Revisiting modes of enslavement: the role of raiding, kidnapping and wars in the European slave trade

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe works of John Thornton, Herbert Klein, James Walvis, John Reader, John Fage and others have given the slave trade new different interpretations, provocatively arguing, among other things, that trade, rather than raiding, kidnapping and wars, played a major role in the enslavement of Africans. Contrary to this scholarly orthodoxy, this article argues that the introduction of trade by Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not signal the end of modes of enslavement such as raiding, kidnapping and wars because Europeans, in fact, used trade as an exterior cover beneath which these violent modes of enslavement operated. The paper also contends that raiding, kidnapping and wars, which began by the fifteenth century and persisted into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accounted for the majority of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic. Thus, the role of trade in the enslavement of Africans has been exaggerated.