Negotiating Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The city of Cape Town owes its origins to its role as a refreshment station for Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessels. Yet ‘the fairest Cape’ was also a half-way station for slave ships making their way from the south-western Indian Ocean to the Americas. This article examines the role of the Cape in the slave trade from Mozambique to the Americas during the 17 years following the Act of Abolition. While the Act effectively ended the importation of slaves to the Cape, it initially had little or no impact on the movement of slave ships through Table Bay. Despite Britain's opposition to the slave trade, the frequency with which slave vessels stopped at the Cape in the first few years after the implementation of the Act almost equalled the frequency with which they had called at the port in the last years of VOC rule. It was only when Britain tightened restrictions on the trade that the number of slavers visiting Table Bay declined and then finally halted in 1824. The conflicting interests of different branches of the British state limited the suppression of the trade, particularly in wartime. But the implementation of abolition was also retarded by negotiations over the parameters of international law and by the equivocations of a slave colony and its administration. This article aims both to bring the Cape into the history of the ‘Trans-Atlantic’ slave trade and to contribute to the broader history of the legal provisions behind abolition.     

Slavery,Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

This article examines a defense of the slave trade mounted in the 1790s by the Luso-Brazilian Bishop Azeredo Coutinho. While Azeredo's defense has been interpreted as a function of his slave-owning family's interest, this article provides a broader analysis of Azeredo's writings on the slave trade and the Portuguese empire within the contexts of eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian intellectual culture and transatlantic debates about empire, commerce and historical transformation. His writing on the imperial economy and the slave trade included both appeals to an eighteenth-century ideal of civilization as a process predicated upon the universality of humanity as well as defense of empire as the rational, just and necessary exploitation of the barbarous by the civilized.     

Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact

Dutch research into the slave trade and its importance to the Dutch economy has often limited itself to investigating the financial success of slave trading companies, calculating the success of slaving by its profit rates. The central argument made in this article is that gross margin is a better indicator for the importance of the slave trade to the Dutch Republic. Even if a slave trading company did not make a net profit on a voyage, such a voyage led to extra activities such as shipbuilding or the production of trade goods. This article provides a reconstruction of this gross margin for the entire period that the Dutch were engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade by combining the most recent data on the size of the slave trade (including illicit trade) with data on both African and American price data of slaves.     

Review essay - Running the Numbers: An Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade CD-ROM

Author: ELTIS, DAVID, BEHRENDT, STEPHEN D., RICHARDSON, DAVID and KLEIN, HERBERT S.; The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM     

Rethinking runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain,the Caribbean,West Africa and North America

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people.     

Women and Slavery: Africa,The Indian Ocean World,and the Medieval North Atlantic,Volume 1

Author: LARSON, PIERS M.; History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822.     

Slavery in the Americas: Resistance,liberation, emancipation

Author: BERGAD, LAIRD W.; Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888; Author: HIGGINS, KATHLEEN J.; 'Licentious Liberty' in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region. Slavery, Gender and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais     

Global Trade Models and Economic Policy Analyses: Relevance,Risks and Repercussions for Africa

Computable general equilibrium models are widely used for trade policy analyses and recommendations. There is, however, increasing discomfort with the use of these models, especially in Africa. This article demonstrates that the results of several such studies of the impact of trade reforms in Africa differ drastically in terms of both magnitude and direction, failing to take account of key features of African economies. It also outlines potential consequences of the misuse of CGE models for policy evaluation and suggests pitfalls to be avoided.     

Amnesia: Cultural Memory,Reconciliation, and Communal Accountability in the Americas

Contributing to debates on the status of comparison in transnational American studies, this essay offers a morphologically comparative approach to memory’s cultural politics in conflict resolution, juxtaposing two histo-ries — one ‘geo-political’ (nation-state, transatlantic) and the other ‘micro-history’ (small-town, regional) — whose ensuing negotiations unsettle paradigms of silencing and forgetting, especially as these pertain to ‘reconciliation’. Offering an alternative to predominantly psychoanalytic treatments of cultural memory and power, this essay employs morphological analysis and queer theory to explore cultural amnesia through blending ethnographic and media sources on the politics of it in the assignment of accountability and belonging.