New Perspectives on Histories of the Slave Trade

[Music] okay I think we're ready to go sort of usual technical problems I'm Ned Alpers and I'm very honored to be the chair of this panel we have five distinguished presenters that each have about 15 minutes so that we don't go way past our bedtime and so I'm just going to introduce each each individual and her or his paper and then I'll when they finish I'll do the same for the following person our first speaker this evening is Emma Christopher who's about to take up a prestigious four-year CN chef fellowship at the University of New South Wales in Sydney she's the author of three previous books and many articles on aspects of the transatlantic slave trade in her new book freedom in black and white the illegal slave trade and its global legacy is forthcoming later this year she's also the director producer and writer of the feature documentary they are we which won five Best Documentary Awards screened in 74 countries around the world and was hailed as an inspiration of victory over slavery by then un secretary-general ban ki-moon her paper is entitled the coast swarms with slave ships I think is that what your now your paper is now called okay good you never know slave trading and captives after abolition so oh that's that's not what it's okay so yours is beyond the Atlantic crossing whatever I've got in the program is not quite right so why don't you come up and introduce your title so what else is due the paper hasn't changed it's just that we have the wrong presentation I did okay it's real honor to be here thank you very much to tireless know about for inviting me someone is telling me they can't hear me at the back that better can hear me okay in 1827 years after their traumatic experiences together in a slave factory in what is today Liberia a man named Tambor spoke to those spoke to those with whom he had arrived into forced exile the Lord borders from a long country he said many of us came together now this is not especially surprising this mention of people as shipmates who'd arrived together but there's a couple of things that we know about this case which come from the extraordinary documentation that surrounds it the first thing I know is that Tambe was a kisi man the name Tambor is given by kisi and kono women to their second born sons as some of you will know but he derived with a group of people who were very mixed only a few of them were also kisi the hinterlands of the Widman coast as you see there is a patchwork of an incredible number of ethnic groups most of which survived today a few of which don't they are not ink not limited to but the ones I could come up with off the top of my head the Tim Needham Andy bandy vile Omo bon flowcode Abe and her go Lima Banta Pele manding Fuller the Quran Co the sure bro and the kono as well as the kisi so when he was talking about we've all come together from a long country this is very much an invention a a new identity that he's coming up with what's also particularly intriguing about this is that Tambor himself had not been a captive in the slave trading business where the others the ones he's now calling his shipmates have been imprisoned awaiting sale Tambe have been enslaved as a small boy but two grown up as others described it in the slave trade he'd worked for his owners the Corcoran the Cleveland families who ruled the banana iowans she would see there on the map at various times as they'd fought and they'd handed him backwards and forwards at least twice he then belonged to Robert Bostock a British man he's the son of a well known Liverpool slave trader of the same name those of you who've read documents that talk about Robert Bostock this is his son and the Bostock family but the son Bostock had married into the Cauca family around 1803 and after the illegal of the slave trade by the British and American governments in 1807 at 8 instead of going home he upped the stakes Bostock had taken tambour and some other slaves he owned and had gone first to Galena sorg anus and then to keep my sarado setting up illicit slaving enterprises with this American business partner Charles Mason who was connected in some way that I've never totally pinned down to the dwarf's of Rhode Island so the reason I want to talk to start with this it's because when Tambor talks about we've all come together we're all from this one place he's clearly making some kind of regional identity in the way that for example Walter Walter Hoffman talks about from the upper Guinea host but because of the extraordinary documentation in this case what I can actually trace backwards is that a lot of these people had known each other from before the Barracuda those of you that work in Sierra Leone will be oh there's that is unbelievably they contract with the chief setting up the factory where Tambor worked as you can see the name at the top is crk the guy who dealt the Amistad slaves there is the contract for their second that's a copy of the contract for their second Factory down at Cape mr. Otto these are the liberated African lists which some of you will be familiar with with the names roughly transcribed by an African Clarke and then a British clerk as well and what's interesting is if you follow these backwards in the style kind of pioneered by philip miss Fitch you can find that some of them had clearly known each other from before and this is backed up not just by chasing the names but by white amber and the census and the other people say about these people so I can say for example that there was almost certainly a set of twins who were likely identical twins there was a group of people who had in all probability come from one different one single raid on a village or possibly a group of contiguous villages and what he's actually saying when that went amber says we came together he sees he is actually arguing against the ones who are manding and fuller who have tried to keep their Islamic faith and saying no now we need to be Christian this is who we are so the reason I want to begin with Tambor to focus on is to focus on how the illegal ization of the slave trade shifted the nature of the horrific experience of Africans caught in its web and to follow this back into Africa as well as across the ocean I was originally going to look at a much wider picture but then I thought that in this very short time allowed perhaps I should just look at once more a bit of the coast and gooeyness is particularly appropriate not just because it was a sort of model illegal slave port in some ways not least because of the Amistad collection connection but it was because because it was a primary focus of the abolitionists and the naval the British naval patrols ayah in these year it was Gallinas when they spoke of when they waged that the coast swarms with slave ships and I also think that this paper in a way follows on from the two panels that have already been today about New Directions in the slave trade particularly the work of Jorge Felipe who is looking at where where people came into Cuba where they came from in the Americas it's kind of a way of tracing that backwards and it's often said that slaves on vast plantations in Cuba Brazil with far less direct supervision from those of European origin has entirely different opportunities and reasons to preserve to transform or to hybridize the cultures they carried with them from Africa but what I actually want to explore is how the actual business practices if the illegally are also affected those also affected the grouping and/or the dissemination of of different ethnic groups so Gallinas had not been a major slave trading port for abolition because of the extremely rough surf it doesn't look very rough on that but you can see that it is very worth actually but you can see that on one side is the Atlantic and on the other side just at the back there you can see incredibly calm mangrove creeks that's a better picture of the mangrove cake which is totally different to the Atlantic coastlines so the reason that it had never been popular before was because it's not a real port it's not doesn't have a natural harbour and because the sea is very rough the surface very rough but once the trade was illegalized it became incredibly attractive to illegal slave traders because merchants and planters could send out smaller faster crafts from Havana or Matanzas or san luis de marinara and if they sailed at just the right moment they could get over that sea bar at high tide and then they were safe in that very calm water behind the british naval patrol ships are bigger they can't get over so if the small ships can get over they're pretty much able to do you know to be there peacefully loading the captives aboard in fact this place was so popular but within the decade as many slaves would be shipped to glean us something will be shipped from leanness in a single year has departed in the entire century to 1800 they left on smaller vessels often more cramped than had gone before and as Benjamin Lawrence is shown a lot of them were children that's also backed up in this case we're about two-thirds are on to the age of 16 now such a precipitous rise in slave trading at Gallinas so a fundamental change in the lives of those living in the hinterland of the windward coast just to give one example the loma people lost so many of their kansas slave Raiders that they began changing their whole way of life they'd always lived in small Hamlet's but they began moving to bigger settlements for protection the vibes lands Gallinas was within became much more serious slave traders themselves and others sought safety in fascinating multi-ethnic alliances like the the condo federation which spent also worked about sometimes from decades ago founded by the loam of the day and bounty man soon Pele Goliath I and mounting people also joined hoping to save themselves by being part of her a group strong enough to partially control the trade which is course what the Vai were trying to do as well but it isn't just this Confederation that leads to questions about how the slave trade after a legalization led to the melding and adapting of ethnic identifications in ways that seem to defy DNA at least easy DNA analysis today the bounty for example who I've studied on for some years now had originally been part of the Timoney people but it separated from the main Timoney group when they moved south to try and protect themselves from slave waiting during the during the legal era when bonds Island which is just inland from Freetown there so they moved south to try and protect themselves and over the two centuries they were there in rough safety they have become known as a separate ethnic group and had that self-identity that they were different people but soon they were so utterly destroyed by the Mende whose identification in this era was itself in flux that those who were left assimilated into the Mende mostly forcibly obviously in fact it suggested that it was this assimilation that led to this group of people being called by Mandi or the different Mende now it might seem that the bantu were no closer to Gallinas than they have been to Bunce Island but the new realities meant that much more fly-by-night operations there were no big structures like bonce Island definitely nothing like on the coast of Ghana today not even the large complex that Pedro Blanco built up a couple of decades later there was nothing like this so those new slaving ports hidden among the mango creeks led to new pathways to the ocean which you can see there the problem for the banter that they can be snuck around and I was just saying to someone earlier today then I actually drove down from the banter where they banter are now to the coast to look at that River there because it shows that it can't be it's even on maps it's not really there it's as if people have decided that people have written that you can't take them down that coast down that river but that is the river I'm pretty sure you can move people down there now I'm running out of time but what I guess I'm trying to say is that what I'm trying to figure out is what happens if you take for example the oral traditions of one group of people all the documents are kind of anfo historical viewpoints as it were and mix them together and try and figure out what does that tell us about the old questions of roots and roots what what does it lead to if you look at these groups of people that came out together because of course it's much as I haven't got to the part of the paper I won't talk about that but the plant is mostly in Cuba the people sending them in this era and they are chartering vessels so if you are caught in a raid in the bantha lands and you go out on one vessel you are on one plantation or on a contiguous plantation now I'm not in any way trying to make a case that that was less horrific than what had gone before it's very very clear that it was not but I am trying to figure out if in some way if we all did micro studies to the coast we couldn't figure out much more about the grouping of ethnicities and self identities and how they shift in the Americas as a result of the new business practices that take place as people try and hide and dodge from the naval patrols and in the totally different business model that takes place after 1808 M has just done something I've never experienced in 50 years in the Academy I gave her the five minutes sign and she finished before five minutes never happened before so our next speaker is Janet Ewalt Jana's an associate professor of history at Duke University her first book examined the history of a Sudanese kingdom in the northeast nuva hills including the slave trade into the Indian Ocean she's published several important essays on labor in the Indian Ocean world and is currently working at work on a manuscript called bondsmen freedmen and contract workers the development of captive maritime labor in the Indian Ocean 1616 10:00 to 1900 and her paper is on the slavery and slave trade in the western Indian Ocean from about 1770 to 1890 good okay great okay my screen looks a little weird but okay thank you for that nice introduction Ned and thanks to my fellow panelists for their participation and members of the audience for their presence in roughly the century between 1770 and 1880 more Africans than ever before probably more than 1.7 million made forced voyages on the western Indian Ocean during this span slave exports okay slave exports increased along the entire I can't see my own images yep on the entire African coast from the Red Sea in the north - maputo bay beyond the Limpopo River in the south and that would be from northern Sudan to southern Mozambique all this area of the coast supplied slaves and larger and smaller numbers okay Africans disembark after embarking from the coast Africans disembarked in four continents the most important destinations with the Americas the Mascarene Islands the Arabian Peninsula and other parts of southwestern Asia Cuba and Brazil okay how did this increase begin and what sustained it before pursuing these questions I'd like to orient you to the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and at the same time interrogate the map that gives you that organ that information this map probably looks familiar to you it's from the transatlantic slave trade database it's a wonderful map I'm not going to criticize it I use it all the time when I teach however like all maps in the service of conveying some information it neglects or obscures other information for example it makes it squishes about 400 years of development into big lines it makes the northern circuit and the southern circuit of the western Atlantic of the western Indian Ocean look completely separate as if they never merged joined or intertwined it's easy to forget that the sue slave trades were very different but it's easy to forget that differentiation does not necessarily result from mutual isolation in fact differentiation and interaction can go together I discovered this when I started to work on the north western Indian Ocean trade as I started in the Nile Valley and then got pulled into the northwestern Indian Ocean and then in the north western Indian Ocean I kept on getting pulled much to my dismay because it complicated things farther and farther south towards the southern circuit of the slave trade I realized at some point there should be a green blob is there a green blob behind kit no there isn't okay okay I realized at some point that Zanzibar in the north western Indian Ocean at the very height of its slave exports received eighty percent of its own captives from killable which is right on the borderline between the northern and southern circuits of the slave trade and turned the hinterland behind Kilwa also supplied captives to Mozambique Island and those captives generally embarked for the mascarenes or the Americas so in other words what looks as if it was a line of separation was actually an area of interaction and people in the hinterland of of kilwa or close and Big Island could go either way they could go to the Americas or they could go to Southwest Arabia or they are southeastern Arabia or southern Arabia or they could end up on the Swahili coast there wasn't a boundary between the two systems as far as they were concerned okay the map emphasized the difference between the two slave trades and those of us who teach about the north who teach and study the north western Indian Ocean slave trade tend to perpetuate this difference with some good reasons I always tell my students or anybody who will listen that slavery and enslavement in the north western Indian Ocean differed a great deal than the same phenomenon in the Atlantic world I emphasize how the north western Indian Ocean was bound by the exchange of commodities other than slaves for centuries before the atlantic slave trade and how people other than Africans were enslaved and traded in that system okay my paper is going to illumine is going to do two things its first going to illuminate the entanglements between the northern circuit of the slave trade and the southern circuit of this circuit of the slave trade and then it's going to shift gears and go and look at the hinterland and what what processes there sustain the slave trade if we look at this is the slave trade as it existed between about 1500 and 1670 that's what it says yes no I see I can't see on my screen what's going on yeah I wonder how I should do this ah that's a 1500 to 1670 thank you very much okay the first thing I want to emphasize is that the same at the same time the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean from the south migrants traders and religious adepts entered the western Indian Ocean from the north and settled along the old trading settlements that had been established on the coast and a northwestern Madagascar for a number of centuries these people beginning in 1500 and with no apparent influence of Europeans began to trade extensively in goods from the interior maybe maybe mainly ivory and gold and from slaves mainly from Madagascar at this point no extensive slave trading routes penetrated into the interior at least according to the most recent scholarship on on the Swahili coast you'll notice a number of interesting things here one is that the island how central the island of Madagascar is captives from Madagascar I went in all directions to India to Southeast Asia to Cape Town and to the Atlantic world especially Barbados you'll also know that the two major slaves of notice that the two major slave supplying areas in Africa or Ethiopia in the north and the island of Madagascar in the south in the 17th century to is the well I should back up a little bit in 1650 migrants from Oman entered this system following people from southern Arabia and essentially insinuated themselves in the trade networks taking captives from Madagascar and commodities from sent from the interior of Africa Oman and because of its close links to India and because of its maritime extensive maritime activity form sort of a fulcrum between the cloth production in India and ivory production in Africa at the same time that the Omani has arrived in a fin along the coast of africa new groups of europeans the French the Dutch and the English came near pians traded slaves in the western Indian Ocean in all directions they took Southeast Asians to Cape Town they took people from Madagascar to Cape to Cape Town to India all over so the slave trade is going in many different in European vessels it's going in to many - in many different directions I would argue though at this this early period was a formative period in which the trade infrastructure within the interior was established not so much to bring slaves but rather to bring ivory and gold in addition Madagascar became very important to Europeans as as it had been as and still was to traders from the Arabian Peninsula at about 1770 plantation agriculture in I'll skip ahead here does it say so yet Cherica 1775 in 1770 plantation agriculture and the mascarenes began to develop very very rapidly largely because of the collapse of the company days and and the opening of enterprises in the mascarenes to private entrepreneurs so the slave trade increased greatly and at this time in particular we see very very sort of close interactions among Afro Arab communities well not the communities themselves but we see French traders going to both Afro Arab communities such as Zanzibar and kilwa for slaves for the mascarenes as well as to Mozambique as well as to most Muslim Big Island for captives are the same for the same destination in other words again captives from well the first time perhaps captives from the central area could end up in many of a number of different of different destinations and I have to note here that net Alpers wrote the sort of the seminal article about the influence of the French slave trade in stimulating the slave trade and other parts of Africa including the northwestern the northwestern Indian Ocean and if you don't mind my saying 1970 okay so this Inc this increase in the demand for captives in the met in the French massacre means and then until the Haitian Revolution in Santo mang followed by the growth of the second slavery especially in Cuba and Brazil continued to sustain the southern circuit I can do this thank you the southern circuit of the slave trade okay but what we still need to understand is how captives how people were made slaves in the interior and how they were trafficked to the coast and for this we have to go to another aspect of the Atlantic world not so much the Atlantic slave trade itself but rather well actually first India first merchant capitalism in India and then industrial capitalism in the North Atlantic beginning in 1750 because of the growth of cloth production in Gujarat the market for ivory in India expanded Indian merchants went to the coast of it Africa will the some some of it sometimes they went sometimes they work through middlemen with cloth in order to exchange for ivory Africans in the interior valued cloth a great deal and open trade routes going to the coast more trade routes than ever before going to the coast to bring ivory for which they exchanged for cloth another Atlantic connection here is medica and Madagascar when slave traders purchase slaves in Madagascar they also they used American silver and when they purchased slaves in Mozambique they used American silver to buy cloth from Indian merchants which they then used to buy slaves so you see this kind of again sort of emerging between the two systems okay so by the time by the time the French arrived on the coast new trading routes had been been opening for the previous two decades ivory the ivory trade continued to expand into the coast first and you know the Indian demand continued and after 1820 the main market for ivory became North America and the United Kingdom the slave trade Road parasitically into the interior on the ivory trade people did not leave the coast of Africa and March into the interior in search of slaves they were after ivory but the organization of the ivory trade large-scale enterprises caravans encouraged local trade porters and armed guards and caravans were given trade goods bolts of cloth in exchange for their labor they then engaged in local and regional trade they traded salt from one part of the interior to another artisanal products and also people okay so people entered the slave trade entered with the ivory trade and in a way slaves are kind of as one scholar put it the small change of the ivory trade expensive cloth and tusks were you know the the hundred dollar bills and people and small bolts of calico small pieces of calico with a small change okay but why did Africans give up people to enter the ivory trade the cloth and the beads and the metal Goods and the guns that that Europeans could get cheaply in exchange for expensive ivory we're both prestige goods and currencies in the African societies in the interior this meant that ambitious people if even if their ambition was something as big as political aggrandizement or just getting married needed to have these prestige goods in order to gain prestige Goods young man youths would join caravans and engage in the slave trade but people who needed prestige Goods often went into debt to to wealthier people when the debts were called in and they couldn't pay them they had to pawn the labor of themselves or their dependents and these people entered the slave trade so it was really the impact of the goods of industrial capitalism especially the cloth and the metal goods on the political economies of the hinterland of Indian Ocean Africa that gave the the slave trade its dynamism and in the 19th century the slave trade in especially the north western Indian Ocean became systemic in a way that had never had been before and the irony about this to me is that there's something very tragic but also Magisterial about the Atlantic slave trade slaves produced the goods that allowed for the industrialization and modernization or progress in Western Europe right that's when you know one of the arguments that's been made in Indian Ocean Africa what was what did what did Europe Indians and Europeans and North Americans want ivory furniture polish cloves pearls these these discretionary goods that nurtured the slave trade and there's just there's something almost chondrite asked about that so I guess in a way I'm saying I'm going back to in some ways these two slave trades kind of came together in other ways they really diverged in terms of kind of their effective and historical importance and content so thank you very much and I know I probably went over that Thank You Jan our next speakers Greg O'Malley Greg's associate professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz his first book final passages the intercolonial slave trade of British America 1619 to 1807 received four awards the we've just heard the forecast prize for British history from the eh-eh-eh also the Rolly prize for Atlantic history the Asli award from the southern Historical Association and the go via the Gouveia prize from the Association of Caribbean historians truly remarkable garnering of prizes he is currently co-principal investigated with Alice Alex Peru key for the neh funded final passages the inter-american slave trade database and there were the link panels that I know many of you attended this earlier today his paper is beyond the Atlantic crossing reckoning with captives multi-stage journeys through the slave trade I think we're in business you've seen this one before but now we're ready for it okay so well thank you for that introduction thanks also to AJ president Tyler Stovall for the invitation to participate in this in this great panel scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade whether quantifying the forced migration assessing the profits of traders or examining experiences of the captives has a tendency to focus on the Atlantic crossing the infamous phrase the Middle Passage which refers specifically to the voyage from the African coast to the Americas is often used interchangeably with the slave trade as if the whole sordid business were encapsulated in just the transatlantic sale for example a textbook I use in a class I teach ends its section on the Atlantic slave trade with the sentence quote when slave slave ships finally reach new world ports they wreaked of disease and excrement period then a heading and a new subject as if the slave trade were over the instant transatlantic vessels were finally reached new world ports and the textbooks accompanying primary sources include excerpts from a Lauda equiano's harrowing description of surviving the slave trade as so many textbooks do and here as well the spotlight on just the Atlantic crossing is evident the excerpt begins with equiano's first sighting of a slave ship on the African coast and ends with his recounting of the squalor and horror in the ship's hold during the crossing of the Atlantic his multi-staged African journey before being sold to Europeans is entirely left out as are his many references to intra American slave trading after the Middle Passage because actually after landing in Barbados Acquia know that the traders in charge of his sale landed he and his fellow captives and took them to a merchants yard where we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold for a fortnight then he went on to relate that I and some few more slaves that were not saleable amongst the were shipped off in a sloop for North America and quote and later in his life equiano's also described working aboard numerous vessels that engaged in such intra American slave trading yet my textbook like most others I think leaves all that out to keep the focus squarely on the Atlantic crossing that's the sort of familiar slave trade story that mostly we tell especially when we get to the point of synthesizing for students and I don't point this out to castigate the textbook because I think it's fixation on the Atlantic crossing mostly reflects the fixations of historians in general and the scholarship on the slave trade to give just one example for now we're gonna do another map from the transatlantic slave trade database the transatlantic slave trade database seeks to document every voyage that ferried enslaved African women and men across the ocean from Africa to the Americas but it excludes intra African movements and intra American movements from its coverage for full disclosure of course in arguing for examinations of the slave trade that are more inclusive of the intra African and intra American phases I'm partly just arguing for the significance of my own research which today has focused almost entirely on the intra American slave trade and it's important to note that all the tremendous scholarship on the transatlantic portion of the slave trade over the past several decades is absolutely essential to me being able to do the work that I do and that's true for many other scholars working on other aspects of the slave trade I should also add that historians of the transatlantic portion of the slave trade have been uniformly receptive and supportive to calls from me and other scholars of the intra American traffic to take that portion of the slave trade seriously in fact thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the receptiveness of David eltis and his collaborators on the transatlantic database we expect to go live later this year with a new intra American slave trade database on the very website that hosts the transatlantic database slave voyages org so my goal for this talk is not really to convince slave trade specialists to take the intra American portion of the slave trade serious instead I'm hoping to convey to a broader historical community teachers the surveys and writers of textbooks why the multiple phases of the Atlantic slave trade not just the ocean crossing are so important and I'm just gonna emphasize two main aspects the importance for understanding captive experiences and the utility of the intra American slave trade and to some degree that intra African but I'll focus more on the American side the utility of it for illustrating the pervasiveness of the slave system now first the most obvious implication of looking beyond just the ocean crossing in our examination of the slave trade is that the journeys captives endured were much longer than the month or two of crossing the ocean with implications more far-reaching than one might initially suspect in Africa virtually all victims of the slave trade endured considerable forced migration within Africa prior to the Middle Passage likewise many survivors of the Atlantic crossing did not settle on plantations in proximity to the port of their arrival some March backs vast distances inland some boarded yet other ships for maritime journeys between colonies by tallying such forced migrations from port records I estimate that one in five captives landing in a British colony from Africa was purchased not by a person planning to put them to work but rather by a merchant speculator who moved them for resale over considerable distance in the Americas more anecdotally accounts from slave trade survivors give a similar impression in Jerome handlers analysis of 14 known narratives from survivors of the Middle Passage to British America six of the 14 are nearly half described additional long-distance movements within three weeks of first landing in the Americas so how does this change things for one thing the journeys were simply longer than we sometimes think on the African end James Albert who Casa Grande Assad described his journey before sale to Europeans this way I cannot recollect how long we were in going from Borno where he was born to the Gold Coast but it was tedious and travelling so far by land being upwards of a thousand miles unless you think he was exaggerating about those thousand miles here's a Google map that backs him up corroborates his memory of the distance voyages within the Americas after surviving the Middle Passage could also cover vast distances a journey like the one equiano's described from Barbados to Virginia was commonplace that's a sale of several weeks on the heels of the Middle Passage perhaps the most dramatic examples come from the southern hemisphere where many captives bound for Peru faced longer journeys with in the Americas than they had endured to cross the ocean some captives traveled to Peru Peru overland from Cartagena more than 2,000 miles March others marched across the Isthmus of Panama for yet another sea voyage this time on the Pacific another route to colonial Peru went through the Rio de la Plata Angolan men and women on this route often first landed in the Americas in southern Brazil only to board new vessels for a sail down the coast to a Spanish port the the map shows it overland but that's that's not usually the Seabourn traffic traders then often March the enslaved overland from Buenos Aires across today's Argentina and over the Andes a journey of nearly 3,000 kilometers to potosi or about 4,000 kilometers to Lima such longer journeys are meaningful beyond just duration and imagine suffering think about mortality I imagine that most people in this room are familiar with the horrifying statistic calculated from known transatlantic voyages that approximately one in five people aboard a slave ship who boarded a ship on the coast of Africa did not survive to reach America a horrific 20 percent of captives perished at sea but as gruesome as that finding is it vastly underestimates the murderous nosov believed trade historians of the slave trade in Africa such Patrick Manning Paul Lovejoy John Thornton have long made the point that the enslavement processes in Africa small-scale raids and full-scale wars were deadly ones the overland and riverine journeys that then delivered the captives from those wars and raids to ports of trade with Europeans also took their toll the horrors of the Middle Passage are more widely known among historians and then I would suggest that intra American trafficking only compounded the the deadliness of this migration the journeys were often shorter in the intra American trade but most captives had only recently survived the pestilent Middle Passage so they often embarked on intercolonial journeys already weakened weary and ill the exhausted captives embarking on such intro American ventures it is perhaps unsurprising that rates of mortality I've calculated for the intro American trade are even higher than the rates of mortality aboard transatlantic journeys but I really what I really want to emphasize is that such comparison such comparison is not really the point for the captives in the slave trade the effect was cumulative those fortunate enough to survive capture and movement within Africa had to survive the Atlantic crossing and even then they had not necessarily escaped death and disease because an intra American voyage might be waiting to test their endurance again now beyond the suffering and perseverance of individual captives looking beyond just the Atlantic crossing can also help us and our students understand the pervasiveness of the slave system the expanding reach of the slave trade ever deeper into Africa demonstrates the system's growth over time as slave Raiders searched farther afield for their prey and on the American side of the Atlantic intercolonial forced migrations pushed the slave system outward from the main ports of arrival from Africa Kingston Jamaica willemstad curacao Salvador da Bahia to all manner of other locations ones that often don't immediately come to most people's minds when they think of African slavery Mexico City New York Venezuela furthermore looking beyond just the Atlantic crossing all phases of the slave trade also understands affects our understanding of profits historians have long debated how profitable the slave trade was Caribbean historian and later prime minister of Trinidad Eric Williams famously argued that the profits of the slave trade fueled British industrialization but many economists dismiss this saying the comparisons of prices paid for captives in Africa and prices received for them in America especially if one factors in shipping costs made the profits small compared to the overall economies of these slave trading empires yet Stan Angermann and other economic historians have tended to focus only on the profits of buying slaves on the African coast and selling them upon reaching the Americas but factoring in other phases of the slave trade complicates matters most simply there were additional rounds of buying and selling people weren't bought and sold once but serially with successive rounds of traders each taking their profit at that stage perhaps even more important a main argument of my book is that the inner colonial phase of the slave trade was entangled with other commerce where transatlantic slave traders typically carried only human captives from Africa to the Americas intra American slave traders often mix that slave trading with the trading of goods in fact many felt that slave trading facilitated their commerce in goods so to give just one example in north carolina in 1749 there was a glut of shipping to many ships not enough goods to fill them so a merchant there named James Murray warned partners in the Caribbean not to ship goods to North Carolina with one caveat he said quote if necessity obliges you to come I advise you to bring instead of rum and sugar some cheap Negroes but not old ones if anything brings a loading here they will end quote in other words having enslaved people to sell brought trade partners to the table when nothing else could in that environment where did the profits from slave trading end and the profits from other Curt Commerce begin you need to trade slaves to get into the other Commerce exporting goods from North Carolina and it wasn't only individual merchants who understood the slave trade as uniquely valuable in this way the British government supported British traders in shipping enslaved Africans from British to Spanish colonies because such slave sales facilitated exports of British manufactured goods the slave trade helped promise in this regard because it was the one traffic for which Spain granted exceptions to their trade restrictions for Spanish America trading enslaved people got British traders into Spanish America and then they could engage in other commerce on the sly as one British strategist explained it from Jamaica quote a trade was opened with the Spaniards and successfully carried on for Negroes and other merchandise whereby great quantities of the manufacturers of Great Britain were yearly vended and despite the fact that slave trading was essential for permission to access Spanish ports he continued quote the trade carried on for negroes was likewise the least branch of their commerce and quote so they made more money selling other goods but the slave trade got them in the door or as another British leader would put it almost a century later understanding the trade in the same way quote a trade to the Spanish mane for British manufacturers is covered wholly by a few slaves and the trade dependent altogether on that share in the assortment end quote so the profits of other Commerce and I would point out specifically the profits of the burgeoning manufacturing sector at the start of British in Britain's industrial revolution were bolstered by the inter colonial trade in slaves these english goods were coming into jamaica enslaved Africans were coming into Jamaica and then they're they're putting together mixed cargoes and using the slaves to get them in to sell the manufactured goods so to understand the Atlantic slave trade the captive experiences the profits of the business or the cultural ramifications in the African Diaspora I think it's vital that historians continue to look beyond just the Atlantic crossing to understand the slave trade more holistically including all of its phases [Applause] our next scheduled speaker was Dale Thomas who's professor of sociology and deputy director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University who's Dale is the author of slavery in the circuit of sugar Martinique in the world economy 1830 to 1848 through the prism of slavery labor capital and world economy and he's currently working on a collaborative international project on the making of plantation spaces in 19th century Cuba Brazil and the u.s. south I think it's also telling how much current work going on in the slave trade is in fact coal and slavery is collaborative unfortunately Dale had a health situation his physician advised him not to travel to DC would not a bad decision given the weather in New York and but we are fortunate because his paper is going to be read by Joe Miller Joe milliner's of course a distinguished historian of the slave trade himself the tea Carrie Johnson professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the past president not only of the American Historical Association but also the African Studies Association so Joe I will pass your greetings on to Dale he regretted very much not being able to be here but it happens as I look at the balance of expertise up here in front it struck me that he was probably thought of invited because he is so well known for creating this field called the second slavery which is essentially the 19th century revivification of slaving by growing industrialism primarily in England that's in the coffee in Brazil and the and the sugar in Cuba and as Jan was saying it extends out to the Indian Ocean as well however Dale is moving on and so the paper this evening will be on the 17th century Brazil and on a Jesuit Father Antonio Vieira the title is children of God's fire and I mentioned that because that's where the paper homes in so I will read and I think Dale was counting on more than 15 minutes I'll do what I can so historian IRA Berlin reminds us that race is a social construction of a specific kind it's a historical construction rather than a biological constant as a product of history it cannot exist outside of time and place it's continually formed and reformed in particular historical circumstances from historical methods experiences and relations particular to those moments in this paper he wants to explore the dynamics of racial formation in the context of the African slave trade and Brazilian slavery in the Portuguese Atlantic using an examination of the sermons of a Portuguese Jesuit on 20 of the era whose date 1608 to 1697 encapsulate the 17th century slave trading in the mass enslavement primary of Africans as we know was integral to the formation of Portugal's Atlantic empire above all to the sugar slave context that migrated from Madeira to Santo Mei to Brazil between the late 15th and early 16th century early 17th century the formation of this complex entailed cross-cultural trade with various people's and policy policies in sub-saharan Africa then the transportation of African captives across the Atlantic and their sale in the Americas and their subsequent socialization into the productive relations of slavery in plantations and mines in the new world this transatlantic geo historical complex marked a radical transition from the medieval Mediterranean world the reciprocal slave rating between Christians and Muslims it was the constitutive moment of a historically unprecedented ly modern system of mass slavery and the slave trade the creation of new categories and the relations of new categories of difference the sustained relations between white European masters and enslaved black Africans was central to the operation of Portuguese Atlantic slavery my argument is the religious thought provided a rationale for their systematic enslavement of Africans it formed the fundament of the political social and ideological cultural of culture of control the secure domination over enslaved Africans and legitimated the institution and brutal practices of the slave trade and slavery however white scholars have long been aware and have been Edmund productively productively studied historical variations in racial categories and hierarchies among different societies the question of what people perceive when they perceive difference has received less attention our contemporary conception of race appears in Akron is when applied to the early modern Portuguese Empire father Vieira's theological theological I'm sorry theological rationalization I will say Oh slavery was not based on the physical and cultural characteristics of enslaved Africans but rather on their spiritual condition he is tempted to call this racism without race the physical serves as the marker for the metaphysical the souls of black folk in quotes were literally Vieira's criteria for their social subordination father Vieira was arguably the leading intellectual figure of 17th century Portuguese Empire he articulated a systematic interpretation the provided intellectual coherence and ideological justification for African slavery at a moment of multiple interlinked crises secular and religious of the forties Atlantic system flowing from the Renaissance the Reformation European discovery of the new world and broadly speaking what became the birth pangs of modern modernity with the establishment of the sugar industry in the Brazilian northeast at the end of the sixteenth century Portugal consolidated an Atlantic Empire of Atlantic proportions however at the same time the Dutch West India Company both attempted to gain control over Portugal's slave trade in Africa and invaded Brazil the Dutch challenge was both secular and religious on the earthly side the Dutch offensive threatened Portugal's domination of the South Atlantic and its slave sugar complex on the other hand the port Protestant Dutch simultaneously challenged the ideological foundations of the Portuguese imperial project the Catholic Church and its claims to interpret the world and arbitrate relations among Christian nations as well as the conversion of Africans to Catholicism under the aegis of Portuguese expansion in Brazil Vieira confronted a crisis that challenged his own cognitive framework to use the cons a concept proposed by Reinhart Kosilek Vieira's intense quote-unquote field of experience with slavery was no longer integrated with his quote horizon of experience that is the religious meaning of the world imparted by the Bible and Catholic theology Vieira operated within a late medieval framework all of human history was interpreted within the Christian narrative narrative arc running from the creation to the Last Judgement the doctrine of last day is circumscribed his horizon of expectation for him beginning anticipated the end and the end realized the beginning he interpreted secular practices and interests that is his field of experience through this religious lens prophecy revelation and symbolic meaning disclose the the hidden significance of events as experienced in the Mediterranean climes however the systematic enslavement of Africans and their transportation to the new world introduced new phenomenon that went beyond this conceptual framework the peoples of Africa were at best at the margins of the biblical narrative and the Americans were beyond it altogether the scale and intensity of African slavery as it developed in the Atlantic was also unexperienced but unprecedented Vieira did not have categories to conceptualize the new conditions forming the Atlantic economy so the era's effort to contain this fundamentally new field of experience within his limited horizon of expectation found expression in a well known series of sermons under the title Maria Rosa Mystica they were not simply a defense of Portugal's secular interests rather their Tridentine and missionary character asserted the religious vocation of the Portuguese expansion as well as Church regulation of secular life in the face of the Protestant challenge in this counter of counter-reformation context it's plausible to view Vieira's eclectic and visionary reading of Scripture and his mystical millennial prophetic interpretation of events as an attempt to overcome his growing discomfort with the stark disparity between experience of suffering and expectations of salvation in this regard the exceptional nature of these sermons is more revealing of his MO of the moral tensions at play in the Portuguese Atlantic than any number of routine operational documents Vieira's sermons are particularly interest because in them he created a comprehensive theological rationale not for slavery in general but specifically for the enslavement of Africans and Portuguese Portugal's unique position in the Atlantic in them the sermons the historical events of the Portuguese colonial expansion the African slave trade and slavery in Brazil are interpreted within the Catholic Church's eschatological arc of time capti capture in africa is identified excuse me with spiritual birth the middle passage with baptism and enslavement on the sugar mills in northeastern brazil with salvation prophecy is united with earthly history portugal is the instrument of divine will the focal point of the era's justification of the enslavement of black Africans is the crucifixion of Christ here Vieira emphasized the presence of Mary together with the Apostle John at the foot of the cross no way out of out of respect for our absent participant I'm trimming it all right we are interpreted the crucifixion is a mystical event that is simultaneously the spiritual birth of Christ the Saviour of Saint John the Evangelist and of the blacks who are the children of Mary Mary gives birth to all men including outsiders and Gentiles she becomes the universal mother of all who have faith and who recognize Christ from Jesus suffering at the cross the blacks are also born as the children of Our Lady to whom they are devoted so the birth of Africans thus children of cavalry justifies their enslavement they were spared divine punishment but occupy the lowest rank among men Vieira's identification of blacks with the horrible with the humble descendants of the biblical ancestor to whom he attributes on I left that part out all right it's particular it's peculiar to Haman anchors his mystical conception of salvation and of Africans anchored in their enslavement their black skin marks them not as descendants of ham but descendants of a companion of Moses called Korah and that is their descent that their status as descendants of Korah is their spiritual destiny not their physical features that determines their earthly conditions this mystical connection explains their spiritual birth from the special love of Mary at the foot of the cross the translating the spiritual birth of the children of cavalry then is their enslavement and transport to Brazil and South and and slavery in Brazil is their salvation it is and this is capitalized miracle of divine providence and mercy the capital the transatlantic slave trade appears in the era's argument as the next step then along the path of salvation for the children of cavil Calvary Vieira praised the historically unprecedented flow of enslaved Africans that was passing continually from Africa to Brazil the meaning Vieira finds in the experience elaborates his sharply dualistic conception of body and soul using the language of the trade he declares that the slaves are called pesos which is Portuguese word for pieces which was an accounting a unit of account in monetizing the value of the slaves labor so they're called pesos because only their bodies can be as enslaved not their souls the Dominion of the master over the slave extends only to his body only the body can be bought and sold the physical unit of labour is what is brought from Africa to Brazil and continues in captivity Vieira argues that our Lady of the Rosary has organized this first physical migration which is of temporal enslavement in order to prepare the enslaved for the second transmigration which is the eternal liberty of the soul he declares the slaves those whose bodies are branded with the hot iron are the children of God's fire and there's the title of the paper the flames return Vieira treats the sugar mill that emblematic fiery and venue of the Brazilian sugar industry as the exemplary site of their bondage and of their suffering in his view there's nothing on earth more like hell than any one of the fiery mills boiling cane juice down toward crystalline sugar in Brazil the searing hot sugar mill has a spiritual significance for the enslaved Ethiopians perpetual suffering is their hereditary right and quote most extreme and exalted discipline their birth at Calvary preordained preordained them to live in imitation of Christ Christ's sufferings on the cross and so the children of God's fire are chosen to suffer in their bondage the clear salvation clear and salvation 'el separation of body and soul and Vieira's the theological conception of slavery imposed temporal as well as spiritual obedience on the enslaved spiritual discipline of enduring earthly pain and almond agley burr is defined by their devaluation by their devotion to the Virgin Mary this is the enslaved of the ingenuous have the duty to serve venerate and invoke Mary through the rosary and through work the mysteries of the rosary enabled them to alleviate and sanctify their labor by offering it to her as the children of the mother of God the enslaved are obligated to venerate and invoke during their hours of work offering even a part of the rosary if they cannot pray it in this entirety by praying and meditating on the painful mysteries of the rosary the infernal of the sugar mill is boiling cauldrons will be transformed into paradise the deafening clatter will be transformed into celestial harmony and the enslaved men although they are black into angels so in these sermons Vieira provided an ideological just justification of the pain and suffering of the Portuguese Atlantic Empire and the African slave trade at the same time he articulated a comprehensive normative conception of slave submissiveness that legitimated the hardships of slavery and articulated a culture of control over the enslaved population in Brazil in the absence of a formal legal slave code and in the absence of an articulated conception of political economy his theological constructions gave intellectual coherence and practical import to what Robin Blackburn has called baroque slavery they were challenged by enlightenment conceptions of slavery and race oh sorry but these achievements were soon challenged elsewhere in the Atlantic by Enlightenment conceptions of slavery and race formulated as part of the rise of the anglo-dutch and French colonial slavery and the shift of the epicentre of the Atlantic Sugar's slave complex from Brazil to the Caribbean already well underway by the era's day enlightenment constructions shifted the locus of difference between slaves and free from the soul to the physical and cultural characteristics of people from Africa and elsewhere viewed in the light of this transformation this examination of the eras theological construction of new forms of slavery in Brazil points to the ways the nexus of race and slavery was continually remade in the course of the historical processes radically restructuring the Atlantic world on Dale's behalf thank you very much okay our final speaker is David wheat David's an associate professor of history at Michigan State University his book Atlanta CAF Raqqah and the Spanish Caribbean 1572 1640 was just awarded the AJ's James Rowley prize and the Lapidus setters Harriet Tubman prize he's currently working with mark Eagle on a history of the early transatlantic slave trade of Spanish America and his talk is 16th century slave routes JPS and Megara bomba in the early Iberian Atlantic [Applause] thank you right well first of all I'd like to thank you all very much for being here at almost nine o'clock right oh sorry my bad and also thank you very much for the introduction and also again echoing Greg thank you to let Tyler Stillwell for the invitation to participate here in this panel it's it's a really honor real honor and privilege for me to be here um so found I want to start off with the 19th century idly no found it as a ranch or almost starting with the ninth century found it as a ranch or hotle in 1593 the town of Megara bomba and camaguey province Cuba is today home to slightly less than 2,000 inhabitants the 19th century cuban historian antonio by Thierry Morales can hardly be blamed for supposing the town's name to the men of Native American origin major surges in the transatlantic slave trade along with significant episodes of migration from China and the Yucatan among other places had drastically changed Cuba's demographic composition within his lifetime by the mid 1800s 43 of megara bombas 50 Spanish residents were in fact recent migrants from the Canary Islands the 16th century by comparison must have seemed a relatively simpler time it was not a number of unsettling parallels can be found in the transatlantic slave trade from Sierra Leone to the Spanish Caribbean during the 16th and 19th centuries and historical advances over the past half century now make it increasingly possible to examine the early Iberian slave trade from Sierra Leone in African and in broader Atlantic context the best-known source for this mid-sixteenth surgery mid-sixteenth century slave trade the tratado Brava deceives to Guinea was written by Cape Verdean trader named Andre Alvarez tell ma de in about 1590 for a year after the town as a ranch of Megara bomba was founded in Cuba more than forty years earlier almada wrote sierra leone was invaded by an army known as the money's aided by their allies the Zumba's afterburn towns and killing many of their inhabitants known as the sap is according to Al Motta the man is properly opened up quote butcheries for people where they brought and killed the SAP is as if they were cows or Rams to eat them as the money's and swim was destroyed one town after another the Cape Verdean ship as they destroyed one town after another Portuguese and Cape Verdean ships waited along the shores and riverbanks to pick up and enslaves a base who were fleeing in masse from this invading army a lot of rights that upon seeing European or Luso African traders those who have been captured by the money's quote clung to our people begging and asking for the love of God that they purchased them in order to be to avoid being killed or eaten by the money Sambas me and that quote many times a slave was exchanged for a belt or a red bonnet or a piece of cloth in quo Baga bomba or maroon be' as our madam mentions in passing was the name of one of sierra leone's many rivers so how accurate right is this account was a lamanna's account after all Europeans in this area we're on the lookout for cannibals and Giants Cyclops and islands inhabited by women and people with dogs faces right among other ancient myths now but although he didn't witness the mana invasions Amata was a Cape Verdean person described as a mulatto with extensive experience of trading on the upper Guinea coast in the 1570s 80s and 90s modern scholars have disagreed as to when these men a invasions happened 1550s perhaps whether they were preceded by earlier invasions 1450s or indeed whether they ever took place at all and even more hotly debated literature on the supposed jaga invasion of Congo in the late 1560s provides much useful food for thought and I just learned from Joe that this debate has been resolved which is which is news to me no but I've very relevant for thinking about the mana invasions which supposedly took place 10 15 20 years earlier perhaps so given this fairly extensive spanish-language documentation generated by slaving voyages from 16th centuries early on my tobe Greene has already done some really you for work with some of these sources the mana invasions of Sierra Leone can be analyzed in the same fashion so rather than thinking about comparing the many invasions to these jag invasions that of Congo slightly later that may have never happened as it turns out probably didn't really happen um we can think of this slave trade from 16th century Sierra Leone in the same ways that we think of this an Angola wave later on in the 17th century based on slave trade data at least 15 to 20 years before Luanda was founded Liberians took advantage of social and political turmoil in Sierra Leone to enslave war captives and refugees probably resulting in a search but what we know happened was there was a surge of forced migration from Sierra Leone to locate to the Cape Verde Islands the Canary Islands to cache ale in present-day Guinea Bissau and to various sites in the Spanish Caribbean while scholarship on the Canary Islands has not yet been fully integrated into sort of the big picture accounts of the early transatlantic slave trade the Canaries were doubly important and that the first slaving and voi slaving voyages that would eventually take captives elsewhere were organized there and secondly notarial records in the Canaries contain information beginning there early 1500s of enslaved Africans who were brought to those islands in accordance with terms stipulated in the 1479 treaty about cassava in which Isabel the Queen of Spain was acknowledged as the ruler of Kafka still actually the Canaries were held to be Castilian possessions Portugal alone would enjoy the right to engage in maritime activity south of nearby Cape bahador on the coast of what's today the Western Sahara but Mariners and merchants based in Andalusia and in the Canaries began to disregard the terms of this treaty in short order throughout the 16th century residents of the Canary Islands not only traded with neighboring Portuguese settlements such as the Cape verities but also regularly traded for slaves at points along the entire western coastline of africa in Sierra Leone Spanish or Canarian traders were not far behind the Portuguese and Cape Verdeans launching slaving voyages from Gran Canaria and especially Tenerife it and the late 15 in 1560s for example we have notarial records in which merchants based in the Canaries hired sailors and sometimes interpreters who would be in charge with going ashore to actually trigger procure captives and some of whom some of these individuals they hired and who appear in notarial records in the Canaries work or tango miles I mean kind of elusive figures and and a pre-colonial african history in one case I think we're gonna be able to turn up the last will of a tangle now among other things so Manuel Lobo Cabrera samples of las palmas notarial records found at least 50 captives in Las Palmas and in the island of drunken area from from Megara bomba essentially referring to a region southern Sierra Leone during the 1560s and early 1570s so this is a snippet from a chart from Lobo Cobras monumental and excellent book now I'm building on his work mark eagle and I have begun to find additional cases pointing to an influx of captives from Megara bomba beginning a little bit earlier in the late 1550 so here's an example of a case that won't take one individual that Lobo Clara although the toponym Megara bomba very rarely appears in Spanish Caribbean sources in the Caribbean right many African my gosh the 16th century Spanish America were described as sabes or Saffy's early modern Iberian may have drawn some distinction between these two terms but I suspect that both sabe and Megara bomba were broad umbrella terms referring to diverse peoples diverse peoples exported from sierra leone sap base and the caribbean were often described secondary ethnonyms two that can be matched with modern west african peoples such as Baga coco lee and Sousou additional terms such as Bolam land on my local yeah longer appear as well although less frequently and Caribbean sources see Mark II go back there say hello while slave ships departing from the Cape Verde Island here's an example from Havana so here's a baptismal record from a bit later from the 1590s in Havana where you can see a couple of people described as sappy and in this source sockets but with the sea and a little sort of City yet while slave ships departing from the Cape Verdi's also delivered and slaves a pace to Caribbean ports such as Carter heina Veracruz Havana in the 16th century and occasionally afterwards in the 17th century especially in Cartagena several voyages sailed directly from la Sierra Leona Sierra Leona or or Megara bomba during the 1560s roughly coinciding with the alleged mana invasions or perhaps the years immediately following so here's some of the ports a 1630 map was some of the port is maybe too small Amica was some of the ports of we've been looking at finding evidence of either cepes or ships arriving from sierra leone down the caribbean the slave ship cargo master crystal bajo drag is Karrueche o rodriguez go to disembarked at least 77 enslaved Africans in Ocoee Espanola 1562 nearly twice as many captives arrived in San Herman in Puerto Rico on a different ship San Antone owned by an individual named Pedro Pedro Rodriguez the following year both of these vessels 1562 and 1563 were said to have departed in some sources from the rivers of Guinea and other sources more specifically from Megara bomba other ships transported captives from maggara bomba - nice owl Espanola and 1564 or from Sierra Leone to Guam and Puerto Rico and 1566 one of the best documented transatlantic slave trade voyages to have taken place at any point before 1580 was that of the Navi of the ship investor Senora de la victoria Meister Francisco Rodriguez extant primary sources for this single voyage consist of over 1000 manuscript pages spread across five separate lagakos in the archive of the Indies in Seville until B green is word I just some excellent work in one of these legatos I'd like to also acknowledge again the tremendous amount of work mark eagle has put into transcribing and analyzing some of this copious and often very difficult source material and I have a different slide I didn't show today where I I show one of the sources of a list of captives that mark transcribed that's just it just looks like like someone died on the page it looks horrible and another one I find a verbatim copy of the same source that was just it was almost like typescript it was wonderful and I you know this months after mark you'd already transcribed several but over a hundred pages of the source the benefits of collaborative scholarly research extensive testimonies provided by in this in the case of this voyage with over a thousand pages of manuscript material extensive testimony is provided by the ships cargo master pilot and other crew members reveal that the captain's disembarked in Cartagena de Indias in late 1564 had been acquired in Sierra Leone now as in some of the other cases we've examined Mariners testimonies indicate specific rivers and islands now where they had purchased captives or stopped to take on water and provisions subsequently auctioned in Cartagena nearly all of the captives were described as a base or socialist others were listed as balloon or bull them and about 15 were ascribed other upper Guinea and antonyms so moving on in addition to potentially providing new insights into the mining invasions described a LaMotta sources generated in the Canaries and the Caribbean regarding a slave trade from Sierra Leone indeed Li illustrate how specific episodes of slave trafficking produced diasporic African populations who were then used to prop up Iberian expansion in different areas this happened at what we now recognize as critically important moments in Iberian expansion on both sides of the Atlantic as I said so here's same map other side of the ocean as Maria Manuel - ow as Maria Manuel Toro has argued Iberian slave trafficking and upper Guinea was primarily routed through the Cape Verde Islands for most of the 16th century in the 1580s this trade was overtaken by direct slave trade voyages from the upper Guinea and mainland especially from kachelle where of course she's focused on records of slave ship arrivals in the Spanish Caribbean confirmed this trend but we can add to further details to this observation first this shift from the Cape Verde Islands to the upper Guinea mainland as a source of slaving which enslaved leading networks may have begun with voyages sailing directly from Sierra Leone to the Caribbean in the 1560s secondly the resettlement of sap is near cash ale around the same time period may have contributed to the establishment of a base for Atlantic oriented slave trafficking on the upper kam mainland as George Brooks has noted sap a refugees comprised a significant percentage of the so called Portuguese population of cacio which was in fact a town within the brown state of Canada a missionary reports from a slightly later period described as a base near cachet land caches well north right of Sierra Leone as being very Catholic and exceedingly loyal to the Portuguese so as I've argued for the Caribbean in later decades Africans played ambiguous yet critically important roles as surrogate settlers sustaining Iberian colonization in 16th century context the rise of cashel occurred at roughly the same time Spanish authorities were implementing new policies for the Caribbean namely the new Indies fleet system beginning the 1560s so later on in the 17th century Cartagena de Indias and Havana experienced this big surge of growth that corresponded to this rapid increase and massive increase in the slave trade especially from Angola along with other along with other places but that period of expansion built on structures that hadn't been established that had been established earlier during previous decades and in the 1560s notably by this wave of migrants from Sierra Leone so I have some other questions I'll skip over I would just a one thing I'm interested in now is comparing voyages that carried sap base from the Cape Verde Islands to the Caribbean to those that were leaving directly from Sierra Leone after the 1560s right so you know Mariners on voyages who were you know working on the slave ships some enslaved some free who were described as Creoles from the Cape Verde Islands and others who were described as tapas so I think again Sierra Leone also provides again this is just one of the questions I was going to bring Sierra Leone provides some really interesting material for thinking about Stephanie small was article on African slave ship Guardians for example so last thing I was going to bring her back to the Canary Islands in addition to bringing captives from Sierra Leone and elsewhere back to the Canaries during the 1560s the Canary Islands received receive captives from Sara Lee not only received captives from Sierra Leone sir but also served as stating grounds for for slaving voyages to the Caribbean so to illustrate this in 1565 Chickie's ambassador and Madrid complain it for the past ten years right again 15 15 50s 1560s residents of the Canary Islands had been flouting this treaty about casa was established much earlier evidently well informed by agents who have been based in Tenerife a since at least 1560 the ambassadors cited the names this is a Portuguese ambassador in Madrid 1565 he cites the names of nearly 30 individuals who have been organizing or participating in unauthorized slaving voyages right these are people who were residents of a Tenerife a so you list at least 30 people by name at least and we can confirm a lot of that 11 we're doing exactly this at least 14 of them appear in a list of Tenerife and Otero Records preparing voyages to the African mainland during the 1550s and 1560s several of which were going to Sierra Leone and as furthermore as it turns out at least some of these Tenerife it is Sierra Leone voyages actually ended up not going back to the Canaries but disembarking captives in the Spanish Caribbean so two of the voyages I mentioned earlier by a guru so I'm Pedro Regas were among these right and one of them was was actually originally listed in Tenerife and rotary records as part of an armada that was going to trade on our Guinea coast so there's probably a lot more going on here to the canarian connection this early on was not over yet Gaspar de ho a native of Tenerife a who later becomes a very important person in Seville a financier slaving a voyage from Sierra Leone to Puerto Rico in 1566 as late as 1567 Tenerife a records still are providing evidence of local residents mounting expeditions to the coast of Guinea to quote purchase black slaves from the Christian merchants who were on that coast one of the voyages of this 1567 voyages main financial backers was the chief constable of the capital of Tenerife in so to conclude before well before the rise of cos shale and Luanda and Western West Central Africa and before the rise of Cartagena and Veracruz and Buenos Aires as major slaving ports in the 17th century America's these slaving networks based in the Cape Verde Islands the Canary Islands and and in South domain which is I didn't get to talk about that it converged in Sierra Leone particularly the 15 late 1550s 15 60s and then fanning outwards to the Caribbean took a shell back to the Canary Islands and possibly elsewhere that we don't know about yet in addition to emphasizing the special importance of us at Bay or Megara bomba diaspora in the 1550s sixties we can treat this episode and in the slave trade from Sierra Leone as an illustrative case and perhaps a precedent for overlapping scintillating networks that evolved fed into income and sometimes competed with one another linking Iberian colonies establishing new Iberian settlements and commercial hubs and reinforcing Iberian expansion while at the same time flouting circumventing are simply pre-empting a metropolitan legislation and priorities thank you these have been five very interesting very rich papers and I want to thank all five panelists and Joe for Dale for for presenting them it's late but if they're willing I think we could at least entertain one round of questions if anybody wants to are there questions or are we all sort of heading to the bar or bad or bed depending on your time zone well if there aren't I want to thank Tyler for organizing this panel and for inviting me to share it and once again to thank our five our five wonderful panelists for their very interesting papers thank you [Applause]

Channel: American Historical Association

Views: 1,219

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: slavery, history, slave trade, AHA Annual Meeting, transnational history

Id: tgE9EImpKeg

Length: 92min 28sec (5548 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019