HIST 499: African History: Slavery

Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade. Beginnings of a regular European trade in slaves from Africa. Pope grants to the Portuguese a monopoly of trade with Africa. King of Spain regulates the importation of African slaves into the Americas. British attempts to break the Portuguese and Spanish monopolies of slave trading. Jesuit justifies the trade in African slaves to a skeptical colleague. Importation of slaves into the Cape of Good Hope. Attempt to create an English monopoly of trade in West Africa. Sources of slaves for the Royal African Company. Log of the Arthur, a ship carrying slaves for the Royal African Company from West Africa to Barbados.

Baquaqua, born in the town of Djougou (in northern Benin) in the 1820s and raised as a Muslim, lived a busy life as an ironsmith and palace servant. Then he was kidnapped and transported to Recife in about 1845. In 1847 he arrived in New York and there was able to gain his freedom. He then went to Haiti for two years, returned to New York, and in 1850 began studies at Central College. "This exemplary volume is worthy of study and emulation. . . . Extensive detail and clear overview of the present edition contrast powerfully with the previous versions." "International Journal of African Historical Studies" Law and Lovejoy conclude that perhaps scholars have underestimated the degree to which African-born slaves in the Americas had a choice among alternative ethnic identities.'?Hispanic American Historical ReviewPaul E. Lovejoy, York University, is the author of Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa.

The essays in this book provide statistical analysis of the transatlantic slave trade, focusing especially on Brazil and Portugal from the 17th through the 19th century. The book contains research on slave ship voyages, origins, destinations numbers of slaves per port country, year, and period.

The editor supplies explanatory annotations and textual notes."Historical Backgrounds" is an especially rich collection of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century documents about colonizers and slaves in the new world. Topically arranged-"Montaigne on America," "The Settling of Surinam," "Observers of Slavery, 1654-1712," "After Oroonoko: Noble Africans in Europe," and "Opinions on Slavery"-these selections create a revealing context for Behn's unusual story. Illustrations and maps are also included."Criticism" begins with an overview of responses to Behn and Oroonoko, from learned and popular writers of her time to Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf, among others. Current critical interpretations are by William C. Spengemann, Jane Spencer, Robert L. Chibka, Laura Brown, Charlotte Sussman, and Mary Beth Rose.A Chronology of Behn's life and a Selected Bibliography are included.
Series: Norton Critical Edition.

Including the full text of Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko, this volume explores its global historical context through a number of literary, philosophical, and historical texts designed to place the work in a literary history as well as a relational history of the three regions the story unites: West Africa, The Caribbean, and England. Documents from each corner of the "Triangular Trade", such as slave trader correspondence, travel accounts from Surinam, and legal decisions concerning slavery in England, combine to add to the richness of this earliest literary narrative written in English about an American colony.

These autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves comprise the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material;and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.

"The lives of the six principal characters encountered in this volume--five women and one man--collectively extend from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. What is most revealing is the evidence of consciousness and changing circumstances in the decades before World War I as these people went from slavery to some sort of freedom. This alternation was not necessarily by a formal act of emancipation, but all the focus characters finally belonged to or were sheltered in a Christian community with a strong antislavery ideology and the capacity to provide a base for social reconstruction."--Page 4 of cover.

Online Resource.