Mechanisms of Slave Acquisition and Exchange in Late Eighteenth Century Anomabu: Reconsidering a Cross-Section of the Atlantic Slave Trade

2003 ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor R. Getz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

Sierra Leone

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.

The London Committee and mobilization of public opinion against the slave trade

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Political Life ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractDuring the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

“The soul that dreams it shares the power it feels so well”: The Politics of Sympathy in the Abolitionist Verse of Williams and Yearsley

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Edward Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Helen Maria Williams ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ann Yearsley ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Important Site

Abstract Identifying abolitionist poetry as an important site for investigating rhetorical transformations and innovations in late eighteenth century women’s poetry, this essay shows how poetic language generates sympathy. In reading women’s poetry in general, and abolitionist poetry in particular, we too often presume that they worked under the assumption that all readers would identify directly with representations of suffering. While William Cowper, writing before Helen Maria Williams and Ann Yearsley, opens up the problematic that all forms of sympathy might be mere narcissistic self-indulgence, Yearsley and Williams provide a model for and effectively limit such reflexive sympathy. For them, the process of sympathizing with an Other begins with the act of taking him or her into one’s own imaginative “domos.” But by actively embracing this narcissistic process, Williams and Yearsley are able to regulate such domestications of the slave’s pain. Williams controls whose identities merge, ensuring that the reader identifies with reformer rather than slaver. In contrast, Yearsley encourages wider-ranging imaginative acts of identification – one can identify with the “crafty merchant” of her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade” – but ensures through various poetic devices that such an act will reveal the disjunction between family and capital. By drawing out various theories of the working of sentiment, this essay makes visible sentimental poetry’s theoretical power: slavery poems by Williams and Yearsley operate as sophisticated theories of sympathetic identification.

Robert Norris, Agaja, and the Dahomean Conquest of Allada and Whydah

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 311-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ross
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The 1960S

In a book in which he gave an account of the reign of Tegbesu (1740-1774), Robert Norris, the late eighteenth-century slave trader historian of Dahomey, included a brief sketch of the career of Tegbesu's father, Agaja (1718-1740), the conqueror of Allada and Whydah. Norris portrayed Agaja as a nation-builder who brought the Dahomeans and the people of Allada and Whydah, “the conquerors and the conquered,” to think of themselves as “one people.” The author claimed that Agaja saw to it after the conquest that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.” He also argued that Agaja's new subjects were so pleased with his policy of reconciliation that they made no “efforts to regain their independence.”Norris' account of Agaja has been very influential, especially since the 1960s when I. A. Akinjogbin not only endorsed it but added both that Dahomey was founded by a group of patriotic anti-slave trade Aja and that post-1740 Dahomey was a European-like nation state. Norris' argument, as embellished by Akinjogbin, was reproduced in a number of authoritative 1970s works and appears to have retained its appeal even though Akinjogbin's addenda have been shown to be at odds with the evidence. Norris' original thesis nevertheless is just as flawed as Akinjogbin's various supplementary claims. Agaja was far from having been a nation-builder; still less was he a far sighted statesman who saw to it that “every part of his dominions became replenished with people.”

The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789-1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
English Language ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Financial Transactions

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.

scholarly journals Manumission in Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 211-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beck Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Wide Cross ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Official Records

Abstract Manumission touched comparatively few slaves, but it proved to be an essential institution for the growth of Jamaica’s free population-of-color. Heretofore, there have been no systematic studies of manumission records for the eighteenth century. This paper analyzes manumission deeds filed as official records in the island’s Secretary’s office during the 1770s. These documents are scrutinized in light of Edward Long’s 1774 discussion on the free population and the manumission process. Despite white anxiety over the growth of the free-population-of-color, the data show that a wide cross-section of Jamaica’s free-population liberated enslaved people for a variety of reasons, including cash payments that reflected market imperatives. While most enslaved people could never hope to find freedom in this fashion, the constancy of manumission had an enormous bearing on the makeup of the free population.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-138
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Almost All

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

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