Atlantic Trade Research Articles

A Collaborative Approach to Antiracist Pedagogy

This cowritten Reflections essay describes an upper-division seminar for honours and master’s students that brought together established antiracist pedagogical principles (for example, decentering Britain) with a commitment to hands-on, in-class collaboration. This collaborative dimension buoyed the class’s capacity to encounter both the challenges and insights that the antiracist framework brought to the fore. In a course that sought to engage with Romantic poetry of “labour and longing” in the age of transatlantic slavery, working together became both an object of study and a learning practice. The coauthored nature of this essay therefore advances, beyond the end of term, the importance of listening and learning from one another in the pursuit of more inclusive, wide-ranging, and (very often) discomforting learning environments, even as such environments can only ever be imperfect.

Norway’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade: a discourse analysis of media coverage and implications for education

Norway’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade: a discourse analysis of media coverage and implications for education

“Siyah Öfke: Ortaçağ İslam Dünyasında Zenci Kölelerin İsyanı (869-883)” adlı kitabın dəyərləndirilməsi

Prof. Dr. Mustafa Demirci's monograph "Black Rage: The Rebellion of Negro Slaves in the Medieval Islamic World (869-883)" on the 'Zanj rebellion' that took place between 869-883 A.D., during the Abbasid period, and was led by the Ali b. Muhammad, is one of the most important studies both in terms of its subject matter and the author's approach and perspective on the subject. The study, which was prepared with a rich academic literature using basic sources and modern research on the subject, deals with issues such as the geography of the event, the causes and spread of the rebellion, the wars and warfare techniques to suppress the rebellion, the short and long-term effects of the damage left behind by the rebellion from an academic perspective in chronological order. The Zanj revolt started in the marshes of Basra in 869 as a result of Ali b. Muhammad (d. 883), who was originally white and claimed to be a descendant of Ali, organizing black slaves working under difficult conditions in the large farms in and around Basra, and the rebellion grew and spread in a short time. Muwaffak Billāh (843-891), the brother of the Abbasid Caliph Mu’temid Alallâh (843-892), who was assigned to suppress the revolt, was victorious against the rebels after tough struggles, and the revolt ended with the killing of the leader of the rebellion, Ali b. Muhammad, in 883.

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

This article supplements the multidisciplinary effort sparked by the New York Times's 1619 Project to focus attention on institutions and practices that supported American slavery. Managerial and financial accounting practices support many types of endeavours. Accounting is usually done for managers, investors, and creditors. Accounting practices supported investment in, and management of slavery, a fundamentally immoral and destructive practice. Accounting served the interests of the enslavers, not the enslaved. Accounting practices helped investors in slave voyages and absentee plantation owners overcome agency problems, facilitating investment. Plantations used accounting to track enslaved people's productivity. Accounting terms and reports dehumanised enslaved men and women, classifying them as assets and as loan collateral. Accounting forms and statements treated slave ownership and the use of slave labour as routine. In these ways, accounting statements helped normalise and legitimise the practice of slavery and helped distance investors and lenders from its brutal reality.

Violent Raiding, Systematic Slaving, and Sweeping Depopulation? Re-Evaluating the Scythian Impact on Central Europe through the Lens of the Witaszkowo/Vettersfelde Hoard

In 1882, the lavishly decorated golden regalia of a steppe nomad warrior prince, which was crafted in the late sixth century BCE in a “bilingual” Scythian–Milesian workshop on the Black Sea coast, was found on the edge of a Lusatian swamp 120 km southeast of Berlin. Its discovery and the ongoing findings of steppe nomad armaments—arrows, battle axes, and swords—in central Europe have led to a lively debate about the nature of Scythian–Indigenous interaction in the Early Iron Age, ranging from benign visions of long-term acculturation to violent scenarios of short-term raiding. In this article, I argue that an analysis of the iconography of the Witaszkowo hoard and new information from excavations at its find spot make it likely that it was sent as a diplomatic gift by Scythian elites to an indigenous leader and deposited by the local community as a votive hoard. An affirmation of the compact chronological range of Scythian artefacts found in the west, growing evidence for the destruction of indigenous strongholds by horse-borne archers, and concurrent evidence for the drastic depopulation of vast landscapes in the second half of the sixth century BCE allow us to envisage the gifting of this hoard as an episode of a fierce and destructive altercation. It is posited that this onslaught was a facet of the western thrust of the Lydian and Persian Empires, and that its extirpative impact was the result of systematic, commercially driven slaving triggered by the concurrent monetisation of the economies of the Black Sea coast. The effects of these raids on Eastern Central Europe’s later prehistoric communities are made manifest by analogies to the disastrous ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade on societies of 16th-to-18th-century West Africa.

Against Diffusion: Power and Institutions in African–European Relations

Abstract Four centuries of precolonial diplomatic, economic, and military African–European relations have been neglected in international relations. Refuting common presumptions about European dominance, before, during, and after the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade, African rulers and merchants were generally in a position of equality or superiority in their relations with Europeans. Contrary to expectations that long-term interaction promotes homogenization via institutional diffusion from core to periphery, Africans generally eschewed European political, economic, and military models such as the Westphalian state, the corporation, and the salaried standing army. Instead, they utilized external opportunities in ways that reinforced evolving local differences, or adopted institutions from the Islamic world; Europeans in Africa were more likely to adopt African models than vice versa. That African polities held out against European dominance longer than larger, richer, and more militarily powerful Asian polities, and that stateless African societies held out longest of all, brings into question fundamental assumptions about survival under international anarchy.

Experiences of Enslaved Children in Luanda, 1850–1869

About half of Luanda’s population comprised enslaved people in the mid-nineteenth century. Although scholars have examined the expansion of slavery in Angola after the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the use of slavery to underpin the trade in tropical commodities, the labor performed by enslaved children has been neglected. This study explores the experiences of enslaved children working in Luanda during the era of the so-called “legitimate” commerce in tropical commodities, particularly between 1850 and 1869. It draws upon slave registers, official reports, and the local gazette, the Boletim Oficial de Angola, to analyze the means through which children were enslaved, the tasks they performed, their background, family connections, and daily experiences under enslavement. This paper argues that masters expected enslaved children to perform the same work attributed to enslaved men and women. After all, they saw captives as a productive unit irrespective of their age.

The spectral geographies of slavery: tourism and the hauntings of dissonant colonial heritage

The spectral geography of the colonial legacy in Bristol is marked by a series of absences from official and tourist narratives about the city. The people and practices of the Atlantic slave trade are part of the historical and contemporary fabric of the city and persist as ever-present spectres. There are significant differences of view that agree with little beyond that the city was a major port of Empire and a significant site in the triangular trade. Bristol is commonly portrayed as a multicultural city with a rebellious spirit and a strong commitment to social justice. This urban imaginary is evident in accounts of the removal of a statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader and philanthropist, during a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. The now empty plinth of the Colston statue has become a contested, liminal space that sits between disparate interpretations and radically different points in time in terms of social relations. Individual and collective memories and stories about slavery constitute hauntings in a spectral geography of Bristol. Such stories are rarely heard, and the city is thus haunted by the absences of the voices of those enslaved and a lack of knowledge of the role of slavery in the growth and historic prosperity of the city. Little has been done to incorporate such dissonant heritage and so the histories of slavers, slavery, and slaves are not significant themes in tourism marketing, attractions or experiences in the city. This paper demonstrates that a process of coming to terms with difficult heritage and associated hauntings offers significant potential for tourism to contribute to historic and contemporary social justice.

Irish-American Anti-Imperialism in Patrick Ford’s The Criminal History of the British Empire

Abstract In 1881, Patrick Ford, the Irish-American nationalist editor of the New York Irish newspaper The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, published The criminal history of the British empire, a collection of five letters that he had written to William Gladstone. In The criminal history, Ford constructed a comprehensive account of British imperial history, beginning with England’s conquest of Ireland, before detailing the colonization of North America, Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, the American Revolution, British rule in India, the opium wars, and Britain’s contemporary colonization of Africa. This article contributes to scholarship on American views of the British empire in the post-bellum United States. In exploring how Ford constructed a Manichean interpretation of world history, where the British imperial project devastated every region it invaded, the article analyses Ford’s reasons for writing and publishing the letters that formed The criminal history. Finally, the article shows that Ford’s central purpose was to foster a visceral hatred of the British empire among his Irish-American readership, to maintain a commitment to their ethnic heritage as proud Irish people, and to encourage his readers that a better future would soon arrive, when the British empire was finally a relic of the past.

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)

Textimony: The Grammar of Atrocity

Abstract This essay seeks to understand the complexity of a post-Holocaust discourse of comparative suffering in law and literature, focusing on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The essay traces a history of post-1945 discourse about the Holocaust, as the place of Jewish suffering under the Nazis swerves between comparability and incomparability, ineffability and analogy, in legal and literary representations. Focusing on M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry in her work Zong!, which features an entanglement between the articulative capacity of Holocaust analogies for articulating the suffering of the transatlantic slave trade and the simultaneous tendency for such comparisons to occlude the very subject that such a comparison seeks to articulate, the argument identifies the tensions that inevitably emerge out of a discourse of comparative memory. Moving outside of Zong!, the essay shows how this problem is embedded, with significant impact on the history and the future of the legal recognition of suffering produced by the transatlantic slave trade, opening up new lines of inquiry about the efficacy, and the consequences, of comparison on the terrain of post-Holocaust human rights.

Robert Burns's Black Neighbours in Ayrshire

Robert Burns's decision to emigrate to Jamaica in 1786 as a slave-driver is well known, and is increasingly debated as Scotland develops its understanding of its direct and indirect roles in the transatlantic slave trade and Black chattel slavery. The stories, and even the names, of the Black people of that period (servants and tradesmen) are typically more ephemeral than those of Burns and his friends and patrons, but it would be wrong to assume that there were no Black people living and working in Ayr and its environs in Burns's day. While the Black population across Scotland was small (commentators suggest around seventy individuals against some fifteen thousand in England & Wales), contemporary records show that over a dozen lived and worked in Ayrshire. While there is no concrete evidence in the Poet's writings, this study shows that it is highly likely that Burns saw some of these people on the streets, that he met the biracial children of the manumitted Black man Scipio Kennedy, and that he was present at the baptism of a Black man, John Cartwright, in Mauchline Kirk in 1784.

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human­–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbean environmental geographies: resistance to extractivism and dispossession, denaturalization of disaster, theorizing global ecological justice, and pursuit of repair. The article suggests how Caribbean environmental philosophy and ecocriticism offer analytics for mapping relational geographies beyond Western epistemes of progress and spatial imaginaries that peripheralize the region.

Possessed: Understanding the Lives of Enslaved Americans

Abstract: Enslaved people in the US South lived in a system designed to exploit their labor in pursuit of profit. This historiographical essay considers key questions about labor and power raised in the previous two decades of scholarship on antebellum slavery. What were the forms and meanings of enslaved people’s politics, and how can we track them through the archive? How was slavery connected to other phenomena including empire and capitalism in the early United States? In pursuing these questions, scholars have illuminated the history of slavery at different scales, ranging from the lived experiences of bound workers to transatlantic networks of commerce and credit through which the products of enslaved labor moved. This essay considers some of the different ways recent historians have worked to understand the institution of slavery, with a particular focus on the question of how closely their approaches bring us to understanding the shape of enslaved humanity.

Black Bibliography as Biographical Method: The Publication History of The Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery, 1837–1849

Black Bibliography as Biographical Method: The Publication History of <i>The Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery</i>, 1837–1849

The Haunting Absence of Language: How Toni Morrison’s Spectral Formula Unlocks Marginalized Counter-Narratives in Current Gothic American Literature

Abstract: Is Toni Morrison still here? Rather than exorcising Beloved by ordering that her story not be passed on, it appears that the author and her shade have been embraced and remain firmly rooted in current Gothic American literature. Morrison honed the spectral, liberating undocumented Black American slave counter-narratives and exposing concealed ancestral trauma. The fecundity of her contribution is celebrated in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House , both of which employ such ghosts to engage with and enlighten their nescient descendants. In this article, I examine the gap in the scholarly conversation on the proliferation of a spectral formula established in Beloved that echoes through current literary works entailing a corporeal ghost, related to the living characters, haunted by a historically invalidated trauma, that is only released by reintegration rather than exorcism.

“Catachresis at the Origin”: Names and Power in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract: Toni Morrison’s fiction is replete with characters who carry nicknames, who rename themselves, or are renamed by others. Some misnamings carry the stories of histories of marginalization and oppression—as with the “drunken yankee” responsible for the naming of Macon Dead in Song of Solomon . Morrison’s characters also rename themselves to resist the legacy of American slavery and institutionalized racism. What ties Morrison’s namings, misnamings, and renamings together is the sense that there is no path to the recovery of true names for many African American people. The consequence is not powerlessness; rather, the “catachresis at the origin” that Gayatri Spivak refers to is intuited organically by many Morrison characters, who embrace misnaming and rename themselves as a mode of claiming self-ownership. Catachresis may begin as rhetorical violence imposed from without, but in Toni Morrison’s fiction, it can end as an opportunity to assert power, autonomy, and a boundless creativity.

Settler Colonialism and Harte’s Frontier Ecogothic in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racialecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. 1 The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

Current State of Archaeobotanical Research in Ghana: On Diet, Food Resources and Research Perspectives

This review delves into the changes in food consumption patterns over time in West Africa, emphasising the significant role played by archaeobotanical studies. West African food consumption has been influenced by various factors such as economic, environmental, and external influences. Our initial studies focused on plant and animal domestication and the spread of grains. The arrival of Europeans in the 15th century brought changes in foodways, introducing new crops from the New and Old World. Some misconceptions about African food and agriculture have been challenged, accentuating the region’s diversity and resilience. The paper discusses the initial focus on economic factors and the domestication of plants, leading to a better understanding of the connection between food and society. Additionally, it dispels misapprehensions about West African cuisine and highlights the impact of the Atlantic trade on foodways. The study underscores the significance of interdisciplinary research in rectifying any biases surrounding Africa’s food history. Archaeobotanical research has shed light on the dynamic nature of African foodways, including the integration of American crops into local food traditions. However, knowledge of the extent of adoption and use of these crops during the precolonial era remains limited. More research is required to comprehend the adoption of American crops and the resilience of African food systems.

Between the Wizard and the Fire‐Eaters: The Last Records of the Illegal Slave Trade to Brazil, 1866–1870

Following the enactment of the Eusébio de Queirós law under British pressure in 1850, the Brazilian Empire brought an end to the international slave trade. Illicit arrivals continued to occur, but around 1856 the trade was deemed extinct by the Brazilian authorities. This study discusses rumours and potential evidence of illicit trafficking on the brink of the repeal of the Aberdeen Act, which stirred up officials from the Brazilian Empire, as well as diplomats from the United States and the United Kingdom, and suggest a connection with the conclusion of the American Civil War, particularly Confederate emigration, and a racist organisation in the United States.