The literature of slavery and abolition

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521832755.015

14 - The literature of slavery and abolition

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Moira Ferguson

Edited by

F. Abiola Irele and

Simon Gikandi

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F. Abiola Irele: Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Simon Gikandi: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

One infamous 300-year battle over slavery was waged in Britain and the Americas, a period that is culturally rich with texts written by first-, second-, and sometimes third-generation Africans (in Britain and the Americas), including the United States and the Caribbean. Geography as an organizing principle helps to illuminate the similarities and differences within that literature of slavery and abolition.

African writers in Britain

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, slaves and ex-slaves in the African diaspora, kidnapped in West Africa, shipped across the notorious Middle Passage, and sold into slavery, wrote unflinchingly about their brutal life experiences. In petitions, poems, fictions, and autobiographies, also known as slave narratives, they recreated their environment and their mature selves as human beings enduring grievous lives, in Britain, the Americas and the Caribbean. They wrote in conscious opposition to proslavery stereotypes.

The earliest recorded English slave trader was John Hawkins, who, in 1562, on behalf of the English government, traded Africans to the Portuguese African and Spanish planters. By 1618, the English government held monopolies to slave trading-companies. The Royal African Company was founded in 1672 and was granted exclusive rights of trade between the west coast of Africa and the British colonies in the Americas. In the next five years, the company had shipped 100,000 African slaves to the West Indies and 5,000 to the North American colonies. After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, England assumed imperial dominance in the slave trade by acquiring the right – the Asiento – to deliver 144,000 slaves to the Spanish colonies.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature , pp. 238 - 254

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521832755.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2000

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