Captives as Commodities The Transatlantic Slave Trade

by Lindsay, Lisa A.

• ISBN13: 9780131942158
• ISBN10: 0131942158
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-17
• Publisher: Pearson

Summary

This book centers on one of the most tragic, horrifying, and important pieces of the history of the Western world: the transatlantic slave trade. Unlike any other system of commerce in world history, the primary commodities exchanged in the slave trade were people, and this fact has implications not only for how the trade was initiated, conducted, conceptualized, and concluded, but also for how we make sense of it in the present. For on one hand, the Atlantic slave trade was indeed trade, and as such it bears comparison with and was related to the expansion of a variety of global commercial networks. On the other hand, unlike other commodities driving cross-cultural exchange in world history, slaves were human, with all this implies about their vulnerability to pain and discomfort, their capacity to resist, their real or potential relationships with sellers and buyers, and-most fundamentally to those sellers and buyers-their labor power. Understanding the Atlantic slave trade thus requires studying economic and political history, dealing largely with those who bought and sold slaves, as well as the social and cultural history of slavers, the enslaved, and the societies they lived in and built. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Lisa A. Lindsay holds a Ph.D. in African history from University of Michigan and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Before developing her scholarship on the slave trade, she published Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria, Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (co-edited with Stephen F. Miescher), and scholarly articles on colonial Nigeria.  She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Socities, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. viii
Series Editor's Preface	p. x
About the Author	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xvi
Introduction	p. 1
The Slave Trade and the Western World	p. 1
Ways of Studying the Slave Trade	p. 2
Overview of the Atlantic Slave Trade	p. 4
Connections	p. 9
The Old World Background to New World Slavery	p. 10
The Maritime Revolution and European Trade with Africa	p. 14
Why Did Europeans Buy African Slaves?	p. 22
Origins: Economics or Racism?	p. 22
Early Labor Demand in the New World	p. 24
Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the Slave Trade	p. 30
The 18th-century Peak of the Slave Trade	p. 34
Slavery and Racism	p. 41
Conclusion	p. 47
Sources	p. 48
Why Did Africans Sell Slaves?	p. 54
Common Myths	p. 54
General Interpretations	p. 55
The Slave Trade, Wealth, and Power in Africa	p. 57
The First Two Centuries of Transatlantic Slave Exports from Africa	p. 61
Expansion of the Trade	p. 65
Effects of the Slave Trade on Africa	p. 74
Conclusion	p. 77
Sources	p. 78
How Did Enslaved People Cope?	p. 84
The Henrietta Marie	p. 84
Passages on Land	p. 86
Passages at Sea	p. 89
African Cultures in the New World	p. 96
Conclusion	p. 104
Sources	p. 106
How Did the Slave Trade End?	p. 112
A Skeptical Query	p. 112
Profits and the Slave Trade	p. 113
Ideology and Revolution	p. 114
Antislavery in the United Kingdom	p. 118
Revolution in St. Domingue	p. 123
Final Slave Trade Abolition	p. 128
What Explains British Antislavery?	p. 132
Conclusion	p. 134
Sources	p. 136
Epilogue: Making Connections-Legacies of the Atlantic Slave Trade	p. 142
The Slave Trade in Modern Memory	p. 142
Africa	p. 144
Great Britain	p. 147
The Americas	p. 149
Racism in the Americas	p. 160
Slavery in the Contemporary World	p. 162
The Big Lessons	p. 163
Bibliography	p. 165
Index	p. 171
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