Crossings

Africa, the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade

James Walvin

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780231945
• eBook ISBN: 9781780232041
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

We all know the story of the slave trade—the infamous Middle Passage, the horrifying conditions on slave ships, the millions that died on the journey, and the auctions that awaited the slaves upon their arrival in the Americas. But much of the writing on the subject has focused on the European traders and the arrival of slaves in North America. In Crossings, eminent historian James Walvin covers these established territories while also traveling back to the story's origins in Africa and south to Brazil, an often forgotten part of the triangular trade, in an effort to explore the broad sweep of slavery across the Atlantic. Reconstructing the transatlantic slave trade from an extensive archive of new research, Walvin seeks to understand and describe how the trade began in Africa, the terrible ordeals experienced there by people sold into slavery, and the scars that remain on the continent today. Journeying across the ocean, he shows how Brazilian slavery was central to the development of the slave trade itself, as that country tested techniques and methods for trading and slavery that were successfully exported to the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas in the following centuries. Walvin also reveals the answers to vital questions that have never before been addressed, such as how a system that the Western world came to despise endured so long and how the British—who were fundamental in developing and perfecting the slave trade—became the most prominent proponents of its eradication. The most authoritative history of the entire slave trade to date, Crossings offers a new understanding of one of the most important, and tragic, episodes in world history.

References

Introduction

1 For a criticism of the idea of Atlantic history, see J. H. Elliott, History in the Making (London and New Haven, CT, 2012), pp. 203–08.

1 Africa and Africans

1 For the details of Jacques Francis, see Gustav Ungerer, The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery (Madrid, 2008); ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English Lawsuit’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17 (2005).

2 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, A Sixteenth-century Muslim between Two Worlds (London, 2007), p. 4.

3 Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa (Madison, WI, 1964), pp. 10–11.

4 G. V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400–1715 (London, 1992), pp. 54–6.

5 J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (London, 1974), pp. 24–6.

6 Ibid., chap. 6.

7 Ibid., p. 42.

8 E.G.R. Taylor, The Haven-finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook (London, 1956), pp. 156–61; C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (London, 1969), pp. 27–8.

9 David E. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London, 1958), pp. 11–15.

10 J. H. Parry, The European Reconnaissance (New York, 1968), pp. 323–7.

11 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 27–8.

12 Peter Russell, Prince Henry ‘The Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, CT, 2001), p. 297.

13 My italics. The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton, 1750–1754), ed. Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (London, 1962), 13, 16 and 19 October 1750, pp. 10–11.

14 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London, 1997), pp. 64–7.

15 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 20–23.

16 Annemarie Jordan, ‘Images of Empire: Slaves in the Lisbon Household and Court of Catherine of Austria’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 7.

17 See ‘Northern Africa in a Wider World’, in Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson and Jan Vansina, African History (Harlow, 1978), chap. 2.

18 John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995), p. 42.

19 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip 11 (Berkeley, CA and London, 1992), vol. I, pp. 466–8.

20 Ibid., p. 469.

21 David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT, 2008), pp. 65–8.

22 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 24.

23 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC, 1965), vol. I: 1441–1700, p. 3.

24 Donnan, Documents Illustrative, p. 32, n. 26.

25 James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (London, 2006), p. 23.

26 Curtin et al., African History, p. 108.

27 John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent (London, 1998), p. 284.

28 Iliffe, Africans, pp. 129–30.

29 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London, 1985).

30 Robert Harmes, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Oxford, 2002), p. 286.

31 Walvin, Atlas of Slavery, chap. 6; David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New H...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• ONE Africa and Africans
• TWO Slave Trading on the Coast
• THREE Slave Ships, Cargoes and Sailors
• FOUR The Sea
• FIVE Mutinies and Revolts
• SIX Landfall
• SEVEN Resistance
• EIGHT Chasing the Slave Ships: Abolition and After
• NINE The Durable Institution: Slavery after Abolition
• TEN Then and Now: Slavery and the Modern World
• REFERENCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX