Africa's Role in the 17th-18th Century Atlantic Slave Trade

Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth to Mid-Eighteenth
Centuries
Oxford Handbooks Online

Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth
to Mid-Eighteenth Centuries
David Eltis
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450-1850
Edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan
Print Publication Date: Mar 2011 Subject: History, Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199210879.013.0016
Abstract and Keywords
Which of the major components of the Atlantic world — the Americas, Africa, and Europe
— was most immediately affected by the integration of the Old and New Worlds that
Columbian contact triggered? On epidemiological grounds alone the Americas would be
the choice of most scholars, with Europe, at least prior to the eighteenth century, the
least affected. In terms of dramatic economic, demographic, and social consequences of
the early stages of Atlantic integration, Africa lies somewhere between the two. Yet if we
shift the focus to changes in the nature and size of connections between the continents as
opposed to changes within them, the most striking developments between the 1640s and
the 1770s relate to Africa, not Europe or the Americas. The Slave Coast was a major
supplier of slaves to transatlantic markets. West Central Africa, by far the largest supplier
of slaves to the Americas, experienced two diasporas. Captives from the northern ports
went to the colonies of northern Europeans, those from Luanda and Benguela in the
south went to Brazil. By the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the
transatlantic slave trade was close to the highest level it was ever to attain.
Keywords: Atlantic world, Americas, Africa, Slave Coast, slaves, West Central Africa, diasporas, Brazil, captives,
slave trade
WHICH of the major components of the Atlantic world—the Americas, Africa, and Europe
—was most immediately affected by the integration of the Old and New Worlds that
Columbian contact triggered? On epidemiological grounds alone the Americas would be
the choice of most scholars, with Europe, at least prior to the eighteenth century, the
least affected. In terms of dramatic economic, demographic, and social consequences of
the early stages of Atlantic integration, Africa lies somewhere between the two. Yet if we
shift the focus to changes in the nature and size of connections between the continents as
Page 1 of 17
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Centuries
opposed to changes within them, the most striking developments between the 1640s and
the 1770s relate to Africa, not Europe or the Americas.
The growth of those connections was very slow. By the time of the First World War about
70 million people had crossed the Atlantic to the Americas since 1492. But only about half
a million of these, or less than 1 per cent, had made the voyage in the first century and a
half. About half the early migrants were captives from Africa; the other half, largely free
or indentured, were from Europe. The most recent estimate of the number of captives
carried off across the Atlantic in the 1640s is 12,000 a year, when the population of sub-
Saharan Africa was certainly several million. Moreover, the only products traded across
the Atlantic after 150 years of the Iberian Americas were precious metals and sugar—the
latter still a high-value luxury rather than a consumer (p. 272) item. Commodities other
than sugar and precious metals made it across the Atlantic as ancillary items in the sense
that precious metals, especially, had a high value to weight ratio and freed up space for
lower-valued goods. The basic inhibiting factor to stronger trade ties, therefore, was the
high cost of long ocean voyages. Thus, Africa remained a source of luxury items for most
Europeans. In aggregate terms gold exports from Africa exceeded the value of slaves
traded until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Epidemiology apart, the main impact of ocean-going technology did not begin to take
effect until after the mid-seventeenth century. In the slave trade at least, voyage times
shortened, the ratio of tons per crew fell, and slaves per crew increased, suggesting
falling costs. While systematic data for branches of transatlantic commerce other than
the slave trade do not exist, trends presumably were similar. The density of exchange, the
packet ships, the huge increase in the range of products traded, the sophisticated
development of marine insurance and financial services make the period covered in the
present chapter as different from the preceding 150 years as this period was from the
nineteenth century. The impact for the slave trade was a sevenfold increase in the volume
of captives carried across the Atlantic between the decade of the 1640s and 1766–75—
from 12,000 to 80,000 a year. Indeed, 1763 to 1776 was the peak fourteen-year period of
the transatlantic slave trade and slaves accounted for more than 95 per cent of total
trade.
Much of this expansion occurred because West Africa—the region north of Angola
encompassing the modern countries from Senegal to the Cameroon Republic—which had
been only marginally involved in the slave trade hitherto, became for nearly two centuries
an equal partner with Angola in the supply of slaves to the Americas. It now seems likely
that there were two underlying environmental structures to the transatlantic traffic and
thus two, rather than one, slave trades. Map 1 shows two systems of wind and ocean
currents in the North and South Atlantic that follow the pattern of giant wheels—one lies
north of the equator and turns clockwise, while its southern counterpart turns
counterclockwise.1 The northern European slaving nations and their colonial merchants
used mainly the first, and the Iberian nations and Brazil used mainly the second. The
Netherlands, France, England, and the Scandinavian nations entered the slave trade in a
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Centuries
systematic way only in the mid-seventeenth century, and the northern system expanded
accordingly.
For Africa the entrance of these countries into the business meant an unprecedented
expansion in the movement of enslaved Africans from north of the equator to the
Americas. Prior to 1640 the Portuguese had assembled African captives from various
parts of Upper Guinea—chiefly the southern rivers of Senegambia—in ‘factories’ (trading
establishments) located initially at Arguim, and then at Santiago and Fogo in the Cape
Verde Islands. These captives ended up in the Spanish Caribbean and Central America,
though this branch of the slave trade had, early in the seventeenth century, been
overtaken by the route from Angola. The Windward Coast, south and (p. 273) east to the
Bight of Biafra, sent very few captives to the Americas before 1640. The Dutch, followed
closely by the English, established their own ‘factories’ on islands south of Cape Verde—
James Fort in the Gambia, Isles de Los, Bunce Island—and where there were no physical
islands, they built islands of a different kind in the sense of heavily fortified factories, or
castles, particularly on the Gold Coast. But, at this point, slaves were more likely to be
sold to gold-producing Africans rather than bought for transportation to the Americas.
However, from the second half of the seventeenth century, some slaves were dispatched
across the Atlantic. The major slave-trading areas of West Africa lay to the east of the
Gold Coast castles, in the Bights of Benin and Biafra, and eventually at markets north of
the Congo River, Loango being the most important. Any European land-based presence
was thin or non-existent between the Gold Coast and Luanda in Portuguese Angola, and
African authorities laid down the rules.
On the Upper Guinea coast, non-human commodities dominated overseas trade until the
1740s. High-quality dyewood (called camwood after a Temne word) came from the
Sherbro, and to a lesser extent from the Sierra Leone estuary region. It was probably the
most valuable single export in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Some
gold was exported early in this period, and Senegal gum (also used for dyes) became
important in the mid-eighteenth century. Small amounts of ivory were always traded. The
major markets for captives taken directly to the Americas at this time were in the Senegal
and Gambia rivers—the buyers chiefly British and French slave traders. Vessels of all
nations sailing to the Bight of Benin and beyond obtained occasional slaves in this region
as they coasted south and east. But all this activity accounted for no more than one in
twelve of all captives conveyed across the Atlantic from sub-Saharan Africa prior to 1740.
However, after 1740, the whole region of Upper Guinea began to engage in significant
direct transatlantic trade; this expansion peaked in the second half of the eighteenth
century. Captive Africans became the most valuable ‘export’ until 1807. Major centres for
the slave trade appeared in the so-called southern rivers of Senegambia (now Guinea-
Conakry), the Sierra Leone estuary, Cape Mount (mainly Liverpool vessels), and Cap
Lahou (mainly Dutch vessels). In the second half of the eighteenth century just under one
in six of all African captives drawn into the transatlantic traffic came from Upper Guinea.
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Centuries
Upper Guinea south of the Gambia River had no large-scale state-like structures, and in
addition, population densities were relatively low compared to the rest of West Africa that
lay within the forest zone. Ethnic diversity was considerable even by African standards.
Languages and nations tended to live in mixed communities, or, if separate, the towns
would be adjacent to centres where other peoples resided. Perhaps these characteristics,
particularly the absence of empires, shaped the supply of victims for the slave trade. If
later patterns (1820s and 1830s) are true for the eighteenth century, then no one group
provided the majority of captives.2 More than three-quarters of all captives originated
within 150 miles of the Atlantic shore. Whilst Mende and Mandingo (p. 274) were the
largest source of captives, they provided little more than a third together of all those
entering the Atlantic trade from this region. Wolof, Kissi, Fula, Temne, Vai, and Loma, and
many others of lesser numerical importance, probably never came close to generating as
many as 10 per cent each of Upper Guinea captives.3
At the beginning of our period the Gold Coast, comprising roughly modern Ghana,
supplied very few captives to Atlantic merchants. The traffic in people leaving the Gold
Coast comprised a little over 1,000 a year on average down to 1695 (compared to eight
times that figure in the same period from the adjacent Slave Coast). However, it leaped to
7,000 a year between 1696 and 1705 and never fell below this figure for the rest of the
eighteenth century.
Despite the prominence of peoples from the Gold Coast in the relatively well-documented
early British Caribbean, an ethnic profile of deportees is harder to build here than for any
region on which transatlantic slave traders drew. The major shifts in the fortunes of the
Akan-speaking coastal societies such as Ahanta, Fetu (the location of Cape Coast Castle),
Fante (where Anomabu was built), and Accra during the slave-trade era are known in
outline.4 The gold-producing states of Denkyira and Akani in the north struggled as
production declined. Further east, the Akwamu empire rose and then fell in this era
before relocating in much reduced form on the Slave Coast in 1730. All states felt the
enduring pressure from Asante in the north, though Asante did not break through to the
coast until the early nineteenth century.5 Such conflicts undoubtedly yielded captives, and
thus some of these events are associated with the expansion and contraction of slave
departures from the three major Gold Coast embarkation points of Anomabu, Cape Coast
Castle, and Elmina. Yet we know rather more about those selling the slaves than we do
about the slaves themselves.
Some tentative inferences on ethnicity are nevertheless possible. Before 1700, both
volumes of departures and prices were low enough—the years 1676–84 saw the nadir of
coastal West African slave prices in the two centuries after 1650—that most slaves must
have been drawn from coastal states such as Asebu, Fetu, Fante, Agona, Accra, and
Adangme, or just beyond.6 The rapid expansion of the traffic after 1700 and the
associated rise in slave prices would have seen slaves travelling the paths to the coast
from the north along with diminishing quantities of gold. The peak of the traffic after
1750, however, was linked to Asante expansion—the major Asante trade routes to the
coast terminating at Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu, and Accra. Most slaves in this
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Centuries
period originated as tribute sent to Kumasi, the Asante capital, by Asante's neighbours,
probably from Dagomba and Mossi country. Such slaves must have begun their journey to
the Americas from the region where forest became savannah (p. 275) 200 or more miles
from the coast. They could have had little in common with the Fante through whose
hands they passed.7 Thus while slaves leaving Gold Coast in the second half of the
eighteenth century continued to be called ‘Coromantee’ or ‘Mina’, they were probably
culturally distant from the slaves assigned these same ethnic terms in the seventeenth
century.
Produce exports into the Atlantic world—a little ivory and some African textiles called
‘country cloths’—were of minor significance in the Bight of Benin. By contrast, more
people left the Bight of Benin than any other region except West Central Africa.
Nevertheless, the step up to large-scale and sustained volumes of slaves entering the
transatlantic trade did not occur until after 1650 and was led by the Dutch and English
until a Brazilian-based tobacco trade got under way in the 1670s. The term ‘Slave Coast’
for the region was not used until the 1690s.8 The growth of the trade was astonishing,
rising from about 1,000 a year in the 1650s to 8,000 in the 1680s, to a peak of over
19,000 a year in the 1720s. Departures were nearly double those of the adjacent Bight of
Biafra. The broad patterns are clear. Ouidah accounted for well over half of all the
region's captives sent to the Americas between 1650 and 1770. It reached its peak in the
1720s just before the king of Dahomey, who had already reduced the kingdom of Allada
(1724), destroyed the independence of Ouidah. Nevertheless, despite the latter's
prominence in the slave trade, down to the early 1680s four out of five captives had
embarked not at Ouidah, but at Offra, the chief port of the state of Allada to the west.
After the Dahomean conquest, smaller centres along the coast such as Porto Novo,
Badagry, and Benin gained market share at Ouidah's expense, while departures from
nearby Jakin, which had briefly emerged as a rival to Ouidah before 1727, collapsed when
it also was destroyed in 1732.
Why was the Slave Coast such a major supplier of slaves to transatlantic markets? It
seems unlikely that the hinterland of the region contained more people than these other
regions. It had no forts to match those on the Gold Coast, few islands, and, for those
approaching from the sea, dangerous surf. The basic explanation might be African
political authority, necessary not so much for enslavement as for providing orderly
markets and debt-collection institutions at the point where the African slave became the
property of Europeans. Credit was the greatest single irritant in European—African slave-
trade relations. This region developed African-controlled trading enclaves that offered
security to outside traders, Europeans and Africans alike.9 Thus African political authority
made such features as fortifications and islands unnecessary, and effectively provided an
ordered environment and a set of rules for carrying on business. In contrast to (p. 276)
the Gold Coast, Europeans were sideline observers of relations between African polities,
not participants. The king of Ouidah successfully imposed his authority on competing
national groups and, even during European wars, vessels trading in his waters would not
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Centuries
engage in hostilities.10 Dahomey continued to enforce this neutrality after the conquest
and through most of the balance of the slave trade era. Ouidah was thus a port in the
European sense in that it was open to the ships of all nations, but on its own terms.
The ethnicity of captives leaving the Bight of Benin is less well known than the military
and political struggles among coastal communities that generated them. Two broad
phases may be discerned down to the 1770s. The extremely rapid expansion of the slave
trade to its peak in 1701–25 was funnelled through Ouidah, Popo, and Offra. There is no
evidence of a strong Yoruba component in this first phase of the traffic so that Dahomey
military expansion to the north and the fall of the Akwamu empire in the west were likely
major sources. The majority of slaves before 1725 would have been Gbe speakers.11 The
second phase spanned the relative decline of Ouidah from the late 1720s. Thereafter,
Dahomey's actions against lagoon-based rivals in the slave export business generated
captives and shifted slave provenance southwards, closer to the coast. Dahomey also
passed on tribute slaves and slaves obtained commercially, both from outside Dahomey,
including Tapa (or Nupe), Bariba, and even some Hausa.12 Eastern ports emerged
towards the end of our period, and these drew slaves primarily from Yoruba-speakers in
the east sent out by the Oyo empire rather than Dahomey. For these, one might
hypothesize a mix of Gbe-speaking and Yoruba peoples.
While the Bight of Benin supplied the most slaves of any West African region, the Bight of
Biafra hinterland (see Map 1) was subjected to the most concentrated pressure from
Atlantic slave markets. A direct, regular, transatlantic traffic began in the mid-
seventeenth century through English and occasional Dutch vessels, and built up to an
average of 2,000 slaves a year by the 1660s. The traffic continued at this level for the
next seventy-five years. The large rise in the volume of departures occurred in this
region, with a 200 per cent increase between 1736–40 and 1741–5. Twenty-five years
later, the region dispatched more captives to the west than the Slave Coast. Although the
Slave Coast has a much higher profile in the literature, almost one-third more slaves left
the Bight of Biafra in the second half of the eighteenth century—an average of 14,000 a
year, almost all of them going to the Caribbean.
If the Slave Coast lacked the castles of the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra lacked
permanent European shore-based establishments of any kind. From time to time the
English maintained factory ships at Bonny and Old Calabar but no buildings. Yet there
were no large African states or empires either on the coast or in the interior. The (p. 277)
emergence of trade with the Atlantic in this area, in slaves and small amounts of ivory,
coincided with the spread westward of the Aro network from Arochukwu—primarily a
prestigious trading diaspora with the ability to carry out some governmental, judicial,
religious, and military functions. However, it was not, and did not result in, a centralized
state, or in military conquest of what is now south-east Nigeria, or direct trading between
the Aro and Europeans.13 A range of Aro institutions, including dispute settlement
mechanisms—ultimately connected to the Aro oracle—and the Ekpe society, came to be of
central importance in areas into which the Aro diaspora expanded. All trading networks,
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Centuries
of which the Aro was the most important, acquired slaves and sold them to intermediaries
who, in turn, dealt with trading houses, or towns with locations along the Imo and Cross
river estuaries.
Slave departures in every African coastal region were concentrated in just a handful of
embarkation points, but in this region nearly all captives left from just three ports
between 1650 and 1770—Bonny, New Calabar, and Old Calabar—four out of five of them
on English vessels. These communities became specialized slave-trading emporiums over
time, but never city-states in the sense of minor military powers forming alliances and
marching against, or with, neighbouring powers in wars of conquest. Trading houses
evolved that fostered close relationships between Bristol and Liverpool buyers on the one
hand and African sellers, often Efik traders at Old Calabar, on the other. Ship accounts for
both Bonny and Old Calabar show twenty to forty African traders selling slaves to large
vessels, but typically two or three of these traders would be responsible for one-third or
half the total shipment, a market structure not drastically different from what existed in
the Bristol and Liverpool slave trader communities. The African traders would be heads of
houses whose wards or towns would line the river banks and form the elements of the
ports known as Bonny and Old Calabar. Because slave captains advanced goods on credit
to African merchants, regulation and enforcement of debt was a central preoccupation of
these houses. In Bonny, the king's power under the Pepple (or Perekuele) family was
sufficient that he was able to act as both financial intermediary between African and
European traders as well as enforcer. At Old and New Calabar, human pawnship became
a central method of guaranteeing debts between Africans and Europeans. In addition, at
Bonny and particularly at Old Calabar, a secret society—Ekpe—evolved to which all
African slave merchants belonged. It, too, helped maintain orderly credit and market
transactions and served much the same function as governments in the coastal states on
the Slave Coast.14 Igbo peoples formed the largest single group among captives who left
the (p. 278) Bight of Biafra in these years, though, unlike the later period, they were
probably a minority. Ibibio also had a strong minority presence.15
West Central Africa was by far the largest supplier of slaves to the Americas. It was also
the only region in Africa where Europeans had some control over the routes by which
slaves reached the coast. In these years 38 per cent of all slaves who crossed the Atlantic
boarded ship in one of the ports between Cape Lopez and Benguela. The Portuguese-
dominated South Atlantic wind and current system connected the region closely with
Brazil, but Dutch, French, and British did break into the system. From an Atlantic
perspective there were two distinct coastal segments within the region, the division
between the two lying somewhere between Ambriz and Luanda. The Portuguese traded
south of this line, mainly Luanda and Benguela, and, after 1700, carried all their slaves to
Brazil. Beginning in the 1660s, other Europeans carried slaves to the Caribbean, the
Guianas, and mainland North America from north of this line, mainly Loango, Malimba,
and Cabinda. The impulse here was Dutch expulsion from Luanda a few years earlier and
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Centuries
the explosive growth of the Caribbean plantation complex, though the northern area,
especially Loango, also supplied dyewoods and some ivory, copper, and cloths.16
The division between the northern ports and the south extended to the organization of
the trade. In the former, slaves moved from African to European control on the coast,
much as in West Africa. During the peak slave-trade era, the three major ports north of
the Congo were outlets for the states of Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo respectively. These
states shared a language, had similar laws, customs, and government structures, but
were also competitors. In each, European traders negotiated with agents of the king,
called mafouks, using temporary factories on shore for which they paid what they viewed
as rent. Jurisdiction always lay with the African authorities and the captain of a French
vessel reported from Cabinda in 1702 that ‘ships are more secure [here] than at Juda
[Ouidah]’.17 In Portuguese Angola, by contrast, a limited European territorial presence
meant that trade routes to the interior were more susceptible to European control. The
mid-seventeenth century witnessed the last Portuguese attempts at conquest prior to the
nineteenth century as the African kingdom of Kongo fragmented. Ndongo came under
Portuguese influence, and the Portuguese negotiated trading treaties with Matamba and
Kasanje, major states (p. 279) 250–300 miles to the east.18 It was now possible to access
slaves from the Lunda empire, located on the tributaries to the Kasai River, even further
east.19 After 1683, the Portuguese put more emphasis on trade, and the source of slaves
for Brazil shifted eastwards. A central part of the trading system was the role of an
intermediary group of peoples of mixed African and Portuguese ancestry called
Pombeiros who created what colonial settlement there was in Angola outside Luanda, and
who provided the transportation and credit links between Luanda and the slaving
frontier. Some were even able to send slaves on consignment to Brazil.20
The West Central African hinterland was easily the largest of the eight African regions
examined here. It comprises the whole of Equatorial Africa—a huge rainforest area about
the size of arable West Africa, stretching from southern Cameroon to the Congo estuary
and east to almost the great lakes—in addition to the woodlands and grasslands of central
and southern Angola. The area east and north of the Congo River generated far fewer
slaves than did central and southern Angola. No social organization in the hinterland of
northern Equatorial Africa could match the Lunda empire on the Kasai in organizing slave
production in what is now eastern Angola, or indeed, the Aro in the western and central
Bight of Biafra hinterland, the Ashanti on the Gold Coast, and Dahomey in the Bight of
Benin.21 The group that came closest was the Loangan coast traders themselves, known
south of the Congo as Mubiri. They operated caravans that set out from Loango, Ngoya,
and Kakongo, travelled widely, formed something of a trading diaspora, and tapped many
diffuse sources in addition to major markets such as Malebo Pool on the Congo. Like the
Aro in Igboland, the Mubiri had prestige in areas they serviced.22
Overall, Cabinda sent out the greater number of slaves among ports north of the Congo.
It was closer to both the mouth of the Congo and the supply networks south of the Congo,
and had the best harbour on the coast. After 1725, the salient long-run port trends are
the rise and fall of Malimba, and the gradual decline of Loango. These broad patterns
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Centuries
correspond very well with long-run decline of the Vili kingdom of Loango from the
seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Former dependencies Kakongo and Ngoya,
to the south, and Mayomba in the north had become competitors by the following century.
The northern ports drew slaves from Equatorial Africa, including Gabon, and, as implied
above, from points south. Overall, they drew on a wider (p. 280) hinterland than probably
any other group of neighbouring ports in Africa. That hinterland ranged from the Mboko,
who lived on what is now the Gabon—Congo boundary, to Kasanje on the upper Kwango
in eastern Angola, and encompassed, too, the Upper Congo drainage area.23
For the Portuguese trade from West Central Africa, the scale and steadiness of Luanda's
contribution to the transatlantic slave trade is striking. In the early 1620s it had already
reached a volume of trade in people that was not to be surpassed until after 1800.
Conflict with the Dutch meant the slave trade collapsed temporarily, but it dispatched
8,000–10,000 slaves a year throughout our period. The direct trade from Benguela to
Brazil did not begin until the 1710s (before this point, slaves from Benguela had been
shipped to Luanda for transatlantic embarkation). Departures typically ran at about half
those at Luanda after 1750.
The evidence on the provenance of slaves passing through Portuguese ports is known
only in very broad outline. There is broad agreement that in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, the Mbundu peoples of central Angola—living within 200 miles of
the coast—were at the beginning of the chain that created deportees and that a slaving
frontier moved steadily eastwards and to a lesser degree southwards as well. States on
the Kwango, Matamba, and Kasanje, east of the Mbundu kingdoms, took over the
Mbundu role and effectively blocked direct Portuguese access to the Lunda empire,
which had, by the later eighteenth century, become the leading source of slaves. Other
sources were the south-east Central Highlands and the Upper Congo basin.24 They, and
the Lunda empire, lay more than 700 miles away from Luanda and Benguela.
South-east Africa was a minor participant in the Atlantic world in this era. Beginning in
the 1670s, after the English government established a monopoly company with sole rights
to trade in West Africa, English and English colonial merchants who wished to skirt that
monopoly began to seek African captives for the Americas in south-east Africa. In
addition, throughout this period the Dutch engaged in a small slave traffic, as did the
French. But for the Atlantic world, south-east Africa meant Madagascar, which, with the
exception of occasional Portuguese vessels seeking slaves for Brazil at Mozambique
Island, supplied all the captives from the region that ended up in the Americas before
1750. And because trade in commodities was minor, the slave trade was essentially the
only significant commercial exchange between the Atlantic and south-east Africa.
Malagasy captives emerged in small numbers from scattered points in the far south and
the north-east, but especially from the north-west of the island. European trade with
Madagascar (which was preceded by, and accompanied by, extensive Muslim merchant
activity) was associated with the rise of the Sakalava empire in the north—probably the
first imperial structure in East Africa—which (p. 281) became the most important single
polity in the island, and most Malagasy captives were either from this empire or had been
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Centuries
captured by it. For reasons as yet unexplained, Madagascar dropped out of Atlantic trade
networks from 1760. It had never supplied even 1 per cent of all captives taken to the
Americas.25
In summary, the slave trade expanded in Africa mainly by pushing regions across a
threshold of supply. A large surge of departures marked the crossing of this threshold in
most of the large regions examined here, followed by a plateau in the volume of the
traffic. Except for West Central Africa, each region experienced a one-time increase after
many years when slave departures averaged only a few hundred a year. One possible
explanation of this pattern is the time, resources, and adjustment of social structures
required to establish a supply network, or to break through to new sources in the interior,
or perhaps to redirect an existing network for goods or slaves, towards the Atlantic.
Upper Guinea in the mid-eighteenth century is one example. Aro activity in the Bight of
Biafra hinterland is another. On the Gold Coast, the massive increase in slaving coincided
with the exhaustion of deposits.26 In the Bight of Benin, the key event appears to have
been the reorganization of the trade associated with the emergence of Ouidah. The
Dahomean conquest of that community appears to have brought expansion of the traffic
to a close. In West Central Africa a doubling of departures occurred in the mid-
seventeenth century, but the numbers continued to grow dramatically after that initial
increase; here, a continually shifting frontier of slaving apparently did exist.27 Given the
lighter population densities, the shortage of continuously navigable waterways, and the
length of trade routes, networks would have to be put in place and slave prices at the
coast would have to rise sufficiently to cover the costs of travel. In the long run, then, this
region's ‘plateau’ became much higher than elsewhere in Africa. In south-east Africa, the
step up occurred after the period that concerns us here. Transatlantic slave trading thus
expanded by pulling in new regions of the sub-continent each of which experienced a
single dramatic increase in the scale of departures. Within each region two-thirds or
more of total departures passed through just three or four ports. The rising demand for
captives from rapidly expanding sugar production, and behind that, everyday demand for
sugar from North Atlantic consumers, provides 50 per cent of the explanation for these
broad patterns. Africanists still need to supply details on the other half of the story.
A great variety of regions and peoples were drawn into the Atlantic slave trade for the
first time in this period of 120 years. Given that 5.2 million coerced migrants left Africa
for the Atlantic world in just over a century, there is no precedent in world history for the
scale of dislocation to the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps most extraordinarily from the
perspective of the history of long-distance migration, almost 2 million were female. In
fact, for this period, only 63 per cent of slaves moved across (p. 282) the Atlantic were
male. Never before had long-distance migration contained such a significant female
component. Moreover, the movement was accompanied by what, from an African
perspective, was a reconstruction of gender that affected all facets except the strictly
biological. The gender roles of Africans and Europeans had evolved in isolation from each
other until the revolution in ocean-going technology and differed in terms of both work
and reproductive functions.28 Much of the agricultural work in sub-Saharan Africa was,
and is, performed by women. Women and children formed the majority of slaves
Page 10 of 17

Centuries
exchanged and acquired in the internal African context. When Europeans attempted to
purchase slaves on the African coast, they were taken aback by the number of females
offered for sale. Their own conception of gender meant that they were looking for what
they called ‘prime males’.
One of the first ‘new’ experiences for African captives being assembled for transportation
to the Americas must therefore have been the extraordinarily high proportion of men.
What appeared high to Africans was, for Europeans, extremely low. Heavy field labour
carried out in gangs was not women's work either in Europe or, initially, in the European
Americas. This preference did not, of course, prevent slave owners in the Americas from
making full use of female field labour. In the last years of slavery in the British Caribbean,
the so-called first gangs on sugar estates frequently comprised only women. But for newly
arrived Africans observing the plantation labour scene, the novelty lay in the number of
males set to work. The adjustment required for those living in the hinterlands of the three
Bight of Biafra ports must have been particularly severe. Over this long century as the
slave traffic grew to its peak, sex ratios on vessels departing from these major ports were,
on average, almost balanced. Indeed, one of the striking features of the slave trade at this
time was the large variations across regions in the gender composition of the streams of
people leaving for the Americas.
A more immediate concern for captives as they contemplated their predicament on the
African coast was the horrendous conditions under which they were forced to travel
across the ocean. Europeans were never subjected to such conditions as they moved to
the New World. The horrors of the middle passage have become well known in the last
few years, but historians have not yet appreciated the wide variations in slaves' shipboard
experiences. Mortality decreased from nearly one-quarter of those embarked to around
14 per cent from 1651–75 to 1751–75, but in deaths per day it remained extremely high
in comparison with other ocean-going routes. The variation across voyages was also
enormous. Thus the high rates were due to the catastrophic experiences of particular
ships, while three-quarters of all voyages experienced mortality well below the mean.
Shipwreck and slave revolts were partly responsible for this pattern, but the major factor
was the incidence of infectious disease. Gastrointestinal disease (dysentery was described
as ‘the bloody flux’) accounted for most deaths and its particularly virulent forms appear
to have been restricted to relatively few vessels (p. 283) where the effects were truly
devastating.29 Regional variation was also important. Mortality varied far more according
to where the slave vessel began its voyage, as opposed to where it went. Thus, mortality
and morbidity were much higher (almost double) on vessels leaving the ports in the Bight
of Biafra than from the rest of Africa, and within the region; Old Calabar had a
particularly bad record. As in the North Atlantic emigrant business in a later period, not
just the conditions on the vessel, but conditions in the port and en route determined
survival. Those who survived the passage from the Bight of Biafra to the Americas were
almost invariably described as weak and emaciated.
Page 11 of 17

Centuries
Unlike mortality, sailing times changed little between the mid-seventeenth and late
eighteenth centuries. For some major routes, such as that from the Gold Coast to
Jamaica, they actually increased. In addition there was much less variation from one
voyage to the next than for shipboard mortality on any given route. However, there was
huge variation between routes. For those fortunate to be carried from Senegambia to the
eastern Caribbean or Amazonia the middle passage typically lasted less than six weeks in
this era. But captives leaving from the Gold Coast and sailing to Saint-Domingue spent an
average of just under four months on board. No data survives for those leaving from
Madagascar for North America, but their middle passages must have been longest. The
fairly abundant records on provisions suggest that, contrary to the popular image, food
shortages were not common, and small quantities of tobacco and alcohol were also
distributed to slaves. The misery of the middle passage stemmed rather from the awful
crowding, the disease, the periodic catastrophic outbreaks of violence, and the trauma of
helplessness and the unknown.
Revolts were fairly common. About one in eight vessels in the mid-eighteenth century
appear to have experienced attempts by captives to take over the vessel. The costs of
controlling such resistance increased the price of slaves and thus reduced the number of
slaves carried off from Africa. Most popular histories claim that rebellion was most likely
while the vessel was off the African coast. In fact revolts per week were just as frequent
during the middle passage and off the Americas as they were on the eastern side of the
Atlantic. The very few successful revolts—in the sense of slaves escaping onto the African
coast—were more likely to occur near Africa. How many were successful? The Voyages
database has records of 361 African attacks on slave vessels between 1641 and 1770;30
twenty-one of these resulted in some slaves escaping to the African coast, and of these,
some would certainly have been re-enslaved. For another fifty or so of this group the
outcome was an aborted voyage, but in these cases the captives were either all killed—
usually because the vessel exploded during the uprising—or the ship was severely
damaged and the slaves were transferred to other vessels. The major impact of resistance
was thus not the freeing of slaves but rather on the cost structure of the business.
For the 85 per cent of captives that survived the voyage, the range of
(p. 284)
destinations in the Americas makes analysis a challenge. No less than 227 combinations
of embarkation and disembarkation regions—in other words voyage routes—linked by
transatlantic slave ships in this period can be isolated in the new Voyages database.
Despite such complexity, some fairly clear patterns are evident. In these years, Amazonia
drew two-thirds of its captives from Senegambia, and mainland North America obtained
40 per cent of its African peoples from Upper Guinea as a whole. No other region in the
Americas came close to this ratio. In other words captives from Upper Guinea found
themselves scattered across the Americas and for the most part they nowhere formed a
large concentrated group—even supposing they had something in common at their point
of origin. Almost one-third of all captives from the Gold Coast went to Jamaica, and a
further one in six to Barbados, many of them in the early 1700s. In both places they met
even larger numbers of people from the Bight of Biafra and northern Angola. Thus the
greatest impact of captives from the eastern Gold Coast was in the much smaller Danish
Page 12 of 17

Centuries
West Indies, which drew almost exclusively on this part of the African coast. The English
carried far more slaves from the Gold Coast than any other national carrier, but as the
English also supplied slaves to all parts of the Americas outside Brazil, Gold Coast
captives were scattered almost as widely as those leaving the three Upper Guinea
regions. Captives leaving the Bight of Benin experienced a quite different kind of
diasporic pattern. In the seventeenth century the heavy English and Dutch presence in
the slave trade here ensured a majority of those leaving disembarked in Jamaica,
Barbados, and the Spanish Americas—via Curaçao. But in the eighteenth century the
Portuguese and French replaced the Dutch and English slavers with the result that
captives leaving Ouidah, Jaquin, Badagri, Benin, and Little Popo poured into Bahia, Saint-
Domingue, and Martinique. Probably two-thirds of all slaves arriving in Bahia between
1710 and 1770 came from the Slave Coast and half the slaves from these ports went to
Bahia, making the Bahia—Slave Coast connection one of the largest and strongest of all
Atlantic slave routes. A short distance to the east, Bonny, New Calabar, and Old Calabar
hewed to the Gold Coast pattern. Once more, English dominance in the slave trade
ensured a wide dispersion of captives—exclusive of Brazil. The Río de la Plata, Spanish
Central America and the Caribbean, every island in the English Caribbean, and British
North America all drew heavily on these three embarkation points in this period. A
minority Portuguese trade also connected these ports with Bahia. In fact the dispersal of
captives from this region was the widest of all regions, which perhaps might account for
the weaker cultural impact on the Americas of peoples from the Bight of Biafra than
others that were less scattered.
West Central Africa during this period essentially experienced two diasporas. Captives
from the northern ports went to the colonies of northern Europeans, those from Luanda
and Benguela in the south went to Brazil. The Dutch were most important in shaping the
northern system. Centring their activities on Loango, they carried one-quarter of the total
exodus to Suriname, mainly in the eighteenth century, and another fifth to Spanish
Americas under the Dutch West India Company, mainly in the seventeenth century. They
were closely followed by the French, with Saint-Domingue (p. 285) alone absorbing one-
third of this large total outflow of captives. The English carried off only half the numbers
of their French and Dutch rivals from this region before the 1770s, and, playing their
usual role of selling slaves to all possible markets, dispersed their human wares over a
very wide geographic range from New York to the Río de la Plata. The southern diaspora,
centred overwhelmingly on Luanda, was much simpler and forged the strongest of all
transatlantic links in the whole re-peopling of the Americas process. The Brazilian ports
of Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro took in 97 per cent of the captives leaving
Luanda and Benguela, and almost all the remaining 3 per cent went to Amazonia. The
most important destination for this diaspora was Bahia, despite its overall reliance on the
Bight of Benin for its source of slaves. Pernambuco, likewise, drew on both the Slave
Coast and Angola. Of the three major Brazilian ports, indeed of all the ports in the
Americas, Rio de Janeiro had the strongest and most exclusive links with an African
regional source of slaves. Over 500,000 captives arrived in Rio de Janeiro from Angola in
these years, constituting 95 per cent of arrivals from all sources. The vast majority of
Page 13 of 17

Centuries
these passed through the single port of Luanda. The size of Luanda's slave catchment
area notwithstanding, the sugar plantations of south-east Brazil must have had the most
homogeneous labour force in the Americas.
By the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade
was close to the highest level it was ever to attain. For every seven people crossing the
Atlantic from east to west, six were African. For every fifteen females following the same
route in these years, fourteen came from Africa. Yet the cultural diversity of Africa is such
that it is a gross distortion to refer to a single movement. What does ‘African’ mean in this
context—something with much less meaning than ‘European’, surely. More specifically
what does a Fulbe Muslim from the upper Senegal River valley who finds himself in
Maryland have in common with an animist Malagasy carried into the Río de la Plata, and
then on to Bolivia? Perhaps about as much as an eighteenth-century English agricultural
labourer shared with a Chinese peasant. The transatlantic slave trade of course forces us
into such aggregations, and by accepting the categories we are able to address the major
paradoxes of freedom and coercion, wealth and poverty, and elite political authority and
the agency of those without property that so preoccupy modern scholars of Atlantic
history. Yet the final lesson from this survey is the vast diversity of the African experience
in these tumultuous years.
Bibliography
Eltis, David, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000).
Falola Toyin, and Matt Childs (eds.), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World
(Bloomington, IN, 2004).
Fynn, J. K., Asante and its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London, 1971).
Heywood, Linda, and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the
(p. 286)
Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007).
Kea, Ray A., Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast
(Baltimore, MD, 1982).
Law, Robin, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892
(Athens, OH, 2004).
——— The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade
on an African Society (Oxford, 1991).
Martin, Phyllis C., The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of
Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford, 1972).
Northrup, David, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-

Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978).
Page 14 of 17

Centuries
Nwokeji, G. Ugo, The Slave Coast and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in
the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2010).
Richardson, David, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J.
Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1998–9), ii: The
Eighteenth Century, 440–64.
Notes:
I am indebted to Robin Law for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
(1) Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhão, 1680–1846:
Volume, Routes and Organization’, Slavery and Abolition, 29 (2008), 477–501.
(2) But, for the Balanta people, see Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting
Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH,
2003).
(3) Philip Misevich, ‘The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the
Nineteenth Century’, in David Eltis and David Richardson (eds.), Extending the Frontiers:
Essays Based on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT, 2008),
155–75.
(4) Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast
(Baltimore, MD, 1982), 11–50, 136–42.
(5) J. K. Fynn, Asante and its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London, 1971).
(6) David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 293–7.
(7) Fynn, Asante and its Neighbors, 116–17, 119, 125; Margaret Priestley, West African
Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (Oxford, 1969), 11–12, 73–4.
(8) Robin Law, ‘The Slave Trade in Seventeenth-Century Allada: A Revision’, African
Economic History, 22 (1994), 63–76; see also id., The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden, 1997), 1,
85–9.
(9) Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic
Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford, 1991), 89–91, 217–18; id., Kingdom of Allada,
72–3; id., ‘On Pawning and Enslavement for Debt in the Pre-Colonial Slave Coast’, in
Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds.), Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical
Perspective (Boulder, CO, 1994), 55–69.
(10) Charles Thomas to RAC, 22 November 1703, T70/13, fo. 44; Robin Law, Ouidah: The
Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892 (Athens, OH, 2004), 123–5.
Page 15 of 17

Centuries
(11) Law, ‘Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West
Africa’, History in Africa, 24 (1997), 207; id., Kingdom of Allada, 101–4.
(12) Law, The Oyo Empire c.1600–c.1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the
Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, 1977), 226–7.
(13) Law, The Oyo Empire, 114–45; Kenneth O. Dike and Felicia I. Ekejiuba, The Aro of
South-Eastern Nigeria, 1650–1980: A Study of Socio-Economic Formation and
Transformation in Nigeria (Ibadan, 1990), 54–93; G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and
Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2010).
(14) Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The
Institutional Foundation of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104
(1999), 333–55; eid., ‘The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c.1600–1810’,
Journal of African History, 42 (1999), 25–50; eid., ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority,
Commerce, and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History, 45 (2004), 363–
92.
(15) Cf. David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in
South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), 58–65, 237. See also Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic
Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969), 251–64.
(16) Phyllis C. Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of
Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford, 1972), 33–72.
(17) Sieur Hays to Asiento Company, 27 October 1702, Paris, Archives Nationales, Section
d 'Outre-mer, Colonial, C8A, 15, fo. 109.
(18) Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the
Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 109–68.
(19) David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and their Neighbours
under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483–1790 (Oxford, 1966), 42–132; Joseph C.
Miller, ‘The Slave Trade in Congo and Angola’, in Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg
(eds.), The African Diaspora: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 84–102.
(20) Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, ‘“Fazandas” em troca de escravos circuitos de crédito

nos sertões de Angola, 1830–1860’, Estudos Afro-Asiaticos, 32 (1997), 75–96; Joseph C.
Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830
(Madison, WI, 1988), 245–83.
(21) Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow (New Haven, CT, 1981).
(22) Martin, External Trade, 70; Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola, 131–2.
(23) Louis de Grandpré, Voyage à la côte occidentale d 'Afrique fait dans les années 1786
et 1787; contenant …, 2 vols. (Paris, 1801), ii. x, 25, 37; Jan Vansina, Paths in the
Page 16 of 17

Centuries
Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI,
1990), 219; Martin, External Trade, 117–35.
(24) Birmingham, Trade and Conflict, 160–1; Miller, Way of Death, 148, 207–44.
(25) Jane Hooper, ‘An Island Empire in the Indian Ocean: The Sakalava Empire of
Madagascar’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2010), especially chapter
2.
(26) Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, 150–1.
(27) Miller, Way of Death, 140–53, 234–41.
(28) Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, chapter 4.
(29) Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz,
‘Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective’, William and Mary
Quarterly, 52 (2001), 92–118.
(30) http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?
yearFrom=1641&yearTo=1770&resistance=1.2.3.4.5.6.
David Eltis
David Eltis, Emory University.
Page 17 of 17

Africa's Role in the 17th-18th Century Atlantic Slave Trade

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Africa's Role in the 17th-18th Century Atlantic Slave Trade

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Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth to Mid-Eighteenth

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Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

Fynn, J. K., Asante and its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London, 1971).

Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007).

Northrup, David, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

I am indebted to Robin Law for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

(5) J. K. Fynn, Asante and its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London, 1971).

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

(20) Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, ‘“Fazandas” em troca de escravos circuitos de crédito

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

(26) Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, 150–1.

(27) Miller, Way of Death, 140–53, 234–41.

(28) Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, chapter 4.

David Eltis, Emory University.

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 08 June 2018

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