Two concepts of a slave in the South Carolina law of slavery

The American law of slavery was structured around two conceptions of what a slave was: a legal person and a form of property. Neither conception preceded the other; neither outlasted the other; neither could be reduced to the other; neither was reluctantly stated; and neither was accidental. Scholars have often treated this double character of the slave in law as a mark of contradiction or incoherence. But the case of South Carolina, examined through state-level statutes and appellate-court decisions, demonstrates that in fact both conceptions were essential to a legal regime intended at root to establish and preserve white control.     

The role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade

The recent controversy instigated by Leonard Jeffries has prompted discussion of the relationship between the development of the transatlantic slave trade and European Jewish communities. Closer attention to the role played by Jews in the development of the trade, and its associated enterprises, suggests that little direct involvement can be identified. In the Dutch slave trade Jews can be said to have had tangible significance, but even here their involvement was relatively marginal. Through detailed analysis of the historiography of slavery, the ‘conspiracy theory’ approach to the issue is substantially challenged and disproved.     

Uncovering testimonies of slavery and the slave trade in missionary sources: the SHADD biographies project and the CMS and MMS archives for Sierra Leone,Nigeria, and the Gambia

This article highlights narratives of enslavement held in the Church Missionary Society and Methodist Missionary Society archives for the Sierra Leone, Yoruba, and Gambia missions in the nineteenth century. Its particular focus is on testimonies of Africans who experienced enslavement in Africa and were subsequently sold to Europeans on the coast and embarked on trans-Atlantic slave vessels. These documents form part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded SHADD: Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents project, a digital publication of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University (http://tubman.info.yorku.ca/publications/shadd/). This article catalogues both the narratives uncovered to date – among the longest unpublished accounts of enslavement in Africa – and research strategies for uncovering more. It concludes with an appendix indexing digitized and transcribed documents available on the SHADD database as research and teaching resources.     

The slave trade in the western Sudan during the nineteenth century

The traditional historical narrative has tended to interpret colonization during the Civil War by simultaneously discounting African-American support for the policy and Abraham Lincoln's sincerity in offering it. Challenging these views, this paper examines new evidence of the U.S. government's efforts to enlist the pro-emigration minority of the free black community for a proposed settlement in British Honduras. For a brief period in 1863, black emigrationists including Henry Highland Garnet and John Willis Menard seriously entertained the Lincoln administration's colonization offers, spurred largely by their experiences with racial violence in the USA and the prospect of stronger political rights abroad.     

Merchant networks,the guarantee system and the British slave trade to Jamaica in the 1790s

This paper contributes to the literature on payments for slave sales in the later phase of the British slave trade. It analyses the procedures used in the ‘guarantee’ system in transatlantic slaving whereby merchants in British ports forged close connections with African factors in British America and with British businessmen who guaranteed to pay the factors’ bills presented as payments for slave sales. This was an important institutional procedure in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Though the ‘guarantee’ system has been explained in outline in previous studies, the case study presented here offers the most detailed appraisal of this system. Examining the British slave trade to Jamaica in 1790s, then the most significant disembarkation centre for enslaved people taken on British vessels, the paper explains the coordination necessary between groups of British merchants, their African factors in Jamaica and their British guarantee in order to secure payments for slave sales at a time of considerable volatility in the demand for slaves in Jamaica. The paper suggests that cooperation between merchants in different British ports in connection with the slave trade is as worthy of investigation as the rivalry between the British ports involved in the ‘Guinea’ traffic.