The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre‐Modern Atlantic World

Abstract

V iolent resistance by Africans forced on board slave ships in the VAtlantic and Indian Oceans has received far less attention than has the same phenomenon on plantations-the ultimate destinations of those vessels. In the last third of the twentieth century, in which perhaps 95 per cent of the total scholarship on slavery has appeared, there have been published just five articles on the topic, to which might be added a few obligatory descriptive pages on slave revolts in each of the general histories of the slave trade from Mannix and Cowley in the 1960s to that of Thomas in the late 1 990s.1 Resistance by slaves in the Americas, by contrast, has provided the focal point of whole scholarly careers. Given the fact that slaves spent an average of 11 weeks on a vessel and the rest of their lives in bondage in the Americas, this may at first sight seem appropriate, but some new data, collected as a spin-off from a much larger project on the transatlantic slave trade, in fact suggest the opposite. What happened on board transatlantic slave vessels now appears to have been central to the shaping of the early modem Atlantic world and warrants much closer attention. The article is divided into three sections. Section I briefly describes the data on which the article is based, explores key features of shipboard slave revolts, and investigates possible explanations of them. Some aspects of revolts, notably variations in the incidence of revolts by African region of embarkation of slaves, are difficult to explain and require further research. In section II insurance and shipping records are drawn on in an attempt to calculate the impact of shipboard resistance by Africans to enslavement on the cost structure of slaving voyages. Section III then sets resistance in the wider contexts of the costs of coerced labour in the Americas and of Euro-African power relations in pre-colonial Africa. It also estimates the impact of African agency on the number and coastal origins of slaves carried across the Atlantic and thereby on the location and size of slave systems of the Americas.