From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce

From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce PDF Author: Robin Law
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521523066
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This edited collection, written by eleven leading specialists, examines the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa: the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and the development of alternative forms of 'legitimate' trade, mainly in vegetable products. Approaching the subject from an African, rather than a European or American, perspective, the case studies consider the effects of transition on the African societies involved. They offer significant insights into the history of pre-colonial Africa and the slave trade, the origins of European imperialism, and longer-term issues of economic development in Africa.

From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce

From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce PDF Author: Robin Law
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521523066
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited collection, written by eleven leading specialists, examines the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa: the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and the development of alternative forms of 'legitimate' trade, mainly in vegetable products. Approaching the subject from an African, rather than a European or American, perspective, the case studies consider the effects of transition on the African societies involved. They offer significant insights into the history of pre-colonial Africa and the slave trade, the origins of European imperialism, and longer-term issues of economic development in Africa.

Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860

Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 PDF Author: Angus E. Dalrymple-Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004417125
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 offers a fresh perspective on why, in the nineteenth century, the most important West African states and merchants who traded with Atlantic markets became exporters of commodities, instead of exporters of slaves. This study takes a long-term comparative approach and makes of use of new quantitative data. It argues that the timing and nature of the change from slave exports to so-called ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin, can be predicted by patterns of trade established in previous centuries by a range of African and European actors responding to the changing political and economic environments of the Atlantic world.

Slave Trade and Abolition

Slave Trade and Abolition PDF Author: Vanessa S. Oliveira
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299325806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority.

Not Made by Slaves

Not Made by Slaves PDF Author: Bronwen Everill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce. “East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism. Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor. Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.

Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa

Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa PDF Author: Robin Law
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 184701075X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to the early stages of colonial rule in the twentieth century. From the outset, the export of agricultural produce from Africa represented a potential alternative to the slave trade: although the predominant trend was to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas to cultivate crops, there was recurrent interest in the possibility of establishing plantations in Africa to produce such crops, or to purchase them from independent African producers. This idea gained greater currency in the context of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, when the promotion of commercial agriculture in Africa was seen as a means of suppressing the slave trade. At the same time, the slave trade itself stimulated commercial agriculture in Africa, to supply provisions for slave-ships in the Middle Passage. Commercial agriculture was also linked to slavery within Africa, since slaves were widely employed there in agricultural production. Although Abolitionists hoped that production of export crops in Africa would be based on free labour, in practice it often employed enslaved labour, so that slavery in Africa persisted into the colonial period. Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling; Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History, University of Worcester; Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.

Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa

Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa PDF Author: Martin Lynn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893268
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
An authoritative and comprehensive study of the palm oil trade.

Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World

Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World PDF Author: Silke Strickrodt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1847011101
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.

The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867

The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 PDF Author: Daniel B. Domingues da Silva
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107176263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book traces the inland origins of slaves leaving West Central Africa at the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade.

Brokers of Change

Brokers of Change PDF Author: Toby Green
Publisher: OUP/British Academy
ISBN: 9780197265208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is an important collection of essays focusing on pre-colonial trade and African-European interaction, looking at western Africa between Senegal and Sierra Leone. It spans the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce in the 19th century.

Freedom's Debtors

Freedom's Debtors PDF Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300231520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. At once scholarly and compelling, this history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone draws on a wealth of archival material. Scanlan’s social and material study offers insight into how the success of British anti-slavery policies were used to justify colonialism in Africa. He reframes a moment considered to be a watershed in British public morality as rather the beginning of morally ambiguous, violent, and exploitative colonial history.