76 results in Slavery
“We Shall Rejoice to see the Day When Slavery shall Cease to Exist”: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast1
- Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry
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- History in Africa / Volume 31 / 2004
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- 09 May 2014, pp. 19-42
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The articulation of antislavery among Africans remains to be studied. Overall, the staple of animated questions, debates, and conclusions of the vast literature on abolition of slavery in the last two decades or so has neglected African contributions of ideologies of antislavery to the global abolition epoch in the Atlantic world. Charting a new trajectory for the study of abolition in Africa, as well as the global abolition epoch, this study examines the ideologies of antislavery among Africans as expressed in the Gold Coast Times (Cape Coast) during the heyday of the British abolition of slavery in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. The study, echoing African agency, reveals the manifest presence of the African intelligentsia abolitionists in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast. The origin and timing of the African intelligentsia's antislavery attitudes in the Gold Coast are not made known in the sources. However, the sources do reveal that antislavery flowered in the littoral region between Elmina and Accra, the hub of precolonial intellectual activities, political activism, and diffusion of cultures, linked to the larger Atlantic world.
Overall, I argue that antislavery existed among the African intelligentsia and that they articulated their ideologies of antislavery in several ways, both on the eve of the British colonial abolition of slavery and in its immediate aftermath. The study is divided into four main parts. The first section problematizes the sources and addresses some methodological considerations. For its part, the second portion interrogates the comparative historiography on abolition, while the third section conceptualizes the African intelligentsia abolitionists and their association with the Gold Coast Times, the main platform for the African intelligentsia's espousal of ideologies of antislavery. Divided into two parts, the final section examines the African intelligentsia's articulation of antislavery both before and after the inauguration of abolition by the colonial state.
Regimes of Memory: the Case of the Netherlands
- Pieter Emmer
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- European Review / Volume 21 / Issue 4 / October 2013
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- 14 November 2013, pp. 470-479
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The Netherlands is not known for its opposing regimes of memory. There are two exceptions to this rule: the history of the German Occupation during the Second World War and the Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. The relatively low numbers of survivors of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, as well as the volume and the profitability of the Dutch slave trade and slavery, and the importance of slave resistance in abolishing slavery in the Dutch Caribbean have produced conflicting views, especially between professional historians and the descendants of slaves living in the Netherlands.
Introduction
- Chouki El Hamel, Arizona State University
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- Black Morocco
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Chapter 1 - Slavery, Insurance, and Sacrifice: The Embodiment of Capital
- Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London
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- The Logic of Slavery
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Frontmatter
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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- Transformations in Slavery
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Index
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Select Bibliography
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Appendix - Chronology of Measures against Slavery
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Summary
1772: Lord Mansfield’s decision: Slaves become free upon entering the British Isles, thus making it illegal to repossess fugitive slaves.
1780: Pennsylvania passes act for the gradual abolition of slavery.
1783: The Society of Friends (England) forms an antislavery association for the relief of slaves and the discouragement of the slave trade.
1783: Massachusetts declares slavery illegal.
1787: The Abolition Society of Samuel Wilberforce founds Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a home for liberated slaves.
1788: Dolben Act regulates British slave trade.
1789: British Parliament debates the abolition of the slave trade.
1791: Slaves rebel on the French island of Saint Domingue. The last European forces are evacuated in 1798, and the independent, black government of Haiti is established.
1791: First U.S. measures abolishing the slave trade.
1792: Denmark declares its intention to abolish the slave trade.
1794: French Republic abolishes slavery (subsequently revoked by Napoleon, 1802).
1799: The Church Missionary Society (England) is founded to pursue humanitarian aims in Africa, including the fight against the slave trade.
1803: Denmark abolishes the slave trade.
1804: Haiti recognized as independent country, abolishes slavery.
1805: British Order-in-Council restricts the import of slaves into colonies captured from France and Holland (Le., since 1802).
1806: Act of Parliament prohibits British participation in the slave trade to foreign territories, effectively outlawing two-thirds of the British trade.
1807: The Abolition Act prohibits all British subjects from participation in the slave trade as of January 1, 1808. A naval squadron that eventually reaches one-sixth of the total strength of the Royal Navy is dispatched to blockade the West African coast.
1808: Sierra Leone becomes a British colony and a center of antislave trade activities.
1808: The United States abolishes slave trade.
1810: Anglo-Portuguese treaty whereby Portugal agrees to restrict its slave trade to its own colonies.
1811: Parliament strengthens the Abolition Act by declaring that British subjects engaged in the slave trade are to be considered pirates.
1813: Anglo-Swedish treaty whereby Sweden outlaws the slave trade.
1814: The Treaty of Paris: France and Britain agree that the slave trade is “repugnant to the principles of natural justice.” France agrees to limit its trade to its own colonies and to abolish the trade in five years.
1814: Anglo-Netherlands treaty whereby the latter outlaws the slave trade.
1814: Anglo-Spanish treaty whereby Spain limits its slave trade to its own colonies and prohibits the trade north of the equator after 1817 and south of the equator after 1820 in return for £400,000 in compensation.
1815: Anglo-Portuguese treaty whereby Portugal agrees to limit its slave trade to its possessions south of the equator. In return, Britain waives Portugal’s war debt of £450,000.
1815: Congress of Vienna: Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Austria, and Sweden condemn the slave trade as “repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.”
1817: British convention with Portugal limits the Portuguese slave trade in East Africa to an area from Cape Delgado to the Bay of Lourenco Marques. Portugal also concedes visit-and-search rights on Portuguese ships suspected of violating this and other agreements.
1817: British treaty with Imerina prohibits the export of slaves from Madagascar in return for compensation of £2,000 per year. Imerina outlaws slave raiding in the Comoro Islands on penalty of being reduced to slavery.
1817: Anglo-Spanish treaty grants Britain the right to detain Spanish ships.
1818: France outlaws the slave trade.
1820: British treaty with Imerina is extended.
1820–5: Slavery is outlawed throughout the newly independent Spanish countries of Latin America.
1821: Slave imports into Cuba become illegal, although the effect is minimal.
1822: The American Colonization Society establishes Liberia as a home for liberated American slaves.
1822: Moresby Treaty between Britain and Muscat prohibits the export of slaves by Europeans in East Africa and establishes a British observer at Zanzibar. Britain recognizes Omani claims in East Africa, including the existence of slavery.
1823: A third treaty with Imerina whereby Britain is authorized to seize slavers; it also provides for the resettlement of liberated slaves.
1823: Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions is founded.
1824: Establishment of British protectorate over Mombasa with intention to restrict slave trade; protectorate terminates in 1826 under Zanzibar pressure.
1825: Hugh Clapperton and Dixon Denham negotiate treaties with the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno to end slave exports in return for trade in European goods.
1826: Newly independent Brazil accepts Portugal’s treaty obligations with Britain and promises to abolish the slave trade in three years.
1829: Mexico abolishes slavery.
1831: Anglo-French treaty provides for mutual, limited right to search vessels suspected of carrying slaves.
1831: Brazil officially abolishes slave trade.
1833: Britain emancipates slaves in its West Indian colonies, South Africa, and Mauritius, with compensation to slave owners; emancipation takes effect on August 1, 1834, although a system of apprenticeship lasts for four years in some colonies.
1835: Anglo-Spanish treaty for condemnation of slave ships.
1836: Portugal abolishes slave trade.
1838: Thomas F. Buxton launches a campaign against slavery, advocating free trade and the colonization of the African interior with freed, Christian slaves. Buxton’s efforts result in the strengthening of the British naval squadron off the West African coast and the signing of antislave trade treaties with African states.
1839: Convention between Oman (Zanzibar) and Britain, which extends rights of search and seizure.
1839: Joseph Sturge founds the British Anti-Slavery Society.
1839: Buxton establishes the African Civilization Society as part of his abolition campaign.
1841: The British Aborigines’ Protection Society is founded in England.
1841: Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia agree to extend rights of search and seizure to halt the slave trade, although France refuses to ratify the treaty.
1842: Webster-Ashburton Treaty: Britain and the United States agree to maintain a naval force of at least eighty guns off the African coast as part of a joint commitment to suppress the slave trade.
1843: The legal status of slavery is abolished in India and elsewhere, although slaves are not emancipated.
1843: France initiates or “free labor” emigration in its colonial possessions to circumvent antislavery treaties.
1844: Britain signs treaty with Sultanate of Anjouin (Comoro Islands) to prevent French recruitment of labor.
1845: Anglo-French treaty: Both powers agree to maintain at least twenty-six cruisers off the African coast as an antislave-trade force; rights of search and seizure are abrogated. France does not adhere to the treaty, which is allowed to expire after ten years.
1845: British treaty with Oman (Zanzibar): Slave trade is restricted to Oman’s possessions in Arabia and East Africa; Britain secures the right of search and seizure.
1846: Tunisia abolishes the slave trade to gain British support against the Ottoman Empire.
1847: The Ottoman Empire prohibits the slave trade in the Persian Gulf and closes public slave markets in Constantinople.
1847: Liberia becomes an independent republic.
1848: Persia bans the maritime slave trade.
1848: France emancipates slaves in its colonies.
1849: French preventative squadron off the West African coast is reduced.
1849: France establishes Libreville, Gabon, as a settlement for freed slaves.
1849: Establishment of British consuls and agents in West Africa to supervise treaty obligations, including antislave trade provisions. Royal Navy squadron is strengthened.
1850: Brazil enforces slave trade abolition.
1851: Britain deposes the ruler of Lagos for his refusal to take action against the slave trade. Antislave trade treaties are signed with Lagos, Dahomey, Porto Novo, Badagry, and Abeokuta.
1851: Anglo-Persian treaty grants Britain right of search and seizure.
1854: Portugal decrees that slaves in its territories are .
1854: Egypt bans public slave markets, although trade continues in private.
1854: The Ottoman Empire prohibits the white slave trade.
1855: First of several treaties with principalities on the Red Sea coast that grant right of search and seizure to Britain; official appointed to Berbera.
1857: The Ottoman Empire prohibits the slave trade in its domains, although the decree is not enforced.
1859: France abolishes the system, although enforcement is not strict.
1861: The Canning Award: Zanzibar and Oman are separated, thereby setting the stage for the further suppression of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
1862: Treaty of Washington: The United States grants Britain the right of search and seizure.
1865: Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery.
1865: British treaty with Imerina whereby Imerina prohibits the importation of slaves.
1867: Cuba ends slave trade.
1869: The Royal Navy begins intensive patrolling against Arab slave trade.
1869: Portugal abolishes slavery.
1870: Ownership of slaves becomes illegal in India.
1873: Kirk-Barghash treaty: Zanzibar bans public slave markets and promises to protect liberated slaves.
1874: Proclamation for the emancipation of slaves on the Gold Coast, following the British defeat of Asante.
1875: British treaty with Tunisia confirming abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Annexation subsequently revoked.
1876: France incorporates Walo and Dimar into Senegal, thereby abolishing slavery.
1876: British Royal Commission investigates the treatment of fugitive slaves in East Africa but opposes asylum for fugitives except in cases of physical danger.
1877: Anglo-Egyptian treaty prohibits the import, export, and transit of slaves in Egypt; domestic slavery to be outlawed by 1884 in Egypt and 1889 in the Nilotic Sudan.
1877: Britain undertakes to reorganize the Zanzibar army to combat the slave trade in the interior.
1877: Imerina declares all slaves from Mozambique free.
1878: Portugal abolishes legal status of slavery.
1880: Anglo-Ottoman Convention reaffirms the prohibition of the slave trade and grants Britain rights of search.
1882: Colonel Charles Gordon, seeking to check the Mahdist rebellion, rescinds the law banning the slave trade in the Nilotic Sudan.
1883: Morocco rejects the “friendly appeal” of the British Foreign Office for the abolition of slavery.
1883: The African Department of the British Foreign Office replaces the Slave Trade Department as the era of “moral temporizing” ends.
1883: Britain assigns four traveling consuls to East Africa to replace naval action against the slave trade.
1884: France and Britain forbid employees and in Morocco to own slaves.
1884: British treaty with Ethiopia grants Ethiopia access to the Red Sea through Massawa on a condition that slave trade ends in the interior.
1885: Berlin Conference: Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Denmark, and the United States agree to “help in suppressing slavery,” although no direct measures are taken against the slave trade in Africa.
1888: Brazil becomes the last American country to abolish slavery.
1888: Cardinal Lavigerie inaugurates a campaign against the slave trade in central Africa, thereby revitalizing the humanitarian cause in Britain and Europe.
1888: Imperial British East Africa Company pays more than £3,000 compensation for 1,400 fugitive slaves at the CMS mission stations near Mombasa.
1888: Germany, Britain, and Italy blockade the coast of Zanzibar, ostensibly to suppress the slave trade.
1889: Zanzibar grants the British and Germans perpetual right of search, decrees that new slaves entering its domains after November 1, 1889 shall be free, and provides for the emancipation of all slave children born after January 1, 1890.
1889: Brussels Conference: The participants of the Berlin Conference, plus Persia, Zanzibar, and the Congo Free State, condemn slavery and the slave trade. Bureaux are established in Brussels and Zanzibar to collate and disseminate information on the slave trade.
1892: Convention between France and the independent states of Senegal in which slaves are recognized as servants; French courts grant certificates of liberty to those slaves buying their freedom.
1893: Renwell Rodd’s report to the British parliament recommending the gradual abolition of the slave trade in East Africa.
1894: British emancipation ordinance in the Gambia for gradual termination of slavery; slaves to be free at death of master or payment of £10 (adults) or £5 (children).
1896: Legal status of slavery abolished in Sierra Leone.
1897: Legal status of slavery abolished in Zanzibar.
1897: Slavery is abolished in Madagascar, following the French invasion of Imerina in 1895.
1899: Joint deputation of Quakers and the Anti-Slavery Society meets with the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs to demand emancipation of slaves in Africa.
1900: Britain abolishes the legal status of slavery in the occupied parts of Nigeria with the intention of extending the decree throughout Nigeria.
1909: Institution of slavery abolished in Zanzibar.
1919: Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye: The Allies limit (but do not prohibit) the slave trade in Africa. The signatories pledge to “secure the complete suppression of slavery in all its forms and of the slave trade by land and sea.”
1926: Forty-four countries ratify the slavery convention of the League of Nations.
1928: Institution of slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone.
1930: League of Nations’ prohibition of slavery is extended to include all forms of forced labor.
1936: League of Nations establishes a Permanent Advisory Committee on the suppression of the slave trade.
1942: Legal status of slavery is abolished in Ethiopia.
1962: Saudi Arabia becomes the last country to abolish the legal status of slavery.
Note on Currencies, Weights, and Measures
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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4 - The Enslavement of Africans, 1600–1800
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Summary
The growth of the export market, particularly the spectacular surge of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could not have taken place without a corresponding increase in the ability to enslave people, and, consequently, an intensification of political violence. While this adjustment implies disorder in the social framework wherever the external trade was important, the effective organization of slave supply required that political violence be contained within boundaries that would permit the sale of slaves abroad. The inherent contradiction in this situation was resolved through a separation of the commercial infrastructure from the institutions of enslavement. On the one hand, the disruption in the process of enslavement was associated with political fragmentation. On the other hand, the consolidation of independent commercial networks permitted the movement of slaves within Africa and beyond. Both dimensions were necessary features of the emerging system of slavery in this African context. The export of about 11.7 million slaves from 1500 to 1800, including the astronomical increase between 1650 and 1800 in the Atlantic sector, could not have occurred without the transformation of the African political economy. The articulation of the supply mechanism required the institutionalization of enslavement, which was disruptive (examined in this chapter), and the consolidation of a commercial infrastructure, which was integrative (examined in the next chapter).
A Politically Fragmented Continent
The most pervasive feature of African history in the period from 1600 to 1800 was the inability of military and political leaders to consolidate large areas into centralized states, despite the presence of many small polities. In the sixteenth century, only Songhay and Borno can truly be called empires. The other states of the period were much smaller than these, and large areas had no states at all. In 1800, there were no large empires, although the number of states as a whole had increased, and the area of stateless societies had been reduced. Political fragmentation accompanied by instability was characteristic of the period. This political environment was well suited for enslaving people.
Notes
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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11 - The Abolitionist Impulse
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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The Reluctant Move Toward Abolition
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the African social order was more firmly rooted in slavery than ever before. This meant that Africa and Europe were on a collision course in which slavery was a major issue, even if Europeans did not always recognize it as such. The imperialist momentum thrust a new social and political system on Africa, in which there was no room for slavery. Even though the pressure for change came from without, African societies were far from passive participants. The internal dynamics of the political economy were closely associated with the transformation of slavery into a productive system, sometimes connected with the external market and sometimes part of regional developments. The transformation was far from uniform. In large parts of Bantu Africa, slavery was linked to the regeneration of social and political institutions, as before. But along the East African coast, in the northern savanna, and on parts of the West African coast, slavery had become essential to the organization of production, no matter what social and political roles were also satisfied through slave use.
The greater use of slaves, involving a transformation in the means of production, demonstrates an adjustment to the world economy of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, alternatives to slavery were not seriously considered until late in the century, and then primarily as a result of European pressures on the African political economy. The long history of slavery had established the flexibility of the institution in controlling people, organizing production, arranging marriages, and bypassing custom. As long as slaves were readily available, they could be used in every conceivable capacity. Only when the source of slaves and the means of distributing them within Africa were undermined did slavery cease to be a viable institution. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the European colonial role was to whittle away at the means of enslavement and distribution. Despite a mythology of abolition, this role was not readily accepted. If there was a passive agent in the history of slavery during the nineteenth century, it was Europe, not Africa. Africa struggled to reform slavery in a changing context. The various European colonial powers did their best to avoid or circumscribe the commitment to abolition, reluctantly pursuing the fight whenever compromise proved impossible. Abolition was eventually achieved not so much because of the desire to end slavery but because the modern industrial system and a slave-based social formation were incompatible. In Marxist terms, the clash was based on the contradictions between different modes of production. The demise of slavery was inevitable in the context of absorption into a capitalist world economy.
Transformations in Slavery
- A History of Slavery in Africa
- 3rd edition
- Paul E. Lovejoy
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This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.
1 - Africa and Slavery
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Summary
Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas, and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in Africa slavery lasted well into the twentieth century – notably longer than in the Americas. Such antiquity and persistence require explanation, both to understand the historical development of slavery in Africa in its own right and to evaluate the relative importance of the slave trade to this development. Broadly speaking, slavery expanded in at least three stages – 1350 to 1600, 1600 to 1800, and 1800 to 1900 – by which time slavery had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy. This expansion occurred on two levels that were linked to the external slave trade. First, slavery became more common over an increasingly greater geographical area, spreading outward from those places that participated directly in the external slave trade. Second, the role of slaves in the economy and society became more important, resulting in the transformation of the social, economic, and political order. Again, the external trade was associated with this transformation.
Slavery: A Definition
Slavery is one form of exploitation. Its special characteristics include the idea that slaves are property; that they are outsiders who are alien by origin or who are denied their heritage through judicial or other sanctions; that coercion can be used at will; that their labor power is at the complete disposal of a master; that they do not have the right to their own sexuality and, by extension, to their own reproductive capacities; and that the slave status is inherited unless provision is made to ameliorate that status. These various attributes need to be examined in greater detail to clarify the distinctions between slavery and other servile relationships.
Preface to the Second Edition
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- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Preface to the Second Edition
Twenty years have passed since I first offered an overview of the history of slavery in Africa (Lovejoy 1979). The first edition of this book was my attempt to relate the internal development of slavery in Africa to external forces. My approach was to use the newly available quantifiable data on the scale, timing, and direction of the slave trade across the Atlantic to explore the political, economic, and social history of Africa, looking for correlations in the trans-Atlantic trade with developments in western Africa. From an Africanist perspective, such an approach also required consideration of the Islamic trade in slaves, Indian Ocean patterns, and Dutch use of slaves at the Cape of Good Hope. My approach tried to tie the known dimensions of the external trade in slaves to a history of slavery in Africa. Since the publication of the first edition, there has been considerably more research done on the demography of the slave trade, resulting most especially in the combination of various data into a single database, the W.E.B. Du Bois database, which draws on records of more than 27,000 slaving voyages between Africa and the Americas.
In preparing the second edition, I have relied on the Du Bois database, although in certain minor ways, the Du Bois data have been supplemented. In the first edition, I generated my own synthesis of available data on the scale of the slave trade, drawing heavily on Curtin’s earlier work (1969). This overview was in turn subjected to critique and revision. The Du Bois database makes much of the debate over the initial Curtin census (1969) and the subsequent revisions obsolete. In addition, other statistical studies have meant that most of the tables in the first edition have had to be modified. Hence most of the tables in this edition are new, although reference to the earlier literature is retained for purposes of comparison. To take account of the new demographic data, I have altered the discussion of the various tables accordingly, and additional references have been provided to reflect ongoing scholarship on the history of Africa and the role of slavery in that history. Where appropriate, I have qualified or otherwise modified my analysis in exploring the implications of the revised figures.
9 - Slavery in the Savanna during the Era of the Jihads
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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The nineteenth century was a period of violent upheaval in the northern savanna and Ethiopia. From Senegambia in the west to the Red Sea in the east, the series of holy wars (jihads) that began in 1804 transformed most of this region, and slavery played a vital role in the transformation. The increased importance of slavery is evident in the export figures for slaves – 1,650,000 slaves sold north across the Sahara Desert and the Red Sea – but the jihads resulted in the enslavement of millions of other people who were settled within the new states. This led to a more intensive use of slaves in production, which further consolidated a political economy in which slavery was crucial and in that sense constituted a slave mode of production.
Increased slave use was related to two factors. First, some areas benefited from the export trade, which included not only slaves but steadily growing quantities of “legitimate” commodities. This expanding market for other merchandise, especially ostrich feathers, ivory, tanned skins, and gum arabic, was connected with the general economic growth of Europe in the nineteenth century. These commodities were taken across the Sahara, although gum arabic and peanuts were shipped from the Senegambia coast, and ivory and shea butter were exported via the Niger-Benue confluence. The second and most important factor was the expansion of the regional economies that were centered in the northern savanna itself. For the first time in centuries, there was no serious multiyear drought that undermined the economy, although drought still affected developments locally. Production in foodstuffs, livestock, textiles, and other manufactures expanded, especially in the new Islamic theocracies. A corresponding expansion occurred in commerce, with the result that the southern desert, the savanna, and the northern forest-zone were closely integrated, probably more so than ever before.
6 - Relationships of Dependency, 1600–1800
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a variety of slave regimes in Africa. At one extreme, in many places in the far interior and in isolated spots between the major states and trade corridors, slaves were still marginal to society, forming one category of dependents in kinship systems but ultimately having little structural impact on the local economy or society. Other regions along the Atlantic coast had more slaves, although the outlook toward slavery was still in terms of dependency, even though the impact of the European market provided a situation in which slavery changed. From Sierra Leone in the west to Angola in the south, slavery was transformed as the interaction between enslavement, trade, and slave use influenced the organization of society. In some places, slavery was the basis for a mode of production; in a few areas, this productive system dominated the social formation. Two broad zones emerged: one strongly Islamic in the savanna belt, where there was a continuation and consolidation of earlier patterns of slave use and supply; and a second that was rooted in the tradition of kin-based societies that were now experiencing the transformation to slave societies. A final feature of this continuum of slave regimes was the foundation of European settlements where slave use shared some of the features of slavery in the Americas. These settlements were one bridge between the European-controlled productive regime in the Americas and the African-controlled system of slave supply.
The Expansion of Slavery
The external demand for slaves and the rivalry between African states directly affected the spread of slavery, for both caused tensions that led to the enslavement of people. The economy became dependent on exports to satisfy the personal desires of merchants and rulers and to provide many parts of Africa with a money supply, textiles, firearms, and other goods essential to the economy and political rule. The fragmented political structure, reinforced by military purchases and the need to acquire slaves to finance imports, was related to a general state of insecurity that facilitated enslavement. These two conditions – the slave market and institutionalized enslavement – set the stage for the course of slavery in Africa.
Preface
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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Summary
Preface
This is a work of synthesis. As such, it suffers from the same deficiencies that all studies of its sort do. I have examined some parts of the continent in much greater detail than others in preparing this book, and I have relied on secondary sources extensively, although there has been some use of primary material. Very likely there are points with which specialists will disagree, because the scope of the topic makes it impossible to be fully aware of the debates that affect particular periods and areas. Nonetheless, the study of African history, and more specifically the analysis of slavery in Africa, has suffered from the opposite problem to that of oversynthesis. There is virtually no historical framework in which the reconstruction of the history of slavery can be set. The numerous local studies that exist are uneven in quality and frequently are presented in a quasi-historical setting that is fraught with enormous methodological difficulties. Often studies of adjacent areas make no reference to each other. Sometimes, analysis is divorced from all outside influence, as if slavery in Africa existed in a vacuum. There are some brilliant local studies that have their own implications in terms of the study of slavery in general, but these, too, suffer from a failure to place the particular case in the context of Africa as a whole, or even specific regions within Africa.
With these problems in mind, I set out to write an interpretative essay, titled “Indigenous African Slavery,” which was presented at a conference on new directions in slave studies at the University of Waterloo in April 1979. I uncovered so much material that a more extensive project was necessary to consider the issues identified. That essay is in part a bibliographical study that can be used to accompany this book. It is incomplete, even with respect to relatively available materials, and it does not examine the extensive archival information that can be used for a study of this sort, although some archival material has been surveyed. In short, the collection and examination of source material continues, but the present volume is a necessary step in the further study of slavery.
10 - Slavery in Central, Southern, and Eastern Africa in the Nineteenth Century
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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- Book:
- Transformations in Slavery
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- 05 June 2012
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- 10 October 2011, pp 219-243
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Summary
The Expansion of the External Enclaves
In the eighteenth century, Europeans and their Euro-African descendants owned slaves at scattered points along the coast. The greatest concentrations were near Luanda, Cape Town, and the Zambezi valley. Despite the relative isolation of these holdings from the main developments in the institution of slavery in African societies before 1800, these European enclaves were the basis of a new order in central, southern, and eastern Africa in the nineteenth century. As these European enclaves expanded, a modified version of the slavery of the Americas expanded too. Despite the presence of a few plantations owned by Brazilians in Dahomey and Angola and the attempts at plantation development in Sierra Leone and elsewhere on the upper Guinea coast from the 1790s to the 1820s, slave masters in West Africa generally developed slavery into a productive system without the American example. Slave masters adapted the practices and traditions of their own societies – Akan, Yoruba, Igbo, or otherwise – so that European conceptions of slavery continued to be marginal, even as the economic importance of slavery increased. The situation in the southern third of the continent, therefore, was different from the experience of West Africa.
A parallel can be found in the adaptation of Islamic views of slavery in the northern savanna, where slavery was reinterpreted over the centuries in terms of Islam. The consolidation of slavery in the Muslim context represented an ongoing adjustment to the spread of Islam, the continued trade across the Sahara and the Red Sea, and the use of slaves in a variety of functions – the military, administration, domestic service, concubinage, and production. This kind of transformation had been largely absent along the Atlantic shores of Africa where Christian Europeans were present. In the nineteenth century, this situation changed.
3 - The Export Trade in Slaves, 1600–1800
- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, Toronto
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- Book:
- Transformations in Slavery
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- 05 June 2012
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- 10 October 2011, pp 45-65
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Summary
By 1600, an important structural change in the political economy of some parts of Africa was well underway. Islam continued to be an agent of change in the northern savanna and along the shores of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Slaves were exported on a sustained level, and enslavement and slavery were still interpreted largely in terms of Islamic law and tradition. The growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade had already exposed west-central Africa to a radically new influence. In the next two centuries, this influence was to have an even greater effect on much of the Guinea coast than the earlier trade in slaves had had anywhere in Africa, with the result that the people of the Atlantic basin experienced a major transformation in social organization. The dynamic changes along the Atlantic shores where the export trade became so substantial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries transformed slavery there in ways quite different from the earlier pattern in the Islamic belt, although structurally the impact was the same: Where slaves had once been an incidental element in society, they now became common. The ability to supply slaves required adjustments in the methods of enslavement and the development of a commercial infrastructure. These changes in turn were accompanied by increased domestic use of slaves.
The Volume of the Export Trade, 1600–1800
Despite the unevenness of the data available for a census of the export trade in slaves, it is possible to make some broad comparisons between its various sectors (see Table 3.1). The trade increased steadily from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The total number of slaves who left Africa – about 1,088,000 in the sixteenth century – includes 750,000 slaves allocated to the Islamic trade and 338,000 for the trans-Atlantic trade. The estimate for the Islamic traffic could be significantly off the mark but is unlikely to be less than 500,000 or more than 1,000,000. The estimate for the trans-Atlantic movement is far more accurate. Hence the sixteenth-century migration probably was on the order of 800,000 to 1,300,000 people. The seventeenth-century trade is subject to less error, and the eighteenth-century trade to less still, because the proportion of the trans-Atlantic trade – which can be estimated far more accurately than the Islamic trade – steadily increased, thereby reducing the relative size of the Islamic trade and correspondingly minimizing the error inherent in an assessment of its volume.