Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition

In the early nineteenth century a centralized political entity, the Galinhas kingdom, emerged in southernmost Sierra Leone. Based on sources from Cuban, British, American, Spanish, and Sierra Leonean archives, this article examines the factors accounting for the emergence and consolidation of Galinhas. I argue that the postabolitionist (1808) redeployment of North Atlantic slave trading actors, networks, routes, and spaces, particularly the connection with Cuba and resources from the island, created the conditions for Galinhas's commercial growth and the centralization of its political power. I then problematize the relationship between warfare, the Atlantic slave trade, and state making. During the foundation of a predatory state, before a slaving and political frontier existed, wars were detrimental to trade. When warfare and commerce — or any social activity — coexisted in the same physical space, the interdependent balance between them, which supported the slave trade itself, was disrupted. After the end of the war, political stability boosted slave trading operations.

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The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of US Participation, 1831–1856

Marques¹

2015

J. Lat. Am. Stud.

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This article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

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Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition

Cited by 6 publications

References 22 publications

Local Concerns, Global Impact: The Social Structures and Influence of Early Anglo-American Firms at Home and Abroad, 1815–1840

Local Concerns, Global Impact: The Social Structures and Influence of Early Anglo-American Firms at Home and Abroad, 1815–1840

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Galinhas in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790–1820

The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of US Participation, 1831–1856

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