Atlantic Trade Research Articles

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Forced Migration and Its Lasting Impact

"The Atlantic Slave Trade: Forced Migration and Its Lasting Impact" delves into the profound and lasting repercussions of this historical tragedy. Spanning over four centuries, the Atlantic Slave Trade forcibly relocated millions of Africans to the Americas, reshaping societies on both sides of the Atlantic. This research investigates the historical context, economic motives, and mechanisms that fueled this trade, while examining its devastating consequences on African societies, including demographic disruption, economic upheaval, and cultural transformation. Furthermore, it explores how enslaved Africans in the Americas played pivotal roles in shaping the New World's industries, culture, and social structures. The study delves into abolition movements, the end of the trade, and the enduring legacies of slavery, including racial disparities, systemic racism, and contemporary social justice movements. Through case studies and comprehensive analysis, this research underscores the ongoing relevance of the Atlantic Slave Trade, emphasizing the critical need to acknowledge and address its profound and enduring impact on the present-day social, economic, and cultural landscapes.

The Influence of American Slavery on American Economy

The only time in American history that the United States has ever fought against each other was the Civil War. How did the Civil War start? Why did the North abolish slavery? What impact did the Civil War have on the American economy? This paper analyzes the background of the American Civil War and the measures taken by the North and South during the war, and puts forward some opinions about the influence of the Civil War on the American economy. The Civil War was a watershed or a turning point in the development of American capitalist economy. However, the success of American economy in the 19th century was not decided by the sudden change brought by a "war" or a "revolution". It was actually the result of the long-term development of a variety of factors that could not be covered by the civil War, this study offers some references for the research of American economy.

Slavery and charity: Tobias Rustat and the African companies, 1662–94

Abstract The links between enslavement and charitable giving in the late seventeenth century were deep and have become newly controversial. This article considers Tobias Rustat (1608–94), a royal servant and a long-term investor in the Royal African Company and other trading companies involved in the transatlantic slave trade, who gave prolifically to English educational and religious institutions from the 1660s. It uses previously unstudied archival evidence to analyse Rustat’s involvement in the trade in enslaved people alongside his charitable giving, demonstrating that both activities should be understood through his distinctive social networks. In doing so it argues for an approach to the contested legacies of slavery's connections to philanthropy that foregrounds the social, political and commercial networks of donors.

David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

Racism, public pedagogy, and the construction of a United States values infrastructure, 1661–2023: a critical reflection

ABSTRACT This paper argues that public pedagogy—an educational activity that takes place outside of the traditional classroom setting—has had a potent impact on the history of racism in the United States of America (USA). Yet this paper questions why the education academy’s scholarship has not shown a commensurate focus on the subdiscipline of public pedagogy, particularly racialized public pedagogy. I explore these topics by first examining a fateful confluence of historical circumstances involving slave codes and indentured servant laws governing low-income white workers, laws passed by the Barbados Assembly in 1661, that made their way across the Atlantic to be lifted, word for word, by leaders of colonial territories that became the USA. These laws ended up regulating not only the legal status of black slaves and white indentured servants in the USA, but also regulating social relations between those same black and white people. The resulting black–white social relations led to the evolution of racialized customs in what eventually became the USA, inspiring practices that undergirded black inferiority and white superiority for hundreds of years. Those customs contributed to the construction of what I have labelled a United States (US) values infrastructure dominated by racism, which I contend is a racialized values infrastructure that exists to this day. To gain more insight into this phenomenon, this paper considers the question: how might the complexity of racialized public pedagogy be addressed in the scholarship of education literature and be imagined in a way to fit into an anti-racist curriculum?

Let's have a relook at accountability

2020 Distinguished Accounting Academic Keynote Address presented at the Annual British Accounting and Finance in April 2022, University of Nottingham.This paper examines how Gloria Agyemang, the BAFA Distinguished Accounting Academic award winner of 2020, has studied accountability in her work. It does this by analysing her previous research contributions to public sector accountability, nongovernment organisational accountability, and accountability in other contexts such as social and environmental accounting as well as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It argues that in the study of accountability, context and the need for accountability to several stakeholders is extremely important; but accountability contexts and the stakeholders need to include those who are hidden in the recesses of everyday life. The paper draws on a theoretical framework that Rached (2016) refers to as “coordinates of accountability”, which by providing a minimalist definition of accountability facilitates an expanded analysis to broaden and deepen accountability research. It argues for responsible scholars to be engaged with historical, contemporary, and societally critical issues and to employ counter accounting methods to reexamine accountability.

Royal Attitudes to the Atlantic Slave Trade and Abolition in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract Recent historiography has placed particular emphasis on the social origins and influence of individuals who took opposing sides in debates on the abolition of the slave trade between 1787 and 1807. There is no doubt that family networks and connections influenced patterns of pro-slavery and abolitionist support. Despite this familial focus, comparatively little attention has been paid to the attitudes and interventions in the debate of King George III and his family. As early as 1808, Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament recorded how Prince William Henry, duke of Clarence, and his younger cousin, Prince William Frederick, second duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, held diametrically opposed views on the issue. Evidence that has recently come to light in the Royal Archives makes it possible to assess whether the divide between George III’s son and nephew points to a royal family riven by disagreement on the rights and wrongs of slavery. By broadening the canvas of study to include other royal dukes, this article contributes to a much fuller understanding of the family’s reaction to one of the most pressing moral and economic questions of the day. Their views were not just a matter of their own personal opinions; their interventions in debate affected (and on balance, impeded) the progress of abolition and had direct repercussions on the lives of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Forgotten No Longer: Universities and Slavery in Twenty-First-Century Scholarship and Memory

Abstract: Just twenty years ago, little was known about the connections between universities and slavery—few understood that universities had been founded and funded by slave owners and others who made their fortunes through the transatlantic slave trade. This essay examines several excellent books and articles on slavery and universities that have created a new subfield within the historiography of American slavery. This new body of work has focused on three main themes: the economic benefits enjoyed by universities from the donations of men who profited from slavery, the role of universities in promoting proslavery ideology, and the use of slaves by universities to work on their campuses and fund their educational missions. This research has led to calls for institutional apologies for slavery, memorialization of slaves who worked on campuses, and reparations for the descendants of these slaves; it is literally reshaping the physical and ideological landscape of many American universities.

Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Aristotle to Crispr, second edition

Experimenting with Humans and Animals: from Aristotle to Crispr, second edition

The ancestry and geographical origins of St Helena’s liberated Africans

The island of St Helena played a crucial role in the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. Strategically located in the middle of the South Atlantic, it served as a staging post for the Royal Navy and reception point for enslaved Africans who had been "liberated" from slave ships intercepted by the British. In total, St Helena received approximately 27,000 liberated Africans between 1840 and 1867. Written sources suggest that the majority of these individuals came from West Central Africa, but their precise origins are unknown. Here, we report the results of ancient DNA analyses that we conducted as part of a wider effort to commemorate St Helena's liberated Africans and to restore knowledge of their lives and experiences. We generated partial genomes (0.1-0.5×) for 20 individuals whose remains had been recovered during archaeological excavations on the island. We compared their genomes with genotype data for over 3,000 present-day individuals from 90 populations across sub-Saharan Africa and conclude that the individuals most likely originated from different source populations within the general area between northern Angola and Gabon. We also find that the majority (17/20) of the individuals were male, supporting a well-documented sex bias in the latter phase of the transatlantic slave trade. The study expands our understanding of St Helena's liberated African community and illustrates how ancient DNA analyses can be used to investigate the origins and identities of individuals whose lives were bound up in the story of slavery and its abolition.

Remembering the Gender and Sexual Archive of the Black Diaspora in Tunisia: a Decolonial Approach to Historical Anthropology

The available studies on the cultural history of the Black diasporas in the Ottoman Mediterranean have focused on religious and other cultural manifestations, leaving out the inquiry about notions and practices related to gender and sexuality. Taking a cue from works on the Black Atlantic and the African continent, this article investigates the notions of gender and sexuality underlying the sub-Saharan worldviews and offers a template to interpret the subjecthood of enslaved sub-Saharans in the Maghribi diaspora. The first part of the essay lays out a historical contextualisation of the Black diaspora in early nineteenth-century Tunis. Then I take the reference to the practice of al-musāḥaqa (lesbianism) among the Black slaves in an 1808 Arabic manuscript as a starting point to investigate, by surveying different anthropological studies, whether al-musāḥaqa can be thought of as pertaining to the archive of sexual epistemology which the enslaved would have taken to Tunisia and, more importantly, to enquire into how we can understand it within a non-anthropocentric historical cosmology-which, ultimately, can contribute to the necessary decolonisation of feminist and queer studies, and history and anthropology more generally.

Liquid Geographies of Transatlantic Slavery: Caribbean Pathways of Forced Migration, 1580-1640

Slave transshipment and resale routes within the Spanish Caribbean were a fundamental part of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought to the region during the late XVI and first half of the XVII century were forcibly made to traverse multiple circum-Caribbean points throughout their lives in a continuous process of de-racination, re-commodification, and forced mobility. Maritime regional slave routes linked seemingly marginal locations in the Caribbean like Cumaná, Margarita, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, or Trujillo with wider regional flows of peoples, capital, and commodities, as well as with the circulation in the larger Atlantic. Veracruz and Cartagena each served as an axis for these regional slave transshipment and resale routes, while Havana and Cartagena both functioned as re-shipment springboards for Veracruz.

“When I saw the skull approaching, I died”: Transatlantic communicative flows in response to racial terror in Brazil

ABSTRACT This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered during fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. For Raphael Calazans, a young Black composer, the culture of survival emerges from solidarity: in the absence of housing policy for freed slaves, people created their own neighborhoods and improvised everyday solutions. The culture of survival is a practical means of grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. It is enacted through different communicative practices, including the papo reto (straight talk) activist register. I draw from conversations with local intellectuals to examine these language flows as a rhizomatic ensemble of tropes emerging from confrontations between life and death, as in police raids. In responding to current iterations of racial terror, the culture of survival displays dynamic resources – including solidarity, self-formation, humor, defiance and strategies for handling liminality – that favela residents deploy in their everyday life.

African archives in the Caribbean: the Yoruba tradition, cultural experts, and the unmaking of religious knowledge in twentieth-century Trinidad

ABSTRACTAttending to how religious custodians, colonial agents, and scholars have exchanged knowledge across sites in Africa and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article raises questions about continuities and ruptures in religious traditions that challenge perceptions of homelands as sites of stable, originary knowledges/heritages and diasporas as sites of improvised and severed knowledges/heritages. Highlighting the Yoruba-Orisa1 religion in Trinidad as a rich diasporic site to work through these issues, I employ a transdisciplinary methodology to argue that historicizing and theorizing African heritage religions that have unfolded around and in the wake of the events of the transatlantic slave trade require comparative research methods – historical, sociolinguistic, phenomenological, decolonial, material cultural studies – that facilitate critical explorations of the multidirectional circulation of expert religious knowledge between Africa and its diasporas. In so doing, we can examine the Caribbean and the Americas not only as sites of African diasporic archives and religious history but also as archival diasporas of African continental religious and socio-political history.

Cities and migration

ABSTRACT As a prelude to the following essays on nine cities selected as strategic research sites, this introduction traces, in summary fashion, the linkages between migration and the development of the capitalist world economy, including, the rise of cities and their development. The history of migration during these five centuries encompasses the movement of European settlers to the new colonies, followed by three centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trade leading in turn, to deliberate labour recruitment in three continents and, eventually, to the contemporary self-driven flows of both labourers and refugees. A final diagram summarizes this evolution and seeks to situate the origin and development of the nine selected cities within it.

The reception of "Sketchers of a hunter" in USA, or I.S. Turgenev against slavery

The following article contains a research of the reasons for Turgenev's "Sketches of a hunter" popularity in XIXth century USA. It is considered the general reasons for the interest of Russia and the United States in each other, and the immediate reasons for Turgenev's popularity in America in the 1850s. The author analyses early American reviews on this book and finds out that the cause for such popularity was the common social problem of slavery in the USA and serfdom in Russia. The first few reviews of Americans on Turgenev's book indicate that the author of "Sketches of a hunter" was initially perceived in the New World as a writer who raises only social problems. Some of Turgenev's texts were compared with the works of American writers, for example, with Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Tom's Cabin”. The aesthetic meaning of "Sketches of a hunter" became clear to American critics only in the late 19th century due to some Turgenev-influenced American writers, such as George Cable, Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson. At this time, the first complete English translation of "Sketches of a hunter" was made by Constance Garnet.

Beyond Isabel Archer's Door: The Underground Railroad and the Condemned Plot for Freedom

Abstract This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the “vulgar street,” protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth-century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom.

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-emancipation Imagination

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-emancipation Imagination