American Trade with Cabo Verde and Guiné, 1820s–1850s: Exploiting the Transition from Slave to Legitimate Commerce

From the 1820s there was a surge in American commerce with western Africa, slave and legitimate, many of the vessels sailing via Cabo Verde. Collaboration between legitimate traders and slave traders greatly increased following the 1835 Anglo-Spanish treaty incorporating an ‘equipment clause’ that conceded the British navy authority to capture Spanish vessels carrying slave irons, lumber to construct slave decks and provisions requisite for slave cargoes. These restrictions were imposed on Portugal in 1839 and Brazil in 1845. Slave traders responded by sailing to Africa without incriminating cargoes, to be supplied by American traders paid with Spanish and Latin American gold and silver coins and bills of exchange from merchants in Britain, Portugal, Brazil and Cuba. Ineluctably, slavers and their intermediaries dominated western Africa's commerce.

Bartering for Slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Early Seventeenth Century

In the context of debates about the definition and origins of globalisation and the role of African agency in the Atlantic slave trade, this chapter examines the commodities traded by Portuguese New Christian slave traders on the Upper Guinea coast in the early 17th century. Based on detailed account books of three slave traders discovered in the Inquisition section of the Archivo General de la Nación in Lima, Peru, it shows how Africans often determined the types and prices of goods exchanged and forced Europeans to adapt to local trade networks. Hence while commodities such as Indian textiles and beads reflected the position of the Portuguese slave traders in a global trading network, at the same time they were actively involved in trading locally produced cloth and beeswax as well as slaves.

The French Discovery of Senegal: Premises for a Policy of Selective Assimilation

This chapter addresses French presence in Senegal, during the first colonisation, the so-called mercantile, and its future implications, notably at the beginning of the implementation of the French colonial system under Louis Faidherbe. For about two centuries before the appointment of the latter as governor in 1854, this country somewhat served as a lab of frenchness, a concept that goes beyond francophony to imply ‘a way of being and to think oneself as French’. However, with the previous integration of the country to the trans-Saharan world, it turned out to be some kind of synthesis of cultural features borrowed from both the Western and the Eastern civilizations and melted with the African cultural background. So it is not surprising that a country credited for being 95 percent Muslim celebrates all the Catholic holidays more so than France today.

Creolization and Creole Communities in the Portuguese Atlantic: São Tomé, Cape Verde, the Rivers of Guinea and Central Africa in Comparison

The Portuguese maritime expansion from the 15th century led to interactions and trade between Europeans and Africans. In places where the Portuguese established permanent bases, social interaction with Africans entailed processes of biological and cultural mixing, the outcome of which varied significantly depending on the different geographic, demographic, political and linguistic circumstances. In particular historical and social-cultural contexts, acculturation assumed the form of creolisation, a concept that is defined as a process of ethnicisation and indiginisation whereby former ethnic identities disappear and are replaced by a new ethnic identity. According to this definition, Creole societies only emerged in the archipelagos of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, but not in the Rivers of Guinea, where creolisation only partly occurred with regard to one particular group. Creole cultures did not emerge in Kongo or Angola either, where local cultures and languages remained largely intact.

Dutch Trade with Senegambia, Guinea, and Cape Verde, c.1590–1674

Little attention has been given to the economic activities of European private investors in the Western African trade. To partly fill this void in the literature, this chapter examines the private investment of the entrepreneurs and businessmen of the Dutch Republic in the ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’ between c.1590 and 1674. It analyses the entrepreneurs financing the insurances of ships and cargos for the Guinea of Cape Verde. The chapter also studies the Republic's businessmen operating in the long-distance circuits between the ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’, Europe and the Americas. In addition, it determines the commercial agents of the Republic's merchants and looks at their agency in the Guinea of Cape Verde's trade. This study is based on the collection of Notarial contracts of Amsterdam's Municipal Archive, the Dutch West India Company's archives and on German and Dutch travelling accounts.

Challenges of the African Voice: Autonomy, Commerce, and Resistance in Precolonial Western Africa

Many kings of Western Africa were strong allies in commerce and trade with the Portuguese crown. However, in the late 17th century, some of their successors adopted policies of free trade as a form of counter-resistance to the Portuguese. This challenged the monopoly of Western trade policies and constituted a call for recognition of their autonomy in the Atlantic world. This chapter examines these Negro-Atlantic challenges to trade and monopolistic views of the Atlantic market, focusing first on the Portuguese trade policies applied in the 17th century. Second, it examines the case of ‘free trade’ policies pursued by a second wave of West African rulers who challenged the monopolism of the Portuguese trade policies in the late 17th century after two centuries of relations. Third, the chapter critically examines the role of the Luso-Africans, and how they related to both side of their complex, hybrid identities.

‘Legitimate’ Traders, the Building of Empires, and the Long-Term After-Effects in Africa

This chapter tries to find answers to some important questions regarding ‘legitimate trade’. While the 1807 Act made trading in enslaved Africans illegal, was it legitimate to trade in African produce when produced by indigenous slaves and transported to the coast also by slaves? And how ‘legitimate’ was it to supply slave traders with everything from vessels to bank accounts and the manufactured goods exchanged for enslaved children, women and men? To examine these issues, the chapter examines the firm of Forster & Smith, trading with West Africa from the early 19th century, and their relationship with the colonial and National governments of Britain in the post-abolition era.

Everyday Commodities, the Rivers of Guinea, and the Atlantic World: The Beeswax Export Trade, c.1450–c.1800

This chapter argues that it was the actions of many common people in West Africa that created the trade systems linking the Atlantic World and the Upper Guinea coast. On one hand, Africans of the region were largely subsistence agriculturalists, but their need or desire for goods beyond what they could produce (or produce easily) led them to develop a commodity export trade. Important among these Africans were producers of non-slave commodities such as beeswax, which was exported from many locations along the coast but has not been the subject of study. The chapter traces the development of the beeswax export trade and the effects it had on local communities. In particular, it shows that as the slave trade grew to dominate commerce, the production and trade of beeswax by stateless people such as the Diola allowed them both to defend their communities from slave raiders and participate as raiders themselves.

‘Into speyne to selle for slavys’: English, Spanish, and Genoese Merchant Networks and their Involvement with the ‘Cost of Gwynea’ Trade before 1550

In 1541, Roger Barlow, an English merchant who had traded with Spain's Atlantic settlements from Seville in the 1520s, presented Henry VIII with a cosmography containing his personal account of the Rio de la Plata, inserted into an English translation of the 1519 edition of the Suma de Geographia by Martin Fernandez de Enciso. Despite the fact that both men had been involved in the buying and selling of West African slaves, Barlow translated Enciso's short description of the slave markets in Guinea without comment. This chapter explores how the trading network of English, Spanish and Genoese merchants Barlow belonged to had traded in slaves and associated products, such as pearls and sugar, since the 1480s. In doing so, they were instrumental in linking the ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’ to the wider Atlantic world.