The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790–1820

Jorge Felipe Gonzalez

doi:10.1017/s0021853721000517

Abstract

AbstractIn the early nineteenth century a centralized political entity, the Galinhas kingdom, emerged in southernmost Sierra Leone. Based on sources from Cuban, British, American, Spanish, and Sierra Leonean archives, this article examines the factors accounting for the emergence and consolidation of Galinhas. I argue that the postabolitionist (1808) redeployment of North Atlantic slave trading actors, networks, routes, and spaces, particularly the connection with Cuba and resources from the island, created the conditions for Galinhas's commercial growth and the centralization of its political power. I then problematize the relationship between warfare, the Atlantic slave trade, and state making. During the foundation of a predatory state, before a slaving and political frontier existed, wars were detrimental to trade. When warfare and commerce — or any social activity — coexisted in the same physical space, the interdependent balance between them, which supported the slave trade itself, was disrupted. After the end of the war, political stability boosted slave trading operations.

Highlights

On 3 April 1818, around five o’clock in the morning, eighty armed men showed up at Jacob Faber’s slave trading outpost in the Kerefe River in southern Sierra Leone
Combined with archival records from Cuba, Sierra Leone, England, the United States, and Spain, they offer insights on the rise of Galinhas as the leading Atlantic slave market in nineteenth-century Upper Guinea as well as the warfare in the region that led to the foundation of the Galinhas kingdom (1808–20)
Du Bois’s iconic text on the US slave trade, historians have explored the strategies adopted by US merchants to continue trading Africans after 1808.2 Yet they have overlooked a critical but unintended consequence of abolition: the simultaneous and interconnected rise of Cuba’s slave-trading market and that of some regions in Upper Guinea such as Galinhas

Summary

Introduction

On 3 April 1818, around five o’clock in the morning, eighty armed men showed up at Jacob Faber’s slave trading outpost in the Kerefe River in southern Sierra Leone. Combined with archival records from Cuba, Sierra Leone, England, the United States, and Spain, they offer insights on the rise of Galinhas as the leading Atlantic slave market in nineteenth-century Upper Guinea as well as the warfare in the region that led to the foundation of the Galinhas kingdom (1808–20).

Results

Conclusion