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Article

Alemam, Joham  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
17 September 2020

of the sixteenth-century slave trading ship Santa Margarida in the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. Not much else is known about Alemam except that on 27 December 1515 Luis Carneiro, a scribe in the Cape Verde customs house at Ribeira Grande, Santiago Island, described him as “captain.” This information appears in entries of the surviving 1513–1516 Cape Verde customs receipt book transcribed from the original Portuguese manuscript into English by historian Trevor Hall (Before Middle Passage, 2015). In outfitting a slave ship and paying customs duty on a captive he imported from West Africa, Alemam shows the growing involvement of non-Iberian Europeans in the early sixteenth-century slave trade in Cape Verde.

In 1462 another non Portuguese ship owner the Genoese Antonio de nolle Antonio de Noli had colonized the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands for Portugal transforming the islands into the center of the expanding Atlantic slave trade ...

Article

Alloron  

Stephanie Beswick

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Sudanese leader, was the first prominent Bari private merchant, slave trader, and opportunist insurgent warlord. He rose to power during the 1860s by exploiting poisonous dynastic rivalries between Nyigilo and Subek, the royal sons of Lagunu, the unchallenged Bari leader in 1840, and their respective noble offspring. The faction of Nyigilo had enjoyed the support of Catholic missionaries up to their departure in 1860, but thereafter allied with the northern slave traders who at that time were establishing fortified trading operations throughout southern Sudan. It was to become an era, for the first time in Bari history, during which commoner traders such as Alloron found it possible to acquire economic and political power. However, the upstart was often reminded of his humble origins by the epithet “man without rain,” implying that he lacked the arcane fructifying powers of royalty.

The arrival of Turks northern Sudanese and Europeans ...

Article

Barchi, Cesare de  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
17 September 2020

based in Portugal whose merchant ships traded between the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands and Valencia, Spain. Nothing is known about his family. Barchi’s reason for renown was that during the last two decades of the fifteenth century his ships transported thousands of enslaved Africans from the Cape Verde Islands to Valencia. Although not much is known about Barchi himself, his business opens a window into the working and scope of the Old World Atlantic slave trade from the Portuguese archipelago in Cape Verde Islands, West Africa to Spain.

During the fifteenth century Portugal had a monopoly over European maritime trade with West Africa. Although the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479) and the protocol of Tordesillas (1494 prohibited non Portuguese ships from trading with sub Saharan West Africa the treaties permitted European merchants to trade with Portuguese islands off the West African mainland The Portuguese crown established customs ...

Article

Colston, Edward  

Madge Dresser

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Controversial philanthropist and merchant involved in the slave trade. He was the Bristol‐born son of a Bristol merchant who spent his early life in London, but it is in Bristol that he is most famous. A staunch Anglican and Tory, he was briefly MP for the city in 1710. His huge donations to church renovation and school building projects, mainly but not exclusively in Bristol, ensured his reputation as the city's greatest benefactor, as his major statue in the centre and his fine tomb by Michael Rysbrack attest. Several Bristol streets, schools, buildings, and venerable local charities still bear his name, and his birthday is still honoured in civic celebrations.

Colston s relevance to black history lies in the fact that he was involved in the British slave trade and in the trade of slave produced goods By the 1670s he was a City of London merchant trading ...

Article

Columbus, Christopher  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2020

and his elder son, Diego Columbus (1479?–1526), governor of Hispaniola during the first recorded revolt by enslaved Africans in the Americas, both had significant connections to Africa. The elder Columbus, known as Cristoforo Colombo in Italian and Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, remains a mysterious historic figure, even though, in the twentieth century alone, more than 250 scholarly articles and books were written on his origins (Sale, The Conquest of Paradise). Over a dozen birthdates have been claimed for him as well as at least twenty-five nationalities (Catz, p.83). Most biographers agree, though, that he was born in the Italian port of Genoa, the eldest son of Domenico Colombo, a wool worker and merchant, and Susanna Fontanarossa.

The sources also agree that, from about 1477 to 1485 Columbus and his brother Bartolemeu were mariners in Portugal involved in trade with West Africa Very little has been written ...

Article

Correia, Aurelia  

Philip J. Havik

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

West African slave trader, was born in all likelihood out of a relationship between a Cape Verdean trader and a native woman. On her mothers’ side Correia descended from the Bijagó, the ruling matrilineage on the island of Orango, the largest and most important in the archipelago off the Guinea coast. Also affectionately known in Guinean Creole, the regional lingua franca, as Mãe Aurélia (Mother Aurelia), Nha Aurélia (Lady Aurelia), or Mamé Correia, she would become the most famous and powerful of all the women traders operating in nineteenth-century Portuguese Guinea, present-day Guinea-Bissau. Situated in West Africa in a region once called the Rivers of Guinea, also known as the Upper Guinea Coast, it was an important entrepôt for the Atlantic slave trade since the 1500s.

Correia s trading career is indissoluble from the transatlantic trafficking and the introduction of peanuts in the Guinea Bissau region as an export ...

Article

Dâaga  

John Saillant

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
24 October 2022

Dâaga (c. 1800/05?–1837), also known as Donald Stewart, Longa Longa, and, possibly, King’s Man, was an African-born soldier of the British First West India Regiment. Dâaga was probably born in modern-day Benin and reared among the Popo. He became a captive in the Portuguese transatlantic slave trade probably around 1830, although he himself had worked as a raider or trader in the Portuguese–African trade in slaves that took place in modern-day Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. Information available on Dâaga derives from local Trinidadian and British military responses to a mutiny of soldiers, apparently all African-born, that he led in June 1837. There are no records of any family members other than a brief mention of a Popo “king” who adopted Dâaga as a boy. He became a Trinidadian folk hero in the century and a half after his death.

The mutiny led to an investigation of its ...

Article

Edimboro (aka AmbaraEdinborough, Philip), Felipe  

Michele Valerie Ronnick

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2018

was born in Africa in either Guinea or Congo, and arrived in the New World by the Middle Passage. Where he disembarked is not known, but at some point he was brought to the northeast coast of Florida, and in 1772 was purchased by Francisco Xavier Sánchez (c.1736–1805), a Floridano planter and cattle baron with extensive holdings in Spanish-colonial Florida. Edimboro worked at Don Sánchez’s original homestead, a thousand-acre plantation-ranch called San Diego (now Guana Tolomata Matanzas National Research Reserve in Palm Valley) and distinguished himself by his valuable skills as a butcher (St. Augustine Record, 2002; Landers, 1991, p. 180). Over the next two decades he and his wife, Filis (1760–? a laundress also owned by Don Sánchez took on a variety of extra jobs and slowly amassed enough money to purchase their freedom According to historian Jane Landers in addition ...

Article

Elizabeth I  

Cecily Jones

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Queen of England and patron of slave‐trading ventures.

1.Genesis of the British slave trade

2.Africans in Elizabethan England

3.Scapegoating ‘Blackamoors’

4.Attempts to expel Blacks

Article

Gladstone, John  

David Dabydeen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Slave owner, instigator of the ‘coolie trade’, and father of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). Sir John Gladstone was a leading member of the West Indian Association of Liverpool, a group of plantation owners and merchants trading with the West Indies in slave‐produced commodities. He owned sugar estates in Jamaica and British Guiana and was a passionate opponent of abolition. In 1830, in a series of last‐ditch attempts to persuade the government not to end West Indian slavery, Gladstone (then a member of Parliament and spokesman for the West India interest) argued that slavery was normal in primitive societies, and that West Indian Blacks had peculiar constitutions, enabling them to work easily under a tropical sun. He held up the dreadful prospect of freed slaves slaughtering the smaller white populations.

In 1833 Gladstone was deputed by Liverpool's West Indian interest ...

Article

Hawkins, Sir John  

Erin D. Somerville

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

The first Englishman to transport African slaves across the Atlantic. The son of a sea merchant and Mayor of Plymouth, Hawkins inherited the family sea business after his father's death. After early voyages to the Canary Islands, he moved to London in 1560 to seek support for voyages to the West Indian colonies, then under tight Spanish control.

Hawkins's first slave trading voyage departed for the west coast of Africa in October 1562. Upon arrival in Upper Guinea, Hawkins raided Portuguese ships for African slaves and other merchandise. Three hundred slaves were brought to Hispaniola, where he illegally sold them to English planters. The financial gains of the expedition were so extensive that Queen Elizabeth I supported an equally profitable second voyage in 1564, which moved over 400 slaves from Sierra Leone. A third slaving voyage in 1567 also supported by the Queen was not as successful ...

Article

Lawrence, Fenda  

Assan Sarr

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

, notable Gambian slave trader, was a free black woman and a relatively wealthy merchant who visited the American South in the second half of the eighteenth century, largely but not exclusively to trade in slaves and other things. She was partner to an English merchant with the last name of Lawrence. Fenda Lawrence traveled to the British North American colonies (now the United States) with respect and status as a person of color. At the time she was described in some European sources as a considerable trader in the River Gambia on the Coast of Africa.

Fenda Lawrence most likely met Englishman Lawrence (first name unknown) when he came to the Gambia River to trade. Her status was similar to that of other female merchants in precolonial Gambia (then Senegambia) of the time who had European partners. Like many of these signares as they were called she had ...

Article

Lima, Geraldo de  

Nana Yaw B. Sapong

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

domestic slave, slave trader, and merchant prince, was born Adzoviehlo Atiogbe in Agoue in Dahomey (Benin) in 1804 He is also known as Adzoviehlo Atiogbe or Geraldo de Vasconcellos A man of several names he is one of the least understood and most complex characters in modern West African history Geraldo de Vasconcellos probably a Brazilian name given to him by his master in servitude entered into a period of apprenticeship under Brazilian slave trader Cesar Cerquira Lima who had a slave factory warehouse at Vodza in present day Ghana Slaves were kept in the Vodza factory before shipment to various destinations Cesar Cerquira Lima was one of a succession of Brazilian traders who had been establishing factories along the eastern coastline of the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century Geraldo de Vasconcellos became one of Cesar s trusted agents in Anlo who kept the supply of slaves steady ...

Article

Lopes, José  

Rafael Chambouleyron

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

also known as José Lopes Espínola, freeborn African from the archipelago of Cape Verde who was probably an Indian slave trader and a military leader in the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Portuguese Amazon region. José Lopes’s deeds in northern Brazil reveal the roles played by Africans, along with Indians and some mestizos, as middlemen in the vast colonial hinterland. They also point out the Atlantic connections of the internal Indian slave trade in the Amazon.

Although there is no information about Lopes’s arrival in colonial Portuguese America, the Cape Verde islands were an important stopover for those who traveled from Lisbon to the north of colonial Brazil. During the last decade of the seventeenth century, and especially after 1693 the slave trade from the Guinea Coast to the Amazon region through Cape Verde increased It is more than likely that Lopes embarked on one of the many ships bringing in ...

Article

Mataka Nyambi  

Rosemary Elizabeth Galli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

warlord, trader, and founder of perhaps the greatest Yao dynasty in Niassa in northern Mozambique, was the grandson of Syungule, head of the Chisyungule lineage. Mataka Nyambi, along with his biggest rival Makanjila, was instrumental in transforming the Niassa Yao from a society of matriclans to one governed by territorial chiefs. In the process, he brought a large population under his control and gained many wives; he is said to have had six hundred wives and numerous children. In about 1875 Mataka (now Mataka I) beheaded his adversary Makanjila.

A fierce drought drove the Niassa Yao to invade and ransack their neighbors for food and, subsequently, slaves in the 1830s Attacks by Nguni raiders have been responsible for their militarization Small and weak matriclans submitted to the stronger territorial chiefs and even sought their protection Mataka Nyambi was both feared and admired for his military prowess In addition trade ...

Article

Moreira da Silva, Antônio  

Mary Karasch

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

mulatto commandant and notorious bandeirante, leader of bandeiras (armed expeditions) in Maranhão and Central Brazil, who conquered and enslaved numerous indigenous populations of the Tocantins River region. He also served as a capitão do mato (bush captain), who recaptured fugitive slaves, returning them to their slaveholders and to slavery. Although he was a mulatto who was described as “bem escuro” (very dark), he was respected by the influential merchant Francisco José Pinto de Magalhães, who praised him for his “prudence, valor, and activity.” However, such a positive statement may have resulted from the latter’s business ties with Moreira da Silva, as both men were involved in the trade of indigenous captives.

In 1819 the Austrian traveler Johann E. Pohl (1782–1834 met Moreira da Silva and reported that he was the terror of the Indians of the region because of his harshness and cruelty In spite of that ...

Article

Newton, John  

John Gilmore

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Clergyman of the Church of England who led what he later considered to be a reprobate youth and worked in the slave trade. It was while on a slaving voyage (1748–9) that he experienced a religious conversion. Nevertheless, he continued to work in the slave trade, and made three more voyages before retiring from the sea in 1754. He became widely known as an evangelical Christian, and was eventually ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England in 1764, serving first in the parish of Olney in Buckinghamshire, and later, from 1780 until his death, at St Mary Woolnoth in London.

At Olney, Newton became a close friend of the poet William Cowper, and together they wrote the collection known as the Olney Hymns. Newton's own contributions include the words to some of the best known hymns in the English language ...

Article

Rabih al-Zubayr  

Elizabeth Heath

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Rabih al-Zubayr was born in Sudan, probably near Khartoum, though the details of his early life are uncertain. Some believe that he was originally a slave freed by his master, Zubayr Rahma Mansur, while others think he was born free and joined the Turkic-Egyptian army before working for Zubayr, the largest slave-trader in southern Sudan. He joined Zubayr’s company in 1850 and had become a competent military leader by 1875, when the British declared slavery illegal.

When the British forcibly shut down Zubayr s operations four years later Rabih gathered what was left of Zubayr s slave army and established a raiding stronghold in the Azande region to the west During the 1880s Rabih and his army attacked and pillaged groups such as the Banda and Sara In the early 1890s Rabih defeated a French expedition and conquered the Bagirmi state in present day Chad from which he staged ...

Article

Rabih, al-Zabayr Fadl Allah  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Sudanese warlord and politician, was born to an Arab family in Halfaya Al-Muluk, a village located close to Khartoum. His father came from the Sudanese kingdom of Sennar that the Egyptian forces of Muhammad ʿAli had conquered in 1821 and he served in the Egyptian military before creating his own business manufacturing bricks Rabih served in the Egyptian army like his father after attending qurʾanic school According to some accounts he first met his future patron Al Zubayr Rahma through a game of chess At this point sometime in the mid 1860s Al Zubayr was simply an ordinary merchant who purchased slaves and ivory in the southern Sudanese region of Bahr al Ghazal like so many other Khartoum based traders Al Zubayr later told English friends that the lure of the southern Sudan and points further south drew him like the American West had attracted so many pioneers in ...

Article

Santos e Silva, Ana Joaquina dos  

Douglas Wheeler

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

wealthy Luso-African merchant, moneylender, entrepreneur, and slave trader in Angola, was born early in the nineteenth century, the daughter of a Portuguese father and a mestiza or mulatta mother. Ana Joaquina dos Santos e Silva, a mulatta or mestiza, became the wealthiest woman merchant and possibly the wealthiest of all merchants in her day in Angola, a colony of Portugal. Little is known of her early years, except that she married in succession two successful Portuguese merchants, both slave traders. When they died, their widow, Ana Joaquina, inherited their properties and became a wealthy entrepreneur on her own.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century Angola s largely coastal colonial society composed of two nuclei at Luanda and Benguela featured an Atlantic slave trading economy This traffic was dominated by merchants of Portugal Brazil and Angola although the wealthiest merchants were Brazilian Luanda s population consisted of ...