France and the Slave Trade

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Triangular Trade

The chapter begins with a short overview of France’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and shows how, by the second half of the eighteenth century, more and more merchants and investors became dazzled by the profits offered by a successful slave voyage. All the Atlantic ports engaged in the slave trade, though Nantes had the highest level of slaving and the greatest dependence on the triangular trade with west Africa and the Caribbean. The economics of a slave voyage are analysed, as well as the cargoes purchased for trading in Africa; the captains’ involvement in slave markets in both West Africa and the Caribbean; the risks run by the slave ships and their crews during the voyage; and the conditions that were endured below deck during the Middle Passage.

Oceanic Intimacies

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Mona Narain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Do So

In this essay, I explore what intimacies might be revealed if we trace oceanic entanglements created by eighteenth-century maritime routes and journeys in historical and contemporary imaginative reconstructions of such histories. I respond to Lisa Lowe’s proposal to use “intimacies as a heuristic,” and to decentre the European notion of “the human” constructed by colonial epistemologies. To do so, I offer two counter-histories, embedded in and through different waters, which challenge imperial two-dimensional epistemologies. “Porous Intimacies” discusses the seafaring part of Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet (1765), one of the first travelogues written by an Indian about Europe. “Immersive Intimacies” analyzes David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1995), which imaginatively reconstructs the middle passage of captured Africans on British slave ships bound for the Caribbean. Rethinking former historical accounts within and outside colonial and liberal frameworks, I analyze new intimacies through oceanic connections.

James Rogers and the Bristol slave trade*

2003 ◽  
Vol 76 (192) ◽  
pp. 189-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Morgan
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Business Failure ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
The Caribbean

Abstract This article examines the business failure of James Rogers, a large Bristol slave trader, within the context of the operation of the late British slave trade in west Africa, on the Middle Passage, and in the Caribbean. Based on a large cache of surviving manuscripts, the article shows that the credit crisis of 1793 led to the demise of Rogers's mercantile career but also that his business collapse stemmed from over-extending his slave trading activities, from relatively poor profit levels, and from attempts to expand his trading portfolio in the eighteen months before the national financial crash.

1. The Atlantic slave trade

2014 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South

Slavery had long existed in Europe and Africa, but the history of the Atlantic slave trade begins in the 1440s with Portuguese exploration of West Africa. ‘The Atlantic slave trade’ charts the increased demand for slave labor in Portugal and the Christian justification of African enslavement. In the 1490s, the journeys of Christopher Columbus to the Caribbean and North and South America opened up mineral-rich and fertile lands on which European countries planted their flags and the Christian cross. More than 12 million Africans boarded the ships, but nearly 2 million died during the Middle Passage. Of those who survived, only about 5 percent went to North America, with most going to South America and the Caribbean.

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.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Middle Passage: The Brooks and the Reality of Ship Crowding in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Radburn ◽  
David Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.

Slave Traders by Invitation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Finn Fuglestad
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Human Settlement ◽  
Local Setting ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.

Four Sierra Leone Recaptives

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

scholarly journals Did Slavery make Scotia great?

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Devine
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Market Opportunities ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between slavery, the slave trade and British economic development remains a contested field of eighteenth century history. This article examines one hitherto unexplored aspect of the subject, the significance, if any, of profits derived from the slave-based economies of the Atlantic in Scotland's Great Leap Forward in the later eighteenth century. It is argued that because of the distinctive nature of Scottish development, compared to that of England, and the intimate connections between Scotland and plantation economies the question does merit serious consideration. The article, however, supports the traditional view that slave trading direct from Scottish ports was very limited, although Scottish merchants and mariners were often heavily involved in slave trafficking from London, Bristol and Liverpool. The key Scottish link was with the tobacco and sugar trades, plantation ownership in the Caribbean and as merchants, physicians, attorneys and overseers in the plantation economies. It is argued that in terms of both capital transfers and market opportunities slavery can indeed be considered one of the factors facilitating development in Scotland and was possibly a much more significant influence north of the border than in the industrialisation of England.

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