The Seventeenth-century Slave Trade in the Documents of the English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Prussian Royal Slave Trading Companies

Abstract

Historians have traditionally placed the seventeenth-century records of the main European slave trading companies, such as the British Royal Africa Company and the Dutch West India Company, in the context of history of empire and commerce. More recently, these records are being revisited to parse the more tenuous cues for social and cultural history of West African polities and the enslaved. This article introduces the underutilized collections of the smaller Northern European slave trading companies (the Swedish Africa Company, the Danish Africa Company and the Prussian Brandenburg Africa Company). The triangulation of these sources with those of the larger trading companies offers new insights into the competition for African slaves, power dynamics between Africans and Europeans, and African adaptations to the vagaries of the trade.