapítható emellett, hogy a mediterrán világ keleti és középső régióiban készült, a Kárpát-medencébe elkerült elefántcsonttárgyak nem tekinthetők kiemelkedően drága luxusjavaknak, többségük viszonylag szerény áron megvásárolható volt.The present paper seeks to examine the available data on the possible sources and monetary value of elephant ivory, both as raw material and finished products, in the Roman to late antique Mediterranean world in order to gain a better understanding of the wider context of elephant ivory artefacts dating from the sixth and seventh centuries discovered in the Carpathian Basin. After reviewing the written and material evidence on the dynamics of the Mediterranean elephant ivory trade from the Hellenistic period until the Early Middle Ages, our main conclusion is that the raw material of the sixth- to seventh-century ivory objects of the Middle Danube Region in in all probability originated from Africa, possibly from the continent’s eastern parts, and arrived to this area through the Mediterranean. It is further argued that the few artefacts manufactured of elephant ivory in the eastern and central regions of the Mediterranean that reached the Carpathian Basin cannot be regarded as extremely expensive luxury goods – in fact, their majority would have been quite affordable to customers of more modest means.

Molecular identification and geographic origin of a post-Medieval elephant finding from southwestern Portugal using high-throughput sequencing

Molecular species identification plays a crucial role in archaeology and palaeontology, especially when diagnostic morphological characters are unavailable. Molecular markers have been used in forensic science to trace the geographic origin of wildlife products, such as ivory. So far, only a few studies have applied genetic methods to both identify the species and circumscribe the provenance of historic wildlife trade material. Here, by combining ancient DNA methods and genome skimming on a historical elephantid tooth found in southwestern Portugal, we aimed to identify its species, infer its placement in the elephantid phylogenetic tree, and triangulate its geographic origin. According to our results the specimen dates back to the eighteenth century CE and belongs to a female African forest elephant (non-hybrid Loxodonta cyclotis individual) geographically originated from west—west-central Africa, from areas where one of the four major mitochondrial clades of L. cyclotis is distributed. Historical evidence supports our inference, pointing out that the tooth should be considered as post-Medieval raw ivory trade material between West Africa and Portugal. Our study provides a comprehensive approach to study historical products and artefacts using archaeogenetics and contributes towards enlightening cultural and biological historical aspects of ivory trade in western Europe.