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Scholars have provided impressive analyses of the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas and its demise over the past four decades, this led by contributions to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/). England played a decisive role in the suppression of that traffic after prohibition of British participation in 1808, this partly achieved by British interceptions of slave vessels by its West Africa Squadron (1819–1867) and the establishment of Courts of Mixed Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1819–1871). Given a North Atlantic Ocean current clockwise gyre and South Atlantic counterclockwise gyre, a major northern slave vessel route connected Africa to the Caribbean and a second southern route connected Africa to Brazil. 1 Africans disembarked in the Caribbean had diverse origins in West Africa (Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria) and West Central Africa (Congo, Angola). Brazil received fewer Africans from West Africa (there was a long-term connection between Benin and Bahia), large numbers of African slaves from West Central Africa and a small number from Southeast Africa (Mozambique) at or near Rio de Janeiro. Language difference (Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Danish in the North Atlantic, Portuguese in the South Atlantic) contributed to a conceptual separation of those two regions, particularly evident in historiographies related to slavery and abolition. The Scottish diplomat David Turnbull was one of the few observers of the nineteenth century who connected Caribbean islands with Brazil. Turnbull asserted to the British Foreign Office that subaltern resistance by slaves and free blacks in both the British and non-British Caribbean could aid in England's quest to extinguish the transatlantic slave trade. Turnbull organized a petition campaign in Jamaica in the late 1840s to pressure England's Foreign Office to pursue more aggressive actions at sea and on land to halt slave disembarkations in Cuba and Brazil. Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston's positive response combined with slave resistance in Brazil contributed to Brazil's imperial government decision to act decisively to halt further slave disembarkations in 1850–1851. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Journal of Global Slavery has announced the winner of the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize, named after esteemed scholar Paul E. Lovejoy, for excellence in works related to global slavery. The winning book, "Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves," by Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa, connects Atlantic and Indian Ocean slavery histories, exploring global discourses on freedom and bondage. The book is praised for its meticulous research, engaging narrative, and contribution to understanding interconnected systems of slavery and colonialism. Submissions for next year's Lovejoy Prize are open until February 14, 2025, and should highlight significant contributions to the field of global slavery studies. [Extracted from the article]

This article demonstrates the logic, efficacy and profitability of the commerce in enslaved persons between Rio de la Plata and Lima from the late 1760s to the second decade of the nineteenth century. Moving beyond the customary study of local markets, it combines newly located tax, custom and notarial records with recent studies to describe the intercontinental slave trade in the Southern Cone. It demonstrates how Lima's demand for labor lay behind the transportation of more than 25,000 enslaved persons over the pampas and across the Andes to the port of Valparaiso, for final delivery in Lima's port of Callao. We find that most of the trafficking was concentrated in the summer and fall, consisted of the transportation of fewer than four slaves at a time, and was undertaken by hundreds of actors playing a variety of commercial roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis de Grandpré's book Voyage à la Côte Occidentale d'Afrique , published in 1801, is well-known to historians of Africa working on the eighteenth-century Loango Coast, located in the Cabinda province of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In describing the laws and customs of the African societies in this region, de Grandpré invites the reader to imagine these societies as "feudal" in character and draws on the semantics of "slavery" in doing so. This article proposes that we need to place this text in the context in which it was written, namely the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. We also need to consider why the author published this book in the first place, in order to understand how the terms "slave" and "slavery" function in this text. The article argues that Louis de Grandpré used the feudal/slavery nexus consciously in order to provide a legitimizing framework for a possible French conquest, hoping to prove his own loyalty and usefulness to Napoleon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on official imperial discourses in the Russian Empire and archival documents of the Orenburg Border Commission (1799–1856), the Russian imperial administrative institution subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this paper analyzes the ransoming, release, and reintegration of freed Russian subjects and shows how these processes and practices were inextricably linked to the Russian imperial concept of political belonging. In such a context, the concepts of freedom and liberation must be questioned; that is, we must determine the extent to which "freedom" can represent a universal value and is legally defined and thus dependent on sociopolitical situations and frameworks. To contribute to a more precise and multifaceted understanding of "freedom" and "dependency" as well as "freeing" and "enslavement," this article examines the liberation and repatriation of enslaved Russian subjects in the Central Asian khanates of Khiva and Bukhara in the first half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship that the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s, had with slavery during the Revolutionary Period. The United Irishmen were exiled by the British Government as a result of a failed rebellion in 1798 and were exile throughout the Atlantic World. For the exiled United Irishmen, the United States became a primary destination for their exile, and here, slavery became an important source of disunity. In Ireland, resistance to slavery was assumed across the entire membership of the United Irishmen, but in exile, this unity diminished. In conversation with past histories, this scholarship focuses on the limitations of Jacobinism as a political ideology and the prominence of rhetoric in revolutionary ideologies of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cameroon Grassfields faced extreme violence during German colonization in the early twentieth century. The German colonial army used various strategies, such as armed attacks, executions, looting, hostage-taking, and other repressive measures. After military subjugation by the German colonial army, however, the use of various forms of violence continued. Germans made use of multiple strategies in this mountain region to procure laborers for the colonial apparatus on the coast. At the same time, they claimed to be fighting "slave trade" and "slavery." However, the coercive measures and violence used for this purpose were and are often characterized by those affected and their descendants as forms of "slave trade" and "slavery." This article adopts an actor-centered approach that combines written sources with corresponding oral accounts and sheds light on local narratives about "labor recruitment." This will reveal how and why colonized actors conceptualized the systems of coercion they resisted against differently from the German colonizers. The article argues that taking the perspective of colonized actors into account calls into question the distinction between "slave trading" and "labor recruitment." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay to the special issue Beyond Slavery and Freedom? makes concrete suggestions how we might move beyond this binary and why we should do so. The introduction argues that the conceptual pair slavery/freedom is deeply entwined with narratives of modernity and progress and has shaped scholarship in very diverse fields. On the basis of empirical research from the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), we identify six possible pathways of thematically and methodologically moving beyond slavery/freedom that the contributions to the special issue address: 1) investigating forms of dependency that are not usually defined as slavery, 2) paying attention to semantic fields that are closely connected to this binary but not usually understood in relation to it, 3) highlighting the connection between (political, institutional) power and dependency, 4) engaging with post-slavery periods and experiences, 5) problematizing the challenges of identifying slavery in non-written records, and 6) underscoring the voice of actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the scholarly debate on the profitability of historical slavery. The article examines the case of the antebellum US South, using slave hire rates as a proxy for the net rent on investments in slavery. It employs empirical data and a more advanced methodological approach to the issue than in previous research. The results suggest that the profitability of slavery was much higher than what most previous research has shown, around 14–15 per cent per year on average after adjusting for mortality risk, but that the return also fluctuated over time. It was on average more profitable for Southern capital owners to invest in slaves than investing in many alternatives such as financial instruments or manufacturing activities in the US South, as long as slavery remained a legal institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years 1823, 1829–1830, and 1837, West and West Central Africa had to contend with three devastating yellow fever epidemics that affected both slave dealers who had settled along the coast and anti-slave trade officials tasked with bringing the slave trade to an end. In this paper I argue that these epidemics had a profound impact on the actions of both sets of actors, and eventually on the expansion and demise of the slave trade in the region. By focusing on the actions of a myriad of Atlantic actors, I explore the ways in which cyclical epidemics of yellow fever were dealt with, emphasizing how prophylactic measures, treatments, and more generally, medical knowledge, were challenged, affected, and changed by the arrival of each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on merchant letters and account books of military entrepreneurs, whose role in slave markets is still poorly understood, this article explores the Mediterranean activities of the Genoese contractors who emerged as major slave traffickers while operating galleys for the Spanish Monarchy. By examining their operations as slave buyers rather than as slave makers, this study analyzes how and why early modern military entrepreneurs mobilized forced labor beyond national borders. The article shows that in the specific context of the early 17th century, Genoese galley managers obtained most slaves by buying them in distant Mediterranean ports, and the reasons for this are explained. The study of how slaves were located, evaluated, negotiated over, paid for, and transported from a distance reveals that buying slaves internationally involved connecting the distant ports of a fragmented market characterized by a volatile local supply, localized information, unpredictable prices, and ubiquitous brokers. It is argued that, in such an imperfect market, the asentistas de galeras had no choice but to empower their galley captains and local agents. Purchasing slaves overseas increased market opportunities but involved high risks, unpredictable legal procedures, and myriad logistical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the mid-sixteenth and late-seventeenth centuries, a minority of enslaved people in Spanish America came from the western Indian Ocean world. Europeans trafficked " Mozambiques " into central Mexico as early as the 1540s, but the terms connecting people to Eastern Africa remained nebulous to imperial authorities. Changeable and malleable, terms like " mozambique " or " cafre de pasa " circulated widely and developed layers of meaning as enslaved people moved among the port cities of the Iberian empires. These vocabularies of difference associated Blackness with the Indo-Pacific in Mexican historical documents. Tracing the experiences of enslaved people of East African origins in Mexico complicates the conflation of Blackness, slavery, and Atlantic Africa. Before the eighteenth century, historical sources point to an overlapping of categories denoting Africanness and Asianness in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores how enslaved workers of African descent were punished in the Americas. It studies punishment inside and beyond the criminal justice system, investigating its legitimation and implementation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the contentious process that characterized the slow, gradual abolition of slavery in Colombia and New Granada between 1821 and 1852. I investigate how in this period slaveowners in the southwest advocated for their right to export their slaves as a form of punishment. In the foundation of the antislavery Colombian Republic, the 1821 manumission law had prohibited Colombians from participating in slave trading. Yet the slave-owning elite justified their appeal for exporting their enslaved property by claiming that selling the slaves outside of Colombian territory (New Granadan after Colombia was dissolved in 1830) was a strategy to get rid of the Afro-descendant populations, whom they considered to be dangerous to the social order. I also study how the position of the enslaved in the southwestern region was politicized both by the military dynamics and legal changes underway after independence. Justifying slave exports as a punishment of the "unruly slaves" was not only a strategy of the slaveowners to regain their capital. It was, mainly, a form of empowerment in response to the challenges they faced as a class in the context of gradual abolition, including the state's courting of slaves through antislavery legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along the East African coast, marronage increased in the 19th century as a consequence of the intensification of the slave trade and the development of a plantation economy based on slave labor. Research on the fugitive slaves on the Swahili coast has been conducted since the 1980s and has mainly highlighted the ambivalent relationship (between rejection and belonging) of maroons with the dominant coastal culture—that of the slave owners, shaped in particular by Islam and urbanity. This article goes beyond the existing interpretations by showing that the aftermath of slavery often consisted of a range of options, less static than those described so far and less focused on opting either into or out of coastal culture. Relying on a case study in present-day Kenya and drawing from European written sources and interviews, I examine what happened to escaped slaves in the Witu region, where a Swahili city-state was founded in 1862. Their history is examined through a spatial analysis and the modalities of their economic and social participation in regional dynamics, showing that no single cultural influence was hegemonic in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the "seasoning" of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica's Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally "tame" Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a special issue on the management of enslaved people working on plantations in the British Caribbean and the American South. It focuses on the relationships between commodification, control, persuasion and enslaved autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Stephanie Camp wrote of the "rival" geography that enslaved people created on slave labor plantations, few studies outside the field of architectural history have used the built environment as a source to understand the lives of enslaved people and the mindsets of enslavers in the United States. This article takes adolescent outbuildings in Louisiana (garçonnières) as a starting point to understand how white parents taught and reinforced ideas of dominance over both the environment and enslaved people and simultaneously rooted young white sons to a slave labor plantation "home." Using architectural evidence, alongside testimony left behind by both enslavers and the enslaved, this article argues that by moving young male enslavers out of the main plantation house and into a separate building, white enslaving parents created a "risk space" for sexual violence within the sexualized geography of the slave labor plantation. The garçonnière, with its privacy and age-and gender-specificity, constituted just one space of increased risk for enslaved women on Louisiana slave labor plantations from a violence that was manipulated within the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Iberian consulates in the United States identified the emergence of a "privateering archipelago," a new revolutionary interimperial legal/economic regime stretching from Rhode Island to the greater Caribbean in the post-Napoleonic decade. Spanish consuls' successful navigation of the privateering archipelago enabled them to expand the power of Cuban slavers into the southern U.S. Spanish consuls' confrontation with privateers became a driving force in the revival of the slave trade after its international condemnation at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Even though there were many ways in which Spanish consulates used the entanglement between privateering and slaving to strengthen the colonial hold on slavery, it was by means of whitening passports that they sought to institutionalize their power in the privateering archipelago. Intended to disenfranchise free gente de color and to re-commodify African slaves, the policy of whitening passports ended up marginalizing mariners and alienating them from consuls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories, memories, and legacies of slavery in Zanzibar have been rendered into words and images in autobiographies, novels, and films. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Zanzibar served as the main slave trading point in East Africa for the Indian Ocean slave trade, and its economy flourished on a slave-based plantation system. Memoirs by British missionaries and former slave owners from Zanzibar bear witness to the relational complexities of enslavement and the embodied realities of manumission, patronage, and (im)mobility. Postcolonial fiction writers from Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Oman have challenged the imposed silences around racialized and gendered violence in Zanzibar and Oman, and confronted the racism and Islamophobia inherent to the diasporic experience of Zanzibaris in Europe. In addition to the curation of former spaces related to slavery in Zanzibar, like the Slave Market, for tourist consumption, film has also emerged as a contested vehicle for representing Zanzibar's slave past and breaking the silence on this still taboo topic. In the absence of a coherent narrative or archive of Zanzibar slavery past and modern revolutionary present, memories of slavery, sexual labor, and resistance embedded in memoirs, fiction, and film reveal the contested imaginaries of ethno-racial-cultural-national-religious identities, the imperial underpinnings of abolition, and the dissociative dissonance of the diaspora in the wake of Zanzibar's revolutionary rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to assimilation, the diversity of the region, and the problems of identification, the presence of Asians with African ancestry in some parts of the Indian Ocean goes largely unnoticed. Whilst Ethiopians came to Sri Lanka voluntarily during the sixth century, the largest known Afro-Sri Lankan community's history dates back to the island's colonial era, which began in the sixteenth century. Oral traditions and archival records demonstrate that the Indian Ocean slave trade carried on even after abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Although their numbers have dwindled due to out-marriage and assimilation, this community's presence is marked out through its strong cultural memories. This article highlights the significance of film as a medium for making Sri Lankans of African ancestry visible and giving them a space to reflect about their ancestors, cultural traditions and sociolinguistic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historical GIS experiment attempts to map the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo alongside the departure of slave ships from the Bight of Benin. The achievements and drawbacks of mapping Africa's pre-colonial past require an overview of the sources and methods used to illustrate the dissolution and formation of inland places during an intense period of intra-African conflict. By collating geopolitical data, it is possible to represent on annual maps the likely origins and migrations of diverse groups of enslaved people who were involved in the warfare in the Bight of Benin hinterland between 1816 and 1836. During this period, an unknown number of captives were enslaved and forced into an internal slave trade, most especially into the Sokoto Caliphate, while over 75,000 individuals involuntarily boarded European slave ships leaving for Brazil, Cuba and, due to British abolition efforts, Sierra Leone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the ways that discussions regarding the abolition of the slave trade held at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) affected slavery in the Iberian empires. Drawing from newspaper coverage, diplomatic correspondence, and conference minutes, we reassess the conditions under which Portuguese and Spanish agents negotiated with their British counterparts; highlight the Iberian political dilemmas that surfaced at the Congress; and elucidate the plenipotentiaries' subsequent resolutions addressing the transatlantic slave trade. As a result of the talks held in Vienna, Spanish subjects in Cuba and Portuguese subjects in Brazil established political and diplomatic strategies to support slavery in order to maintain their positions in the world market of tropical goods. In other words, while slavery was undergoing reconfiguration in Brazil and Cuba, slave-owners and their political representatives were forced to engage with the hegemonic, abolitionist discourse systematically established by the British at the Congress in order to formulate their proslavery response. The article thus demonstrates that the Congress of Vienna was integral to the international consolidation of the politics of "second slavery" in the Americas. In other words, Brazil and Cuba were forced to engage with the hegemonic discourse systematically established by the British at the Congress in reconfiguring slavery and formulating their proslavery defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize winning novel, Sacred Hunger (1992), explores the Middle Passage from the perspective of two central protagonists: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a slave ship builder and owner of the Liverpool Merchant , and Matthew Paris, his cousin and the ship's doctor. The novel asserts that the "sacred hunger" of the slave trade is the desire for making money, at any cost. In this essay, we argue that one cost, the novel suggests, is the commodification of women's bodies, particularly black captive women entering the trade. Exploring this libidinal economy, we examine the role of the ship's doctor, in Paris, as the keeper of the gateway to slavery; the sexual exploitation of both black and white women, and Unsworth's use of the trace—in this case, the elusive figure of the Paradise Nigger, or Luther Sawdust, who is Paris' son, Kenke, conceived in a new settlement based on democracy undertaken in Florida and engaged in by both blacks and whites from the wrecked Liverpool Merchant. Capitalism, through human competition, enters that community, which, ultimately, is destroyed as Kemp discovers it and retakes his property. The Paradise Nigger represents a counter-memory and counter-force: a hope that the repetition of master-slave dichotomy in the libidinal economy can be interrupted by something "other" that suggests alternative shapes of human freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate that slavery persisted in Naples and Rome until the first half of the nineteenth century. My analysis shows that, while from a quantitative point of view slavery may be viewed as a "residual phenomenon," the life narratives and practices of slavery encountered in these different urban contexts are not unlike those typical of the Italian peninsula in previous centuries: captivity, the role of privateering, the link between slavery and serfdom, and, finally, baptism as a vehicle to freedom were all important aspects of this complex phenomenon. The slavery cases examined for Naples also highlight the complex links between captivity and slavery in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic slave trade. Examples illustrate how the two circuits of slave trades were in reality intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cuneiform documents found at Tell Atchana, a site on the River Orontes not far from modern city of Antakya, are of pivotal importance for our knowledge of western Syrian society during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. These tablets from ancient Alalakh provide data relating to the city's daily life and its social structure and administration. Compared to the large amount of information regarding free citizens, the material concerning slave laborers and menial workers—which is the topic of this article—is scanty and not always easy to interpret, for both the public and private sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some reflections on slavery in the Ancient Near East during the Old Babylonian period. Particular attention is paid to an analysis of the sources for prisoners of war originating from Uruk in which the bīt asīrī , "the house of prisoners of war" is mentioned. These texts from the bīt asīrī date to the short reign of Rīm-Anum, who held power in Uruk for about eighteen months, between 1742 and 1740 BC. The use of war prisoners as labor force and slaves is examined in detail. It is suggested that the bīt asīrī was an institutional entity, managed by the state, and moreover that it was connected with the production of flour. This investigation also makes comparisons with other references to prisons in the Ancient Near East and especially in the Bible. Lastly, the ways in which war captives could be freed are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third-millennium Mesopotamia has provided an impressive quantity of sources for the study of ancient slavery, among them a collection of standards (the so-called Laws of Ur-Namma). Despite the volume of documents, Mesopotamian slavery remains elusive in its general traits. This is partly due to the nature of the sources, but also to the approaches and interpretations of modern scholars. Slavery in ancient Mesopotamia has been the focus of several studies in the 1960s and 1970s that interpreted the sources using comparative approaches and Marxist analyses. Since then, the topic has seldom been revisited. In this article, I present the status quaestionis with an overview of the available sources and related studies, together with a sketch of the different types of bonded and forced labor in the Neo-Sumerian period (21st cent. BCE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A historiographical introduction to slaving, worldwide, accents the productivity of the social sciences in expanding its study from the modern Americas to fully global scales, but also raising challenges to maintaining a single abstract definition for "slavery" applicable to increasingly diverse contexts. An epistemological shift to historical analyses built from human motivations and strategies, richly contextualized in particular times and places, characterizes the four innovative essays in this collection, which advance the field by historicizing early maritime slave trading in the southern Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1500 and 1840, ships under Portuguese colors embarked more than 5 million enslaved men, women and children from the coasts of Africa. Despite its position as the preeminent slave trading empire in the Atlantic World, no studies have systematically traced the evolution in maritime investment practices in Portugal and its American colonies which propelled this massive forced transportation of captive Africans. Beginning with Portuguese merchants' earliest forays into Atlantic trade, on the West African island of Cabo Verde in the fifteenth century, maritime cargoes were collectively owned through the distribution of small shares. Drawing on medieval Mediterranean precedents, these collective, legally constructed partnerships opened early transoceanic trading opportunities to a diverse group of traders, colonists, and mariners, creating a decentralized mercantile trade which diffused profits throughout slave trading communities. Slaving merchants in Salvador da Bahia adopted this collectivist model of investment by the early eighteenth century, converting commercial disadvantages into a prosperous and durable trade which wove together the economic interests of a heterogeneous cross-section of Salvador's inhabitants—including merchants, their families and slaves, and mariners—within the business of slaving. This article traces the persistence of this financial strategy, and argues that it enabled the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the linkages between the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America during the Iberian Union (1580–1640). Drawing upon legal suits, it argues that Brazilian port cities were both destinations and hubs for the re-exportation of West Central African captives to Spanish colonies. Vessels frequently "stopped over" in Brazilian ports following the Atlantic crossing due to navigational exigencies and to avoid paying the higher duties on captives levied in Spanish American ports. This article demonstrates that the integration of the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America facilitated the spread of slavery well beyond sugar-producing regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on local slaving agents, encomenderos de negros , during the first half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on notarial documents, Inquisition cases and investigations on contraband and tax evasion, the study explains how Portuguese intermediaries sold and distributed African captives in colonial Mexico between 1616 and 1639. The ability to extend credit was key to the success of these agents-on-commission. The article also explains why agents of the Grillo and Lomelín slaving monopoly (asiento) failed to replicate the success of their Lusophone predecessors in Nueva Veracruz, Mexico City and Puebla de los Ángeles in the 1660s and 1670s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May of 1746, slaving captain Christiaan Hagerop illegally captured ten Gold Coast canoe paddlers, seven of whom were free Africans from Elmina and Fante. Hagerop subsequently sailed to Suriname, where he sold the paddlers into slavery. To appease the relatives of the captured men and to safeguard its reputation among local Africans, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) launched a search for the kidnapped paddlers. Six of the men were eventually located in Suriname in 1749, the seventh having died in slavery. While the Africans were transported back to the Gold Coast via Amsterdam, the WIC tried to have Hagerop extradited to its Gold Coast possessions to receive punishment for his crime. A legal battle over jurisdictional competence ensued in the Dutch Republic, the outcome of which was that the captain was made to stand trial in Amsterdam, but in the end he received very little punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]