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Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade
David Richardson
| VIOLENT and nonviolent
resistance by Africans against European enslavement are now well
known in the annals of transatlantic slavery. No longer is it possible
to posit, in the words of one eminent historian, "the myth
of slave docility and quiescence."1
Yet the scholarly literature on the subject has been overwhelmingly
concerned with slave resistance in the Americas, even in those cases
where historians acknowledge that plantation-based revolts were
but one element in a spectrum of resistance that transcended Africa,
the Middle Passage, and the Americas.2
This article seeks to redress the imbalance in the literature by
examining patterns of slave revolts on board ships at the African
coast and in the Atlantic crossing between circa 1650 and 1860.
Using newly revealed quantitative data, it attempts to uncover explanations
of these revolts and to assess their impact on the level as well
as the structure of the slave trade. The analysis suggests that
rebelliousness by slaves on ship and the resulting efforts by European
carriers of slaves to curb such behavior significantly reduced the
shipments of slaves. In addition, the analysis uncovers major variations
in the incidence of revolts over time and, equally important, by
geographical origin of the slaves shipped. These variations cannot
be explained by reference to failure of European management regimes
on slave ships but seem instead to be rooted in differences in the
political economy of the various African slave supply regions. Overall,
therefore, patterns of shipboard revolt shed important light on
the impact of Africa and Africans on the organization and scale
of the Atlantic slave trade as well as on the relationship of the
trade in enslaved Africans to the development of Atlantic history. |
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Whether as organizers or as victims of the transatlantic traffic in slaves, Africans had a major influence on the course of Atlantic history between 1500 and 1850. Indigenous merchants retained control over the slave trade in Africa and thus helped to determine the magnitude and coastal distribution of slave shipments from the African coast.3 Rates of loading slaves on ships stationed at the African coast varied through time and from one location to another, and before British efforts beginning in 1807 to suppress the traffic altered the economics of slaving, European ships tended to congregate at locations where slaves could be acquired most quickly and in large volume. The reasons for variations in loading rates of ships are still unclear, but insofar as they reflected differences in the efficiency of internal slave supply systems in Africa, they were likely to be influenced heavily by local cultural, institutional, and political factors. Thus, if the ethnic composition of slave shipments from Africa is to be understood properly, more comparative studies are needed of the socioeconomic environments in which slave trading developed in coastal Africa. The new CD-ROM database of transatlantic slaving voyages from 1527 to 1866, which delineates more fully than hitherto local and regional studies of slaving activities in Africa, will provide impetus to such research. |
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