Slave Trade

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Article

Abolition  

John Gilmore

Article

Publication History:

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

The term can be applied either to the ending of slavery, or to the ending of the slave trade, but in British historical writing the former is more usually referred to as emancipation.

While there are earlier examples of individuals who had doubts about the legality or morality of both the slave trade and slavery, serious public questioning of these institutions only began in Britain in the third quarter of the 18th century, with the attention focused on legal cases such as those of Jonathan Strong and James Somerset (see Somerset case). The first group of people who collectively questioned the legitimacy of the slave trade were the Quakers, who formed a Committee on the Slave Trade in 1783 and were also prominent in the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade also referred to as the Society for the Abolition of the ...

Article

ʿAli ibn Ibrahim  

George Michael La Rue

Article

Publication History:

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

preeminent trans-Saharan merchant and caravan leader (khabir) from the Sudanese kingdom of Darfur, was born in Kubayh, the son of Ibrahim ibn ʿAli, a Tirayfi merchant from Kordofan who immigrated to Darfur, and an unknown mother. He was commonly known as khabir ʿAli. In the nineteenth century Darfur was Egypt’s leading supplier of trans-Saharan goods including ivory, ostrich feathers, and slaves. In 1838, when Darfur’s sultan Muhammad Fadl died, young ʿAli ibn Ibrahim had already crossed the Sahara along the route from Kubayh (Darfur’s commercial capital) to Asyut in Upper Egypt, perhaps as part of a caravan led by his mentor, paternal uncle, and future father-in-law, Muhammad Kannun, or one of the lesser Tirayfi caravan leaders. ʿAli ibn Ibrahim allegedly heard the news of the sultan’s death from Muhammad ʿAli, the viceroy of Egypt.

ʿAli married six times and had numerous children His first marriage was probably ...

Article

Bangassou  

Richard A. Bradshaw

Article

Publication History:

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

a Bandia paramount chief (or “sultan”) of the Nzakara kingdom, a precolonial polity spanning the Mbali River in the southeastern region of what is now the Central African Republic. Named Kpangba at birth, he adopted the name Bangassou (“blazing sun”). According to Nzakara oral history, his father was Mbali/Bali (Mbari/Bari) “the gazelle,” son of Gwendi (or Boendi) “the taciturn,” son of Beringa “the drunkard,” son of Dunga “the quarrelsome,” son of Gobenge, son of Pobdi, son of Bwanda “the healer,” son of Agungu, son of Pongiet, son of Bongumu. These ancestors of Bangassou were members of the Bandia clan who left their Ngbandi homeland on the Ubangi River and conquered the Nzakara people.

The Bandia rulers participated in the growing slave trade of the nineteenth century and incorporated women and children into their polity thus prospering while nearby peoples in stateless societies were raided by slave traders The Nzakara often ...

Article

Banking, insurance, and the colonial trade  

Erin D. Somerville

Article

Publication History:

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

The triangular shipping route of the slave trade largely formed the banking industry in England. British goods such as textiles, arms, and iron were exchanged for slaves in Africa, which were then transported to the West Indies and traded for sugar, tobacco, cotton, spices, and rum. The triangular trade was a system of immense earnings, as every ship sailed with a profitable cargo. The wealth generated by the triangular trade brought increased affluence to the planters who cultivated the West Indian produce, the merchant capitalists who sold the slaves, and the industrial capitalists who produced the British goods, which in turn demanded new banking facilities and functions.

Primary of these new requirements was insurance Shipowners and slave merchants themselves insured early voyages travelling the triangular trade route However the increasing amount of bills drawn against West Indian merchants and accumulated wealth soon required large scale insurance schemes most often drawn ...

Article

Bannerman, James  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

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

a prominent trader in nineteenth-century Ghana, was born in 1790 His mother was a Ga woman from Accra who had family ties with the Alata chief in the neighboring town of Osu and the Asere chief of Kinka His father was Colonel Henry Bannerman a Scottish officer and a trader in the Royal Africa Company stationed at the British fort of Cape Coast Bannerman s father s connections in the British government and his mother s connections in southern Ghana helped prepare the way for his rise as a businessman Bannerman s ambitions were facilitated by the changing nature of trade between European nations and West Africa The British government s efforts to close the international slave trade posed some challenges for coastal communities on the Ghanaian coast although the stabilization of the Asante kingdom s borders had already led to a decline of slave exports from the region ...

Article

Birmingham  

Jonathan Morley and Cassandra Adjei

Article

Publication History:

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

City with historic links to the slave trade. The first guns to be exported to Africa in 1698 were manufactured in Birmingham, renowned for its metalworking; this triggered a growth in the city's industries, and by 1766, 100,000 guns a year were shipped, as well as other tools of the slave trade: manacles, chains, branding irons, thumbscrews, pincers, muzzles, and instruments for prising open the mouths of recalcitrant slaves to make them eat. Cheaply made flintlock muskets, the guns were often dangerous to their users, and contributed to the militarization of the continent: it has been estimated that 20 million went to Africa by 1907.

The city's Lunar Society (a group of freethinkers and radicals) included members who were vehement abolitionists. Thomas Day, from Lichfield, was co‐author with Joseph Bicknell of the poem The Dying Negro (1773 a famous tract that spoke of a ...

Article

Black Family  

Roland Barksdale-Hall and Diane L. Barnes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which traced the history of a black family beginning with its African progenitor, Kunta Kinte, aired to wide public acclaim in the 1970s. The family saga generated considerable attention, as evidenced by a rise in popular interest about the black family and genealogical organizations across the United States. The following decade Dorothy Spruill Redford organized a reunion of more than two thousand descendants of enslaved Africans—including herself—and their masters, then wrote Somerset Homecoming (1988). From the end of the twentieth century, Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) tells the story of the intertwined lives of slaves and their masters in antebellum South Carolina.

Firsthand slave narratives, while limited in number, are excellent primary sources. Narratives that give accounts of enslaved Africans' introduction to the Americas, such as the two-volume Interesting Narrative of the ...

Article

Bonetta, Sarah Forbes  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2013

Atlantic slave-trade survivor presented as a gift to Britain's Queen Victoria, was born in the early 1840s in or near the southern Beninese town of Okeadon. Her birth name is not known, but her marriage certificate would list her name as Ina Sarah Forbes Bonetta, perhaps indicating that her original name was Ina. Southern Beninese states had fought for years against the inland kingdom of Dahomey for autonomy, as the slave-trading empire sought to force its southern neighbors to pay tribute and accept Dahomean control over the slaves that were often sold to European and South American merchants. In 1846 Dahomean soldiers seized her and killed her parents during the Okeadon War between Dahomey and its enemies in the Yoruba city of Abeokuta after a traitor had allowed Dahomean troops entry to the town Bonetta was fortunate she did not join the 600 or so town residents ...

Article

Bristol  

Madge Dresser

Article

Publication History:

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

City in the south‐west of England whose importance to black history is firmly established by its long‐term involvement in the transatlantic slave economy, by its subsequent links to the North American anti‐slavery movement, and by the developments affecting its relatively small black population since the 1960s.

1.Bristol and the ...

Article

Caribbean  

John W. Pulis and David Simonelli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with the Caribbean from 1492 through 1895 The first article discusses the Caribbean slave trade the transmission of cultural identities and the Caribbean s influence on North America while the second article discusses the 1834 emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean and annual ...

Article

Carvalho Alvarenga, Rosa de  

Philip J. Havik

Article

Publication History:

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

merchant and trader in Portuguese Guinea, present-day Guinea-Bissau, was born in the 1780s, in the town of Cacheu on the Guinea coast, into a family with strong connections to administration and commerce in the region. Her father, Manuel de Carvalho Alvarenga, was also Guinean-born; he was descended from Cape Verdeans who had settled there in the 1700s, acting as commanders of the ports of Cacheu, Farim, and Ziguinchor, who intermarried with African women. Her brother, Francisco de Carvalho Alvarenga, became an important trader and held posts in the Portuguese administration in the town of Ziguinchor in the Casamance region (part of Senegal since 1886 Her aunt Josefa de Carvalho Alvarenga was born in the Cape Verde islands and married wealthy officials and owned landed property and slaves in the archipelago Although Rosa de Carvalho Alvarenga s mother s name is unknown she was in all likelihood of Banhun origin ...

Article

Cinque, Joseph  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

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

Although Sengbe—pronounced Sin’gway, and later Anglicized as Joseph Cinque—lived for approximately sixty-six years, he is best known for his role in a drama that lasted a little more than three years. Scholars believe that Cinque, who belonged to the Mende ethnic group, was a married man and father before his abduction. Cinque was born in Sierra Leone and at about the age of twenty-six, he was kidnapped by slave raiders and sold to Portuguese slave traders who took him to Havana, Cuba. There, he and other Africans were resold and put on the Amistad Shortly after leaving Havana harbor Cinque led a group of slaves who freed themselves and attacked the ship s crew killing all but two crewmembers The rebels kept these two alive and ordered them to sail back to Africa The crewmembers however tricked them and sailed north About two months later the ship landed ...

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

Dahomey, Early Kingdom of  

Article

Publication History:

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

Abomey, the capital of Dahomey, was founded around 1620 by Dogbari, who fled Allada after his brothers fought with one another for control of that kingdom. Dogbari’s grandson, Wegbaja, expanded Abomey through military conquest and consolidated it into a powerful state in the middle to late 1600s. Wegbaja’s grandson, Agaja, conquered both Allada and Whydah in the 1720s, founding the kingdom of Dahomey with its capital at Abomey. The government of Dahomey was an absolute monarchy with a well-established, centralized state and bureaucracy. Dahomey became heavily involved in the European slave trade, which had begun in earnest a century previous with the arrival of the Dutch.

The rule of Gezu (1818–1858) marked the pinnacle of Dahomey’s power and influence. Military victories enabled the kingdom of Dahomey to stop paying its annual tribute to the Oyo empire of what is now Nigeria Still the end of the slave ...

Article

Douala, Cameroon  

Eric Young

Article

Publication History:

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

The town of Douala first developed on the southeastern shore of the Wouri River estuary in the 1700s as a station for the transatlantic slave trade. Dutch merchants initially dominated the transatlantic trade, but the town was also frequented by ethnic Duala traders, many of whom acted as middlemen in the human traffic. British influence slowly usurped the Dutch until 1884, when Germany, after signing a treaty with two Duala chiefs, formally colonized Cameroon. With a good harbor, Douala quickly became the colony’s largest trading center, attracting African migrants as well as German and, later, French and British colonists. During World War II (1939–1945), it briefly served as the colonial capital.

Although Yaoundé is now the capital of Cameroon post independence infrastructure projects have solidified Douala s role as a national and regional economic hub Today Douala handles approximately 95 percent of the country s ...

Article

Easton, Maryland, and Frederick Douglass  

Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
01 December 2006

Before his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker in Baltimore, Maryland, Frederick Douglass (then Frederick Bailey) was imprisoned for a week in Easton, Maryland, when his 1835 plan to escape the slavery of the colonel Edward Lloyd's plantation at Saint Michaels was discovered. Along with four conspirators, Douglass was shackled and pulled by horses, stumbling and at times simply dragged over the fifteen miles from the plantation to the jail in Easton.

As the seat of Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Easton was a haven for traders who made a living buying slaves from jails and selling them into the more concentrated plantation labor of the Deep South. Hounded by traders while imprisoned in Easton, Douglass never forgot them. On 5 July 1852 Douglass denounced Austin Woolfolk a Maryland slave trader at whose slave mart on Pratt Street in Baltimore the fates of countless African Americans were ...

Article

Economics  

Richard H. Steckel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 1998
Published online:
30 September 2010

The agenda for research on many topics in studying slavery in the United States was established during the nineteenth century. The charges and countercharges of the pre–Civil War debate over slavery and abolition left a residue of ideas condemning the “peculiar institution.” Hinton Rowan Helper argued that inefficiencies inherent in slavery retarded Southern economic growth, while Frederick Law Olmsted maintained that slave labor was less productive than free labor and that investments in slaves were generally unprofitable. By the twentieth century, themes of growth retardation, inefficiency, nonviability, unprofitability, and the harshness of slave life often appeared in works on antebellum Southern history. Thus when Alfred Conrad and John Meyer in 1958 published their famous paper ushering in the new economic history, they confronted widely held views and ways of thinking about slavery and the Southern economy.

Work conducted in the decade or so following the paper by Conrad and Meyer ...

Article

Europe  

Robert H. Gudmestad

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

European visitors to the United States were keenly interested in slavery, African Americans, and race relations in America. Few blacks lived in Europe, as slavery had been abolished there, and almost no black Americans visited the Continent. European visitors held a spectrum of opinions about Americans and their customs: some praised qualities like ingenuity and democracy, while others criticized a lack of good manners. Europeans, though, were almost universal in their condemnation of slavery, even as they held a variety of opinions about African Americans.

Visitors traveling to northern states usually found their contact with African Americans to be agreeable. There were relatively few blacks in these areas; Europeans saw blacks working as both skilled and unskilled laborers. African Americans might carry luggage into an inn, serve meals in restaurants, or repair shoes. The Russian diplomat Pavel Svin'in visited the United States between 1811 and 1813 He went to ...

Article

Exeter  

Lucy MacKeith

Article

Publication History:

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

City with a low black population, but a good example of the historical presence of Blacks in areas outside the major port cities, an indication of how omnipresent they were in Britain from the 17th century onwards.

Parish registers provide examples such as the burial on 4 February 1631 at St Mary Major of ‘Thomas, sonne of a Blackamore’; the baptisms on 16 February 1689 at St Stephen's of ‘Mary Negro, black’, on 9 April 1735 of ‘Charles English, negro’, and on 4 December 1778 of ‘Thomas Walker, a black boy’; and the burial on 8 May 1791 of ‘Robert Hill, black, a servant at the Devon and Exeter Hospital’.

A contemporary broadsheet in November 1668 gives details of ‘200 blacks brought from the plantations of the Netherlands in America’, part of the procession led by William of Orange on his way to claim the throne in London. On 22 ...

Article

Glasgow  

Jacqueline Jenkinson

Article

Publication History:

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

One of Britain's leading trading ports between the 17th and 20th centuries. Links between Glasgow and the black world originated through trade. In the late 17th century the merchant guilds of Glasgow added to its flourishing trade with the colonial tobacco plantations in mainland North America by forging trading connections with the West Indies. The Glasgow West India Association was founded in 1807. The Association spent many of its early years defending the slave trade interest. Glasgow was involved in the slave trade, but to a much smaller degree in comparison to the major slaving ports of Bristol, London, and Liverpool. Trade connections and the slave trade led to the creation of a permanent black presence in Glasgow by the late 18th century as black people arrived, settled, and married. One early black Glaswegian was David Cunningham lawfully born to Anthony a black labourer and ...