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.     

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.     

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.     

From violence to alliance: Maroons and white settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities.     

‘The State of Slavery': Somerset,The Slave,Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

From 1772 until the 1830s, the landmark decision in Somerset v. Stewart, which held that a slave must be freed by virtue of his presence on English soil, provided a powerful weapon in the trans-Atlantic battle against chattel slavery. But by the 1840s and 1850s, pro-slavery advocates used another British opinion, The Slave, Grace, as a counterargument to shape a new pro-slavery constitutionalism. This article studies four cases critical to understanding this process of reinterpretation: The Slave, Grace (1827), Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), The Slave, Matilda (1837), and Strader v. Graham (1852). These four decisions reveal the escalating battle of legal doctrine pitting freedom based on the absence of positive law vs. the reversion and reattachment of slave status.     

Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”: The British campaign to abolish the slave trade, 1807–1900

Building on Robert Merton’s theory of unanticipated consequences of purposive action and Charles Tilly’s theory of error correction, the present article presents a stylized narrative about the British campaign to abolish the trading in African slaves, from its beginning in 1807 until the end of the nineteenth century. In the end, this campaign was largely successful, though it required error corrections that had extremely far-reaching consequences. The colonization of Africa was, to a certain extent, a second-degree unanticipated consequence. This case study suggests that three sorts of error correction can be distinguished, namely (a) measures that are taken to facilitate the effective implementation of the purposive action; (b) measures that are taken to minimize unintended consequences, after the purposive action has been carried out; and (c) new purposive actions that widen the objective and are more far-reaching than the original purposive action.     

Slaveholders and revolution: the Jamaican planter class,British imperial politics,and the ending of the slave trade, 1775–1807

This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those challenges did not determine the fate of the Jamaican planters. Rather, it was the radicalisation of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the extended period of war that began in 1793, that led to their eventual defeat over the question of the slave trade.     

Civicness: From Civil Society to Civic Services?

Activities in civil society, seen as the sphere of society in which voluntary associations are dominant, are considered an important source of civility in modern society. By interacting and finding solutions for common problems, members of associations turn into citizens with a broader perspective and interest in the common good. The evidence for these positive roles is at best mixed, however. Not voluntarily associating in a separate sphere of civil society, but combining associational with public and commercial modes of social coordination, appears to offer a more promising option for civilizing modern society. Examples of hybridity are discussed. The paper concludes with a plea for a clearer recognition in social research of civicness as a normative perspective.

The Foundations of Democracy: U.S. Foundation Support for Civil Society in South Africa, 1988–96

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This paper analyzes the grantmaking to South African civil society of six major U.S. foundations between 1988 and 1996. It...     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Colonialism and Civil Society in Africa: The Perspective of Ekeh’s Two Publics

Although it has gained wide currency in the analysis of African politics, civil society remains a “mysterious” concept in need of proper grounding and understanding as an integral part of African social formation. This paper argues that one of the widely acclaimed canonical works in African studies, Peter Ekeh’s theory of colonialism and the two publics in Africa provides one of the most original perspectives for locating and understanding the character of modern civil society as a product of colonialism. In particular, the theory provides an explanation for why primordial attachments have remained fundamental to the structuration of civil society and why state–civil society relations have largely been fractured, instrumentalist, and dialectical in the post-colonial period.