Slave Trading in a Republic of Credit: Financial Architecture of the US Slave Market, 1815–1840

Credit facilitated the intra-US slave trade's growth between 1815 and the financial crisis of the late 1830s. Movement of money across geographic space was the enslavers’ chief challenge, and this article details the process of slaving firms’ building credit and remitting funds with which they constructed supply chains in bondspersons. Slave market development was dependent on US and North Atlantic financial integration and comprised three stages. These included use of the Second Bank of the USA, supplemented by domestic bills of exchange, and culminating in the use of southern state banks with northern correspondent ties, which the financial crisis severed.     

‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars of the American slave revolts were concerned primarily with what the revolts revealed about the character of slavery and those who resisted it. Recently, in a shift in perspective that has not been fully appreciated, several historians have used the methods of micro-history to focus attention instead on the process by which stories of the revolts were composed. The emphasis of this new approach on silences in the historical record accounts for its immense interest to the historical profession, as well as for its profound limitation as a contribution to our understanding of American slavery.     

“America Will Not Tolerate Slave Traders”: Counter-Trafficking Policies and US Power

The US government has implemented an ambitious set of policies designed to combat human trafficking and sex trafficking in women and girls in particular. This article argues that anti-trafficking discourse and policy can be understood as a project to sustain and strengthen US power. This power has been wielded through the use of foreign aid, which influences the actions of both state and non-state actors overseas. Existing policies reinforce unilateralism and executive-branch dominance. Policymakers have also used gender strategically to moralize their actions and assert global leadership on this issue. Gender is thus deployed to serve US interests.     

Florence Hall's ‘Memoirs’: Finding African Women in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive.     

‘Wives of Circumstance’: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Late Nineteenth-century Senegal

Using the example of correspondence between a West African trader and two French colonial administrators, this article examines tensions over authority, slavery and gendered categories in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal in the early 1890s. The debate between the three men concerns two women and their questionable status as wives or slaves. The example of the two women, the options presented to them by both the trader and the colonial administrators, and their ultimate choice over slavery and freedom contributes to the historiography on gender, slavery and emancipation in Africa. The author also raises questions pertaining to the use of colonial administrative records to reconstruct the past of women in slavery in French West Africa.     

‘When he gets among his Countrymen,they tell him that he is free’: Slave Trade Abolition,Indentured Africans and a Royal Commission

The 1807 Act to abolish the British slave trade determined that those Africans seized by the British navy from illegally operating slave ships would be enlisted into the armed forces or indentured for a maximum of 14 years. In 1821, a Royal Commission was sent to the West Indies to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of those Africans who had been indentured under the Act. This article focuses on the work of the Commission – as it became riven by a personal and political dispute – in Tortola. It pays particular attention to the testimonies of the indentured Africans documented in the records. Their dissident narratives further disrupted the inquiry as they refused to answer to either redemptive abolitionism or instrumental political economy – the overlapping discourses framing the ways in which alternatives to enslaved labour were conceptualised during the 1820s.     

The Problem of Freedom in a Mid Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Society: The Liberated Africans of the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda (1844–1870)

In the mid nineteenth century, the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda liberated 137 Africans from the slave trade. The liberated Africans then became apprentices for several years before they were granted complete freedom. This article argues that the in-between status of the liberated Africans was ambivalent and their very presence in a society where slavery continued to exist highly problematic. This was reflected not only in the way their bodies were shaped, but also in the fact that both colonial officials and liberated Africans sought ways to end the experiment. The article also argues that the conception and the vicissitudes of this civilising project were intimately linked to experiences with freed slaves elsewhere in the Atlantic world.     

Off the Block but within the Neighbourhood: The Local Slave Trade in São Paulo

This article compares slave-trading networks in the 1860s and 1870s in Santos and Mogi das Cruzes, two largely dissimilar townships in the south-eastern province of São Paulo, Brazil. These local markets had different structural patterns, even though buyers in both places depended on personal connections to procure single or very small lots of slaves. Santos had a more defined network of slave traders, while buyers and sellers in Mogi das Cruzes relied more on family connections. These findings are linked with studies on the internal market in Brazil and other parts of the Americas to show that local slave trading was more important than has been assumed, yet requires greater study to understand fully.     

The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhão, 1680–1846: Volume,Routes and Organisation

Maranhão has the best documented slave trade in all Portuguese America. However, it is one of the least studied branches of the Atlantic slave trade. This article provides an assessment of the volume, routes and organisation of the slave trade to Maranhão, in northern Brazil. It shows that, although small in scale, the slave trade to Maranhão displayed important features concerning the routes and organisation of the Atlantic slave trade. Finally, because of the late European occupation and relative isolation, the slave trade to Maranhão offers ideal conditions for observing the rise and fall of African slavery in the New World.     

The Registers of Liberated Africans of the Havana Slave Trade Commission: Implementation and Policy, 1824–1841

The Registers of Liberated Africans that were compiled in the course of British anti-slave trade suppression contain detailed biographical information for individuals who were liberated from slave ships according to international law. These records are invaluable for an analysis of the demography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and hence it is necessary to assess critically their generation, including who made them and for what reasons. By focusing on the Havana Slave Trade Commission between 1824 and 1841, this essay provides an overview of the registration process of over 10,000 Africans, the structure of the Mixed Commission court, and details on the court officials, including a list of 162 African-born interpreters that resulted in the issuance of emancipation certificates to thousands of Liberated Africans who were subsequently subjected to terms of apprenticeship negotiated by the British and Spanish governments.     

Why the Danes Got There First – A Trans-Imperial Study of the Abolition of the Danish Slave Trade in 1792

This article explores the causes and timing of the abolition of the Danish slave trade in 1792. While the existing historiography highlights economic and humanitarian considerations behind the decision to decree abolition of the slave trade and situates such concerns within a Danish context, this article looks at ways in which trans-imperial influences on the Danish government and commercial ties between the Danish colonial empire and other slave trading polities were equally important factors in the move towards abolition.     

Master–Horse–Slave: Mobility,Race and Power in the British West Indies,c.1780–1838

This article examines a particular social practice that attracted attention from visitors to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British West Indies: enslaved footmen accompanying white riders on horseback, often seeking to keep up by holding onto the horses’ tails. Referred to here as ‘master–horse–slave’, this is interpreted as a ‘hybrid co-mobility’ (or co-present mobility involving humans and animals). The article argues that master–horse–slave was a manifestation of slavery as everyday social practice. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of practices of mobility as significant features of Caribbean slave societies and the place of animals in these.