Slavery and redemption in the Catholic missions of the Upper Congo, 1878–1909

The French Catholic Société des missionnaires d’Alger, also known as the White Fathers, sought to abolish slavery in the Upper Congo by creating mission outposts of liberated slaves. The missionaries purchased (‘redeemed’) young African slaves, captives, and dependents, and placed them in mission orphanages. The White Fathers claimed to have liberated these redeemed orphans, even while they ensured, often through force, that they remained alienated from their natal communities and subjugated dependents. In much the same fashion as domestic and Islamic slavery in the immediate environs, the slow integration of these orphans drove the expansion of Catholic mission communities. Through studying Catholic mission slave redemptions at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the interactions and development of pre-colonial African, Zanzibar Islamic, and European Christian ideas of slavery and freedom.     

Sugar,Slavery and Productivity in Jamaica, 1750–1807

The article revisits one of the most significant questions in the historiography of British West Indian slavery and abolition. It examines the argument that the relatively weak state of the British West Indian economy from the 1780s onward was the main reason why Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. In confronting this question of decline, the article analyzes the largest and most important slave plantation economy – Jamaica – during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using newly generated indicators such as total factor productivity and national income, the paper constructs a case for the dynamism and efficiency of the plantation system in Jamaica right up to abolition in 1807.     

Military Slavery in the Sudan during the Turkiyya, 1820–1885

Our Maryland research suggests that it might be possible to integrate the labour supply and planter preferences approach to the transition to slavery by thinking of it as a process that occurred in two stages. During the first stage a small number of ‘Early Plungers’ demonstrated by example that African slavery could be employed profitably. They also created the legal and institutional structures needed to guarantee property rights in slaves. Prominent among the early plungers was a group of Barbadians, perhaps recruited by Lord Calvert specifically for their expertise operating within that island's slave system. The activities of these early plungers brought a small but noticeable population of African descent to Maryland. During the second stage, late in the seventeenth century, when the labour shortage occurred, their activities helped to persuade a majority of planters to invest in Africans.     

Abolition,Economic Transition,Gender and Slavery: The Expansion of Women's Slaveholding in Ghana, 1807–18741

The British withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade fostered the expansion, rather than retrenchment of slavery within Africa. It also spurred a shift in the pre-nineteenth-century gendered pattern of slaveholding. This paper examines the extent to which radical economic changes altered the gendered structure of slaveholding in post-abolition Ghana. It argues that the British prohibition liberalised slaveholding conditions and resulted in a reconceptualisation of the value of slaves which breached the tradition of restricted female proprietorship of slaves, and also led to increased women's earning capacity, slave acquisition and use, as well as the scale of their holdings.     

Slavery,emancipation and the creole world view of Jamaican colonists, 1800–1834

Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists developed a distinctively local, or creole, world view characterised by the defence of slavery and a culture of white male solidarity. However, local slaveholders maintained close links with Britain and were militarily dependent on the metropole. Metropolitan culture influenced their ideology, and Jamaican slaveholders saw themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown. They were therefore colonial creoles and, in spite of the rise of abolitionism in the metropole, they maintained that their local practices were reconcilable with their status as transplanted Britons. By the 1830s changed circumstances in Britain and Jamaica forced slaveholders to reach a compromise with the British Government and to accept the abolition of slavery, but in spite of the important changes that this entailed, the main features of their creole world view persisted.     

Student resistance and the democratic transition: student politics in Senegal 1999–2005

University students participated in the democratic transition in Senegal that, throughout the 1990s, saw student activists across the continent advocate for political change. This paper examines the role students played in the election of the new government in Senegal in 2000 and the years that followed. Many student activists in Senegal argued that they were responsible for the changement politique, that saw the first defeat of the ruling Socialist Party since independence in 1960 and the victory of Abdoulaye Wade – ‘papa sopi’ (‘the father of change’). The paper considers the relationship of students to the new governments. It argues that students in Senegal, and across the continent, have played a vital role in political transformations, though not in circumstances chosen by them.