The Shell Money of the Slave Trade

The Shell Money of the Slave Trade
Author: Jan Hogendorn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2003-09-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521541107

A study of the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade.

A Fistful of Shells

A Fistful of Shells
Author: Toby Green
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 651
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022664474X

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold. Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources
Author: Alice Bellagamba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 110732808X

Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638–1870

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638–1870
Author: W.E.B. Du Bois
Publisher: e-artnow
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8026883780

'This monograph was begun during my residence as Rogers Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, and is based mainly upon a study of the sources, i.e., national, State, and colonial statutes, Congressional documents, reports of societies, personal narratives, etc. The collection of laws available for this research was, I think, nearly complete; on the other hand, facts and statistics bearing on the economic side of the study have been difficult to find, and my conclusions are consequently liable to modification from this source. The question of the suppression of the slave-trade is so intimately connected with the questions as to its rise, the system of American slavery, and the whole colonial policy of the eighteenth century, that it is difficult to isolate it, and at the same time to avoid superficiality on the one hand, and unscientific narrowness of view on the other. While I could not hope entirely to overcome such a difficulty, I nevertheless trust that I have succeeded in rendering this monograph a small contribution to the scientific study of slavery and the American Negro.' William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois (1868 – 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money

Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money
Author: Bin Yang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429952333

Originating in the sea, especially in the waters surrounding the low-lying islands of the Maldives, Cypraea moneta (sometimes confused with Cypraea annulus) was transported to various parts of Afro-Eurasia in the prehistoric era, and in many cases, it was gradually transformed into a form of money in various societies for a long span of time. Yang provides a global examination of cowrie money within and beyond Afro-Eurasia from the archaeological period to the early twentieth century. By focusing on cowrie money in Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian and West African societies and shell money in Pacific and North American societies, Yang synthsises and illustrates the economic and cultural connections, networks and interactions over a longue durée and in a cross-regional context. Analysing locally varied experiences of cowrie money from a global perspective, Yang argued that cowrie money was the first global money that shaped Afro-Eurasian societies both individually and collectively. He proposes a paradigm of the cowrie money world that engages local, regional, transregional and global themes.

The Slave Trade

The Slave Trade
Author: Hugh Thomas
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 916
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476737452

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, Hugh Thomas describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time, but to answer controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated.

A Crime So Monstrous

A Crime So Monstrous
Author: E. Benjamin Skinner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2009-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0743290089

Based on four years of research in over a dozen countries across the globe, journalist Skinner provides a shocking expos of the inner workings of the modern-day slave trade. Maps.

Inheriting the Trade

Inheriting the Trade
Author: Thomas Norman DeWolf
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2008-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807072923

A trailblazing memoir about one family’s quest to face its slave-trading past, and an urgent call for reconciliation In 2001, Thomas DeWolf discovered that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for transporting at least ten thousand Africans. This is his memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced their ancestors' steps through the notorious triangle trade route—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states. A difficult but necessary examination of the slave trade, racism, and privilege in the United States, Inheriting the Trade is a powerful call for white America to reassess what they have been taught about their own ancestors, about slavery and wealth, and about America both past and present.

The Last Slave Ship

The Last Slave Ship
Author: Ben Raines
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2023-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1982136154

The “enlightening” (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors’ founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship’s perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic—an epic tale of one community’s triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.

An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World

An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World
Author: Mariana Candido
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2013-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107328381

This book traces the history and development of the port of Benguela, the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa, from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. In discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies, Mariana P. Candido explores the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states and the emergence of new states. Placing Benguela in an Atlantic perspective, this study shows how events in the Caribbean and Brazil affected social and political changes on the African coast. This book emphasizes the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas and crops.