Early Slave Trade Research Articles

Local African responses to the early slave trade trade in Upper Guinea, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries

When Portuguese mariners reached the Senegambian coast shortly before 1450, they quickly engaged in taking small numbers of captives back to Lis-bon. In Senegambian societies, varied forms of limited or temporary servile status existed before this first contact, and the interior was connected to the older trans-Saharan slave trade. By the 1580s several thousand Africans a year were being pur-chased and taken either to the Cape Verde Islands, to Europe or, increasingly, to the Americas. Africans responded rapidly but variously to the development of this slave trade. They protected themselves by moving into remote or geographically protect-ed areas; and they learned to defend themselves and to turn the tables by capturing their aggressors. Some, such as the Bijogo, actively entered the slave trade, even cap-turing Portuguese. Finally, several communities of escaped slaves were established, with at least the tacit support of local Africans. These Maroon communities were composed at least partly of captives who had escaped from the Portuguese.

The Early Portuguese Slave Ship and the Infrastructure of Racial Capitalism

AbstractThis article argues that an infrastructural analysis of the early Portuguese slave trade permits a detailed account of the emergence of what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism.” The early Portuguese slave ship is one of the clearest examples of how an infrastructure of accumulation accelerated the racialization of capitalism. As denounced by the 1684 Portuguese Law on Tonnage, the holds of the early slave ships created spatial regimes that regularly killed captives through asphyxiation, a unique form of death resulting from the reduction of human life to capital. If enslavement was defined by this spatial regime of suffocation, the early slave trade extended the grounds for racialization through extensive networks of credit and debt. This financial system established the parameters of enslavement and freedom, bridging shipboard and terrestrial social relations. Early slave ships included Black sailors, known as grumetes. A term that became adopted throughout the first region of the Portuguese slave trade in Africa, grumete referred to African wage laborers who worked with Luso-African traders. As wages were likely paid in credit that could only be cashed out by participating in the sale of humans, the freedom of the grumetes was constrained by the system of credit that financed the early trade. The infrastructure of the early slave trade was thus the nexus and conduit between interconnected financial modes, commodified life and debt, that together account for the racialization of the early Atlantic world.

‘The Kingdom of Angola is not Very Far from Here’: The South Atlantic Slave Port of Buenos Aires, 1585–1640

This article draws upon sources from Spain's Archive of the Indies and elsewhere to survey the early seventeenth-century slave trade to Buenos Aires, exploring the diversity of ways in which slaves were transported to Buenos Aires, strategies of contraband traders, and the city's rich economic and social links to port cities in Brazil and Angola. Taken together, these diverse sources reveal how Buenos Aires was a key port of the South Atlantic. This article also suggests some revisions of the major characteristics of the early slave trade to Spanish and Portuguese America – notably, the significant presence of children among the enslaved.

The Slave Trade as Memory and History: James A. Emanuel’s “The Middle Passage Blues” and Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage”

The Slave Trade as Memory and History:James A. Emanuel’s “The Middle Passage Blues” and Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” Raphaël Lambert (bio) James A. Emanuel’s “The Middle Passage Blues” (1999) and Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1945) are two of a few remarkable poems about the transatlantic slave trade, and comparing them affords a unique opportunity to explore two very divergent and yet complementary perspectives—one memorial and the other historical—on the slave trade.1 Emanuel’s poem serves as a prologue to Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (1999), a collection of essays originally presented at the inaugural conference of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) held in Tenerife in 1995. The “Transatlantic Passages” theme, the time of the conference, when claims for reparations were rising, and the location in the Canary Islands—a thriving center of the early slave trade—undoubtedly account for the visceral, even phylogenetic bond Emanuel establishes with his middle passage ancestors, urging us to consider the interplay of individual and collective memory.2 Emanuel’s poem, by postulating an unbroken continuity between past and present and advocating devotion to the community, revives issues of identity formation and identity politics that say more about our present world than about our past. Hayden’s poem, unlike Emanuel’s, was not commissioned. It grew out of the earlier Black Spear project and shows Hayden’s determination to offer a fresh perspective on black history while refashioning the poetic canon in the process. Hayden takes a primarily historical interest in reconstructing the narrative of the middle passage, and although his poem is less demonstrative and more detached than Emanuel’s, it remains equally harrowing and involved with the past. But Hayden, whose affected objectivity is candid and deliberate, addresses not only the revision of history but also the transcendence of racial and cultural schisms so as to foster universalist values. For Hayden, the middle passage is not a personal inheritance, a cause for mourning, resentment, or self-discovery as it is for Emanuel. It is a past for all implicated parties, a past not to be forgotten, and a lesson for the future. “The Middle Passage Blues” and the Source of Memory It is not given to man to make for himself another cradle. —Charles Péguy, Morceaux choisis (1928) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “every man is a quotation from all his ancestors” (28) is an adage James A. Emanuel would not disavow, so much is his poem entrenched in a logic of kinship and generational ties: “I can HYP-NO-TIZE myself rememberin’ Grandma’s chair; / she had slave-girl mem’ries, and she rocked and hummed’em there: / her daddy’s neck and legs in chains, his own vomit in his hair—” (ll. 8-10). The motif of comfort (grandmother; rocking chair, and stories), abruptly cancelled out by one of discomfort (great-grandfather; chains, and vomit), cannot be [End Page 327] allowed to remain, simply, a disturbing memory or an event of the past, for Grandma prophesies that: “When you grow up, you be a Middle Passage man” (l. 18). Such words enclose the narrator in a predetermined, fateful condition. Thus Emanuel offers nostalgia in its literal etymological sense: a return home (nostos) mixed with pain (algos), which accounts for the narrator’s blues. Furthermore, the use of the past unreal conditional in the first stanza suggests both the narrator’s resignation and assimilation of the lessons of the elders: “If I’da been a sailor on the Seven Seas / I’da sailed the seven ENDS and let the MIDDLES be… . / But if I’da been a sailor, I’da still been black” (ll. 3-5). Resignation; assimilation; but also volition since the narrator chooses self-induced hypnosis. And it is after the initial pleasure derived from such a state that the narrator runs through the successive stages of fear (“and suddenly I’m runnin’-runnin’-runnin’ …” [l. 13]), psychosis (“Middle Passage mem’ries … they in a dungeon in my head” [l. 19]), self-acceptance (“I ain’t runnin’, I’m just standin’, but I had to have a plan” [l. 28]), and finally control and transformation of the legacy...

The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 by Toby Green (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 by Toby Green Rebecca Shumway The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589. By Toby Green. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 366 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (e-book). Drawing on archival sources in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Toby Green presents a new study of the earliest phase of European maritime activity and settlement on the Cape Verde islands and the West African coast between the Senegal River and Sierra Leone. The book examines conditions in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Iberia and West Africa that set the stage for the complex interactions between Europeans and Africans that followed, though the book primarily focuses on the period from 1460 to 1589, when Cape Verde was a hub of long-distance trade. Most of the nine chapters deal exclusively with the islands and coastal towns where Iberians conducted trade, although frequent reference is made to the African hinterland as well as locations in Europe and the Americas that were connected to Cape Verde by maritime trade. The book provides a richly detailed analysis of the evolution of Cape Verde as both an entrepôt for trade in enslaved Africans and a very early European colony in which African slaves produced agricultural products for export. Green’s use of documents from the Inquisition enables him to paint a detailed portrait of the settlers who came from Iberia in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seeking their fortunes in the first site of what Philip Curtin has dubbed the “plantation complex.” A large proportion of these settlers were New Christians of Jewish ancestry, and Green argues that their experiences with violence and exclusion in Europe shaped the ways in which they built a new society based on slavery and slave trading on Cape Verde and the African coast. One of the most intriguing ideas presented in the book is that this part of the world was simultaneously shaped by three overlapping diasporas in this period: the New Christian diaspora in Cape Verde and the Mediterranean, the diaspora of Islamic traders involved in trans-Saharan trade, and the Mandinka diaspora through which coastal Western Africans shared a cultural and linguistic link with their neighbors in the distant interior. Green is very keen to show that he has uncovered new evidence that warrants a reassessment of the volume of the early slave trade from Upper Guinea. He makes a strong argument for the underappreciation of the Portuguese contraband slave trade and introduces evidence showing that the scale of this trade may have been quite large. For example, he demonstrates that many slave ships could have been provisioned by the increasing agricultural production in Upper Guinea [End Page 729] in this period. The number of enslaved Africans taken by slave ships in this period nevertheless remains extremely uncertain, however, and historians who have used quantitative methods to assess the volume of the trade will undoubtedly question Green’s interpretation. Moreover, this evidence alone does not refute the generally accepted view that African gold was more important than slaves to the first generations of European traders in Africa, which Green rejects. New evidence presented here regarding early Europeans’ travels in the Americas has more potential to stimulate fruitful historical analysis. Green shows that many of the first “explorers” of the Americas, including Columbus, actually had extensive experience in and knowledge of West Africa, and that they referenced their African knowledge in their encounters with the indigenous people of the Americas. The ways in which these European travelers introduced ideas about slavery and slave trading from the Old World to the New constitute a new dimension of the ideological processes involved in the formation of the early Atlantic World. Some readers will be put off by Green’s exaggerated claims. This book certainly advances historical knowledge of the complex processes that might be called the making of the Atlantic World (à la John Thornton); however, it is a stretch to say that it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of major events in the more recent history of the world—such as the colonization of Africa...

Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, 1500-1830

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Maps and Illustrations Introduction: Alcohol as History in Africa 1. Alcohol in Early Modern West Central Africa 2. The Introduction of Bacchus Into West Central Africa 3. The Reign of Bacchus: Portuguese Alcohol at Luanda and its Hinterland During the Early Slave Trade, c. 1550-1649 4. The Downfall of Bacchus: Brazilian Traders, Portuguese Capitalists and the Struggle for the Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1650-1699 5. The Long Century of Gerebita: The Luso-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1700-1830 6. The Profits of Luso-Brazilian Alcohol in Slaving at Luanda and its Hinterland 7. Underpinning the Slave Trade: Other Uses of Luso-Brazilian Alcohol in Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1575-1830 Conclusion: The Impact of Portuguese and Brazilian Intoxicants Appendix: Graphs Bibliography Index

A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present by Elizabeth Isichei

BOOK REVIEWS745 African A History ofChristianity inAfrica:FromAntiquity to the Present. By EUzabeth Isichei. (Grand Rapids:WiUiam B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; LawrencevUle, NewJersey:Africa World Press, Inc. 1995. Pp. xü, 420. $ 19.95 paper.) There has been a need for a comprehensive Introduction to the history of African Christianity ever since that continent emerged from its colonial condition to consist of a body of self-governing poUtical communities. Such a history has now been produced by Professor Isichei Ui this weU-researched volume, which has managed to cover the intended extent of both place and time in a way which is both eminently readable and most convincing. The author demonstrates howAfrica played an important role in the Mediterranean church of patristic tunes and how a connection with that era has survived in the continuing history of the monophysite Churches of Egypt and Ethiopia. The Christian tradition in most of sub-Saharan Africa, however, began a thousand years after patristic times with die advent of Portuguese imperiaUst involvement Ui the southern Western and Eastern coastal areas of the continent , and continued with other European (mainly French and British) missionary initiatives which at first accompanied and then superseded the trade Ui African slaves. The author does not gloss over the involvement of Christian clergy and laymen, Capuchins for example and pious Protestant merchants, Ui the early slave trade. It seems that the acquisition and selling of baptized slaves did not meet as much ecclesiastical censure as the temptation to seU them to purchasers from rival denominations. In what she terms "a distant forerunner of black liberation theology" Professor Isichei quotes the seventeenth-century petition to Rome by Lourenço da SUva, a black CathoUc layman, which resulted at that time in a series ofVatican propositions which would have made the slave trade "unworkable" but which were not put into practice because of the perceived commercial "need." The great movement for converting sub-Saharan Africans to Christianity came once the slave trade declined Ui the nineteenth century, and Professor Isichei gives equal weight to Protestant and to Roman CathoUc initiatives Ui this e??efG?ße. Although no longer encumbered by slavery, these activities were stUl part ofEuropean imperialist designs, and the mission ofconverting Africans to Christ was Ui some places compUcated by the presence of European settlers whose spiritual needs would compete with diose of the natives. Professor Isichei treats separately and equally ofWestern, Southern, and Eastern Africa Ui this history. She points out that Ui many cases foreign missionaries did not remain long enough to learn African languages adequately and that, even where they did, most of the conversion activity was Ui fact performed by Africans themselves. 746BOOK REVIEWS The problem of how to Christianize without Europeanizing was raised frequently as the African missions progressed. In many cases a solution was attempted by the creation of a separate African church community. The fissiparous nature of Protestantism was certainly more sympathetic to such developments , and Professor Isichei describes the many instances of such independent congregations Ui aU parts of Africa over the years, but she also points to the twentieth-century examples of separatist movements from CathoUcism. This becomes a Uvely issue in Professor Isichei's final chapter, where she examines the current situation of the estabUshed Christian churches with regard to wealtii, to women, to local politics, and to the claims of traditional African phUosophies. Altogether Professor Isichei has produced not simply a fascinating account ofrival churches UiAfrica but a convincing history ofAfrican Christianity . Brian Garvey University ofLeeds Asian A Vision Betrayed: TheJesuits inJapan and China, 1542-1742. By Andrew C. Ross. (MaryknoU, NewYork: Orbis Books. 1994. Pp. xvü, 216. $34.95.) Based principaUy on selected EngUsh-language secondary Uterature, this attempt at a "synoptic history" offers some insights about the Jesuit mission in Japan and China from the time of St. Francis Xavier to the 1742 papal buU Ex quo singulari condemning the Chinese Rites. Andrew Ross, a senior lecturer on the history of missions at the University of Edinburgh, opens with the premise that "many scholars," including Nigel Cameron and Joseph Needham, have so focused on Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) that diey have not asked how he ever came "to...