Historical Slave Trade Research Articles

The Long-term Impact of the Historical Slave Trade in Africa on Contemporary Industrialization

The Long-term Impact of the Historical Slave Trade in Africa on Contemporary Industrialization

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade

Merseyside football and the slave trade

ABSTRACT This paper is about the roots of Everton Football Club and, given their shared heritage, Liverpool FC. It concerns a dimension to the history of both clubs that has been largely overlooked but should be considered in light of Liverpool’s ongoing civic reckoning with its historic slave trade connection. The research carried out suggests that the foundation period of professional football on Merseyside was marked by the patronage of well-known figures in Liverpool society who, directly or indirectly, profited from the exploitation of slave and other forms of coerced labour. It is contended that there was a reciprocal relationship between a cohort of club patrons and the evolving football scene in the city. It is also argued that Everton FCs recent commitment to memorialize the slave associations of the dock land site of its new stadium – a move it has reaped praise for – can also be viewed negatively as an underscoring of the ‘maritimisation’ of the impact of slavery, further obscuring the pervasiveness of the slavery story beyond maritime spaces.

Association of hepatitis C virus genotype 2 spread with historic slave trade and commerce routes in Western Africa.

The hepatitis C virus genotype 2 (HCV2) is endemic in Western and Central Africa. The HCV2 evolutionary origins remain uncertain due to the paucity of available genomes from African settings. In this study, we investigated the molecular epidemiology of HCV infections in rural Guinea, Western Africa, during 2004 and 2014. Broadly reactive nested reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based screening of sera from 1,571 asymptomatic adults resulted in the detection of 25 (1.5 per cent; 95 per cent confidence interval 0.9-2.3) positive samples, with a median viral load of 2.54E + 05 IU/ml (interquartile range 6.72E + 05). HCV-infected persons had a median age of 47 years, and 62.5 per cent were male and 37.5 per cent were female. The full polyprotein-encoding genes were retrieved by a combination of high throughput and Sanger sequencing from 17 samples showing sufficiently high viral loads. Phylogenetic analysis and sequence distances ≥13 per cent averaged over the polyprotein genes compared to other HCV2 subtypes revealed nine previously unknown HCV2 subtypes. The time to the most recent common ancestor of the Guinean HCV2 strains inferred in a Bayesian framework was 493 years (95 per cent Highest posterior density (HPD) 453-532). Most of the Guinean strains clustered poorly by location on both the level of sampling sites within Guinea and the level of countries in the phylogenetic reconstructions. Ancestral state reconstruction provided decisive support (Bayes factor > 100) for an origin of HCV2 in Western Africa. Phylogeographic reconstructions in a Bayesian framework pointed to a radial diffusion of HCV2 from Western African regions encompassing today's countries like Ghana, Guinea Bissau, or Burkina Faso, to Central and Northern African regions that took place from the 16th century onwards. The spread of HCV2 coincided in time and space with the main historic slave trade and commerce routes, supported by Bayesian tip-association significance testing (P = 0.01). Our study confirms the evolutionary origins of HCV2 in Western Africa and provides a potential link between historic human movements and HCV2 dispersion.

The enslaved ontology: Peoples of the historic slave trade

We present the Enslaved Ontology (V1.0) which was developed for integrating data about the historic slave trade from diverse sources in a use case driven by historians. Ontology development followed modular ontology design principles as derived from ontology design pattern application best practices and the eXtreme Design Methodology. Ontology content focuses on data about historic persons and the event records from which this data can be taken. It also incorporates provenance modeling and some temporal and spatial aspects. The ontology is available as serialized in the Web Ontology Language OWL, and carries modularization annotations using the Ontology Pattern Language (OPLa). It is available under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

The Enslaved Ontology: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade

We present the Enslaved Ontology (V1.0) which was developed for integrating data about the historic slave trade from diverse sources in a use case driven by historians. Ontology development followed modular ontology design principles as derived from ontology design pattern application best practices and the eXtreme Design Methodology. Ontology content focuses on data about historic persons and the event records from which this data can be taken. It also incorporates provenance modeling and some temporal and spatial aspects. The ontology is available as serialized in the Web Ontology Language OWL, and carries modularization annotations using the Ontology Pattern Language (OPLa). It is available under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

Witchcraft beliefs as a cultural legacy of the Atlantic slave trade: Evidence from two continents

This paper argues that the historical slave trade contributed to the propagation of persistent witchcraft beliefs on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and establishes two key empirical patterns. First, it shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa, representatives of ethnic groups which were more heavily exposed to the Atlantic slave trade in the past are more likely to believe in witchcraft today, thus establishing a link between historical trauma and contemporary culture. Second, exploring the role of the slave trade in cultural transmission across continents, this paper finds that Afro-descendants in modern Latin America are substantially more likely to believe in witchcraft relative to other ancestral groups. Moreover, accounting for ancestry and other relevant factors, people residing in regions historically more reliant on African slave labor are also more likely to be witchcraft believers. These findings support ethnographic narratives on the connection between slave trade, slavery, and the entrenchment of witchcraft beliefs and shed light on the nature of these beliefs and related practices as a cultural framework for interpreting misfortune and a mechanism of enslavement in local communities.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis lineage 1 genetic diversity in Pará, Brazil, suggests common ancestry with east-African isolates potentially linked to historical slave trade

Lineage 1 (L1) is one of seven Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) lineages. The objective of this study was to improve the complex taxonomy of L1 using phylogenetic SNPs, and to look for the origin of the main L1 sublineage prevalent in Para, Brazil. We developed a high-throughput SNPs-typing assay based on 12-L1-specific SNPs. This assay allowed us to experimentally retrieve SNP patterns on nine of these twelve SNPs in 277 isolates previously tentatively assigned to L1 spoligotyping-based sublineages. Three collections were used: Pará-Brazil (71); RIVM, the Netherlands (102), Madagascar (104). One-hundred more results were generated in Silico using the PolyTB database. Based on the final SNPs combination, the samples were classified into 11 clusters (C1-C11). Most isolates within a SNP-based cluster shared a mutual spoligotyping-defined lineage. However, L1/EAI1-SOM (SIT48) and L1/EAI6-BGD1 (SIT591) showed a poor correlation with SNP data and are not monophyletic. L1/EAI8-MDG and L1/EAI3-IND belonged to C5; this result suggests that they share a common ancestor. L1.1.3/SIT129, a spoligotype pattern found in SNPs-cluster C6, was found to be shared between Pará/Brazil and Malawi. SIT129 was independently found to be highly prevalent in Mozambique, which suggests a migration history from East-Africa to Brazil during the 16th–18th slave trade period to Northern Brazil.

“Dig, What Makes Your Mouth So Big?”: Off-Modern Nostalgia, Symbolic Cannibalism, and Crossing the Border of the Universal Language in Clarence Major’s “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage”

Abstract African American literature on the Middle Passage has always challenged white supremacy’s language with its power to define and control. This article demonstrates how the border of such a “Universal Language” is challenged and trespassed in Clarence Major’s ekphrastic poem “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage” in order to communicate – through the implementation of the voice of a disembodied water spirit Mfu – the black perspective on understanding the slave trade and effectively resist the symbolic cannibalism of Western Culture. The trope of antropophagy often appears in Middle Passage poems in the context of (mis)communication (which results in the production of controlling, racist images of blacks) and stands as a sign of Euro-American power to create the historical, hierarchical, racial reality of the Atlantic slave trade in its economic and symbolic dimensions. The strategy implemented by Major in his poetic confrontation with representation of historical slave trade in European and American Fine arts may be classified as “off-modern” (to use Svetlana Boym’s (2001) nomenclature), which immediately places his poem in a “tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia” as a means of a critical analysis of the heritage and limitations of a given culture. My claim is that the poem’s “off-modern nostalgia” perspective is a version of textualist strategy which Henry Louis Gates (1988) identifies as Signifyin(g). Major/Mfu successfully perforates and destabilizes the assumed objectivity and neutrality of the images of blacks and blackness created and circulated within the realm of the visual arts of the dominant Western Culture. In “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage” Signifyin(g) takes the form of what could be called an ekphrastic (re)interpretation of actual works of art and joins in the critique of essentialist views often associated with understanding of meaning.

The Historical Slave Trade and Firm Access to Finance in Africa

Access to finance helps explain the link between the historical African slave trade and current gross domestic product. We first present mistrust, weakened institutions, and ethnic fractionalization as plausible historical channels linking the slave trade to modern finance and development. We then show (i) the slave trade is consistently linked to reduced access to the formal and trade credit needed by modern firms, (ii) this shortage particularly reduces capital investment in smaller firms not in business groups, and (iii) the slave trade cannot explain most other business obstacles, suggesting that long-term societal shocks are exceptionally important for finance. Received December 16, 2014; editorial decision June 29, 2017 by Editor Philip Strahan.

Witchcraft Beliefs as a Cultural Legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Two Continents

This paper argues that the historical slave trade contributed to the propagation of persistent witchcraft beliefs on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and establishes two key empirical patterns. First, it shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa, representatives of ethnic groups which were more heavily exposed to the Atlantic slave trade in the past are more likely to believe in witchcraft today, thus establishing a link between historical trauma and contemporary culture. Second, exploring the role of the slave trade in cultural transmission across continents, this paper finds that Afro-descendants in modern Latin America are substantially more likely to believe in witchcraft relative to other ancestral groups. Moreover, accounting for ancestry and other relevant factors, people residing in regions historically more reliant on African slave labor are also more likely to be witchcraft believers. These findings support ethnographic narratives on the connection between slave trade, slavery, and the entrenchment of witchcraft beliefs and shed light on the nature of these beliefs and related practices as a cultural framework for interpreting misfortune and a mechanism of enslavement in local communities.

Human trafficking: a variant of the historic slave trade in contemporary Nigeria

Human trafficking is as old as human existence and civilisation. It dates back to the time of old kingdoms where captivities of conquered empires were taking from into slavery and compelled to serve kings and princes of foreign kingdoms. This practice later changed to the sales of recalcitrant or sickly captives to other powerful kings that needed the services of slaves either as palace guards, farm workers, stewards, or in some cases as objects of sacrifice to appease the gods during a festival. Unfortunately, the ascendancy of this practice in contemporary times has now become a bane of challenge to the government, stakeholders and even security operatives as several youths (particularly teen girls) are been recruited as sex workers overseas, or used as ‘baby producers’ in what is popularly described as a ‘baby factory’ in Nigeria. This paper therefore examines some recent issues on kidnapping as well as factors responsible for this criminal act in Nigeria. Sequel to findings, this paper made some recommendations.Keywords: Human trafficking, Human right, Sex workers, Slave trade, Smuggling of people

The Historical Roots of Firm Access to Finance: Evidence from the African Slave Trade

We examine how the historical slave trade in Africa is linked to the present day business environment. We show that: (1) The slave trade is strongly linked to present day levels of firm access to finance; (2) Among all the business obstacles a firm faces (e.g., enforcing contracts, tax rates) the slave trade only affects access to finance; and (3) The historical presence of the slave trade not only erodes access to formal credit, but also reduces the supply of trade credit from suppliers and customers thought to substitute for formal channels. These results provide a firm-level mechanism to explain the link between the slave trade in Africa and present day GDP. The results also suggest a causal link between culture and finance, and imply that cultural impediments are the binding constraint on firm performance.

Phylogeography and molecular epidemiology of hepatitis C virus genotype 2 in Africa

Understanding the origin and nature of hepatitis C virus (HCV) genetic diversity is critical for improving treatment and vaccine design, and such diversity is the sole source of information about the virus' epidemic history prior to its identification 20 years ago. In this paper, we study the molecular epidemiology of HCV genotype 2 in its region of endemic origin, west and central Africa. Our analysis includes 56 new and highly diverse HCV isolates sampled from infected individuals in Guinea-Bissau. By combining phylogenetic, geographical and epidemiological information, we find a previously unappreciated geographical structure in the diversity of HCV genotype 2, pointing to a history of eastwards spatial spread from the west African coast to Cameroon that took place over several centuries. Molecular clock analysis dates the common ancestor of HCV in Guinea-Bissau to 1470 (1414-1582). The phylogenetic position of isolates from Madagascar and Martinique suggests a role for the historical slave trade in the global dissemination of HCV and of the epidemic subtypes 2a and 2c. Coalescent-based estimates of epidemic growth indicate a rapid 20th-century spread of HCV genotype 2 in Cameroon that is absent in Guinea-Bissau. We discuss this contrast in the context of possible parenteral HCV exposure during public-health campaigns undertaken during the colonial era.