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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 provides a review of books on Dutch colonial history, focusing on violence, slavery, and the economic impact of colonial trade. The books explore the agency and cultural contributions of enslaved Africans and other marginalized groups, challenging the traditional focus on European colonizers. They also examine the economic and political challenges faced by the Dutch, highlighting the role of force and slavery in their system of exploitation. The study of non-Dutch experiences offers potential for future research that bridges the two hemispheres. [Extracted from the article]

This paper investigates the role of Islamic jurisprudence in creating and sustaining forms of social dependency in the oases of Tuwāt (in present-day southern Algeria). Drawing upon a series of fatwā s collections compiled between 1750 and 1850, I examine how Saharan legal scholars reinforced the structural hegemony of local elites and ensured their control over servile and semi-servile groups, particularly the Haratin population. The materials reveal that jurisprudential techniques and arguments were instrumental in fostering practices of subordination, most notably through the defense of exploitative sharecropping arrangements. The tendency of local jurists to uphold individual property rights de facto worked in favor of descent groups claiming genealogical and cultural superiority. It significantly contributed to the maintenance of unequal relationships between individuals and social groups in a society profoundly shaped by the trans-Saharan slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the documents of an investigation into the illegal commercial activities of a director of the French slave trading fort of Ouidah, along with inventories of deceased employees and workers at the fort, this article traces the private trade of free and unfree individuals at this outpost of the French empire. It demonstrates that private trade was structural to the French presence in the region. It was tolerated, was at times legal, and formed part of employees' expectations for their financial compensation. Finally, it explores the precarious position of actors bridging different economic and cultural worlds with an unclearly defined legal and racial status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines issues of the slave trade and slavery in the Momo River valley of Cameroon. Using primary sources (oral tradition and archival materials) and secondary sources, the paper shows the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in the region not only in the slave trade and slaving activities but also in the transformation of some old social institutions and the emergence of new ones. The paper argues that the transatlantic slave trade introduced capitalists in this part of Africa, who continued to make profits from legitimate commerce after the abolition of the slave trade through the persistent enslavement of other Africans to work in the palm oil industry. The Momo River valley continued to be a major source of these slaves. This paper therefore brings into the limelight slavery and the slave trade in an area which contributed to the transatlantic and the post-transatlantic slave trade but which has still not received adequate scholarly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olga Todorova's book, "Domestic Slavery and Slave Ownership in Ottoman Rumelia," is a comprehensive Bulgarian monograph that explores the nature of Ottoman rule over Bulgarians. Todorova argues that Ottoman slavery was less severe than Western slavery, primarily focused on domestic work, and not driven by economic or racial factors. The book examines the involvement of Bulgarians in slavery, as well as the psychological, social, and legal aspects of domestic slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Todorova challenges the use of the term "Turkish yoke/slavery" in Bulgarian history, arguing that it is misleading and inappropriate. While the book is primarily aimed at a Bulgarian audience, it contributes to the global scholarly discussion on slavery. The review also mentions another study by Todorov that discusses the abduction of Greek children by Bulgarian officers during the Great War. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Africa: Colonizers' Unpaid Debt" edited by Irina Abramova explores the socioeconomic and political impact of European colonization on Africa. The authors argue that the transatlantic slave trade and colonial rule have had lasting effects on the continent, including mass poverty and economic disenfranchisement. The book examines the history of the slave trade, the atrocities committed by colonial powers, and the exploitation of Africa's resources. It also highlights the role of the USSR in supporting African liberation movements and advocates for collaborative efforts between Africa and Russia to reclaim sovereignty and challenge neocolonialism. [Extracted from the article]

The paper examines the repulse of fifteenth century Portuguese slave raids in the Senegambia by the armed forces of the empires of Great Jolof and Imperial Mali, within the context of the ongoing Military Revolution debate and with an emphasis on the military organization and weaponry deployed by both sides. Despite the claims of some historians about early European advantages in naval warfare, any such superiority on the part of the European vessels was not demonstrated in these encounters, with the war-canoes and poisoned arrows of the Jolof and Malian marines proving highly effective against the caravels, cannons, and crossbows of the Portuguese sailors. The African militaries of the Senegambia region were well-organized, well-disciplined, and more than capable of defeating European marauders. If Europeans did develop notable military advantages over West Africans in the sixteenth century, they had not yet begun to do so in the fifteenth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article discusses two books, "Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery" by Kate Phillips and "The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838" by Stephen Mullen, which explore Scotland's involvement in slavery and the slave trade. The author criticizes Phillips' book for its lack of original manuscript sources and superficial approach, pointing out errors and unsupported claims. Mullen's book is praised for its scholarly apparatus but criticized for not citing previous works, particularly a 1971 doctoral thesis by Tom Devine. The article emphasizes the importance of careful and rigorous research in contributing to the understanding of slavery and its legacies. [Extracted from the article]

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx's support for emancipation was conditional on the level of 'civilisation' attained by Black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx's racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx's nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-Black racism of Marx and the place Black workers occupy in his historical-materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or 'human capital' – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called 'labour in the abstract', and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour 'in general', depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference , particularly the branding of race. The term 'Black', which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx's scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour's subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of 'primitive accumulation', however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx's corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years later, the present article revisits Robert Kagan's assertion that Americans are from Venus and Europeans are from Mars. The article questions what place is reserved for space in contemporary EU-US relations at the dawn of the third space age. First, describing some of the challenges in transatlantic cooperation on space matters, the article reviews the history of transatlantic dialogue and cooperation on trade, science, and technology. The focus is then shifted to commercialisation's key challenge of space traffic management detailing scholarly work, possible approaches and comparing EU and US attitudes. To conclude, the article argues that pursuing divergent and uncoordinated approaches to address space traffic management will be detrimental to transatlantic relations and a missed opportunity for a positive dynamic in space governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a theoretical analysis of the logistics of neoliberal slavery in the 21st century, focusing on the role of the port cities as the hinge in the supply chain through the case of the cyber scam industry of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone. The hinge, in a metonymic and metaphorical way, connects a complex mobile networking system with a multi-dimensional and topological dynamism. The overlaid networks consist of a tripartite operation—the production, the market, and the law—and explains the persistence of human interest in profiting from surplus values through human labor extraction, and the violence and cruelty inherent in this. The logic of circulation no longer follows Marx's analysis of M-C-M or M-M+, but the formula of V-M+. Through void with no cost, and violence with no law, there is no limit to the multiplication of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the figure of Bousaadiya, once performed in varying iterations throughout central North Africa, as an entry point to approach the problematics of mobility and memory in Libya. Bousaadiya performance, a multidimensional set of practices that I read critically as dance, produces an embodied social ground upon which Libyans have enacted and contested racialized practices of belonging and a mobile gravesite where it is possible to interrogate regional histories of enslavement and their material and symbolic legacies. While reading Bousaadiya performance enables an excavation of the trans-Saharan slave trade and its ghostly e/affects, performing Bousaadiya enabled the incomplete burial of these through surrogation, easing particular losses. In this article, I explore both of these aspects of the performativity of Bousaadiya's dance, which is underscored by the forms of remembering it that continue to proliferate. To follow Bousaadiya is to grapple with the ongoing unresolvedness in Libyan cultural politics of the country's histories of slave economies and the hierarchies left in their wake and to gesture toward the prospect of repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century, freedpeople rescued from slaving boats on the Indian Ocean by British anti-slavery cruisers were sent to Bombay, where many of the young men found employment as stokers in the stokehold of P&O steamships. British administrators discussed the future of freed 'Africans' strictly as profitable sources of labour. Freedpeople, however, went on to form their own Muslim community or jamāt in Bombay, known as the Sidis or Habshis. While colonial 'liberation' was bound up with ideas about race, Sidis rejected ideas of a singular racial biological origin with their itinerant notion of a community descended from the Prophet. This article is a historical critique of the terms of the colonial racecraft that gives us the category 'African' and the natural division of humans into races, and an effort to read the colonial archive against the grain for the explication of a subaltern Sidi or Habshi notion of jamāt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is becoming increasingly sophisticated, diverse, and international. Challenging prevailing stereotypes about the dominance of northern European business interests, García Montón's study shows the persistent vigor of Genoa's merchant community in this examination of the asiento system that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and continued into the mid-eighteenth century. Along the way, he also illuminates the slave trade's connections to many other forms of trade, legitimate and illegitimate, on both sides of the Atlantic. Impressed with his research and approach, these six reviewers discuss its implications for a variety of international contexts, from Central Europe to Italy, Iberia, England, and the Caribbean, including the profitability of the asiento trade and the many different people who participated in and benefitted from it on both sides of the Atlantic. It emerges that the asiento was about much more than just the slave trade. Its profits and trading networks helped integrate the different imperial economies with footholds in the Caribbean. Drawing on the wealth of new scholarship from these different historiographies, they raise some questions about elements that García Montón did not pursue fully in the book. He responds with additional research to address some of those issues, while also calling for more research on the interconnected "asiento worlds" that are one of the most fascinating and unanticipated results of his research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the narratives and counter-narratives of indenture experience in Fiji in the works of Totaram Sanadhya, John Wear Burton, Kenneth Gillion, Brij Lal and Satish Rai. The recruitment of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji began in 1879, much later than in other colonies. Yet the experiences of the labourers in Fiji were not markedly different. The indenture system, or girmit, was considered better than the slave trade, while others regarded it as only a change in name, with regulations to safeguard the colonial interest. The above authors have shown that, from the onset, the recruitment process, the passage from India to Fiji, life on the plantations and the coolie lines, and life after indenture were a duality: either emancipation or victimisation of Indian labourers. This paper highlights the dual nature of the indenture experience in Fiji. [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]

A major contribution of this book is the significant integration of the northern Yoruba polities into the historical analysis of the Yoruba, espousing their connections and relevance in Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History by Akinwunmi Ogundiran I The Yoruba: A New History i is divided into five sections, with ten chapters covering political, economic, social, and religious themes across the same 2000-year period of Yoruba history. Ogundiran's focus on the lived experiences of the Yoruba highlights the roles of everyday people in the many political, economic, and sociocultural shifts that occurred in the long history of the Yoruba. [Extracted from the article]

Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family's Story of Slavery, by Alex Renton & Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean, by David Alston And Renton outlines reprisals for enslaved uprisings; seven significant revolts occurred between 1769 and 1774. Alston outlines the involvement of Highland individuals in all stages of the slave trade and slavery: the slave castles in Africa, the middle passage, and plantation life. [Extracted from the article]

Dutch historians have usually been reluctant to frame Dutch colonial projects as empire building or consider the Netherlands as an imperialist nation. More recently, Pepijn Brandon and I have shown (in I Slavery and Abolition i , 2021) that in the late eighteenth century this commerce made up over 5 percent of Dutch GDP and over 10 percent of the GDP of Holland, a commerce that was overwhelmingly based on enslaved labor. In this respect Catia Antunes makes an important point with her contribution to I The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice i when she highlights the political objectives of the Dutch Estates-General chartering the VOC and WIC, namely to change the balance of power within the highly federalist Republic toward centralization. We also know that the jurisdiction of the VOC extended well beyond their trading settlements and that many treaties around the globe between Dutch settlements and local polities established Dutch suzerainty, as Martine van Ittersum argues in I The Dutch and English East India Companies i . [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the historical significance of Elmina Castle, a fortress on the West African coast that played a central role in the transatlantic slave trade. It examines an oil painting attributed to Pieter de Wit, which depicts the Director-General of the Dutch West India Company in Africa, Dirck Wilre, inside his apartment in Elmina Castle in 1669. It delves into the complexities of life and death within the fort, highlighting the social death of enslaved Africans.

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power, by James Walvin Walvin also effectively surveys the importance of management and accounting techniques to Atlantic slavery's functioning, while maintaining a focus on the violence that was fundamental to the brutal system. James Walvin, I A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power i . [Extracted from the article]

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 article traces the history of early pentecostal responses to sex trafficking and the related issue of prostitution. It documents the stories of Pentecostal Rescue missions recorded in pentecostal papers such as The Bridegroom's Messenger, Apostolic Faith, Weekly Evangel , and the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate. This study explores pentecostal views of society and culture as well as rhetoric about trafficked women, especially the concepts of victimhood, guilt, and culpability for "fallen women." It demonstrates how ministry to trafficked women positively and negatively shaped pentecostal attitudes toward women and dress in the pentecostal tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using probate inventories from multiple locations in the Ottoman central lands, this article offers a quantitative perspective on long-term patterns of slaveholding, slave prices, and demand for slaves. Findings include a continual decline in slave-ownership and related indicators across all social groups and strata, and a decline in prices in connection with trafficking from Africa in the eighteenth century. The investment preferences of the top buyers and the composition of the slave population also indicate that the features of the demand for slaves were neither fixed in any period nor uniform across regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ehalt and Alberts also point to the Buddhist monastic economy in Asia as a local model that shaped the missionaries' practices. Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th-18th Centuries), edited by Hélène Vu Thanh and Ines Zupanov The editors now caution us against generalizations, emphasizing instead the diversity of local situations, the fragility of missionary economies, as well as the controversies within their ranks. [Extracted from the article]

In February 1660, supercargo Laurens de Sille sailed from New Amsterdam (Manhattan) to Curaçao aboard the galliot Nieuwer Amstel. Tasked with maintaining a record of the cargo, De Sille kept a journal of the four-month journey to Curaçao and back. While keeping a journal was common practice on Dutch ships, few survive from the seventeenth century. De Sille's journal offers a unique insight into mid-seventeenth-century shipping activities at Curaçao, as his account captures day-to-day proceedings during a period for which there are only sparse extant sources on the island's history. More importantly, De Sille's chronicle of his two-month stay on the island depicts Curaçao as it emerged as a hub for the Dutch transatlantic slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In fact, with the exception of Alex van Stipriaan's monograph on Rotterdam, which focuses on Atlantic slavery, all the books discussed in this review include the much less familiar story of Dutch colonial slavery in Asia. In 2019, Utrecht was the third Dutch city, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam, to commission a study of its slavery history. The first five were commissioned by the city councils of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht to investigate the role each of these cities historically played in the slave trade and colonial slavery in order to understand the postcolonial present and foster a sense of connection and belonging in these ethnically and culturally "diverse" urban conglomerates. Utrecht did not have its own chamber in either company, but it did have the right to appoint an "extraordinary" director in the VOC's Amsterdam chamber. [Extracted from the article]

The fact that body-part reflexives (BPR s) are widespread in Romance-lexifier pidgin, creole and mixed (PCM) languages of the Atlantic area has usually been accounted for in terms of substratum influence from West African languages, in which such reflexives are common. However, this approach does not explain why BPR s are also frequently found in Romance-lexifier PCM languages like Zamboanga Chavacano and Malacca Creole, which lack a demonstrable African substrate, are spoken outside the Atlantic area and are in contact with languages that lack BPR s. Drawing on cross-linguistic as well as historical corpus data, this paper argues that the source of BPR s in these languages should be traced back to the late-medieval and early-Renaissance lexifiers. More specifically, it is proposed that speakers of Romance-lexifier PCM languages identified, recapitulated and replicated reflexive-like uses of words such as 'body' and 'head' in the lexifiers. A number of bridging contexts is argued to have fostered these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where most scholarship on the origins of the sugar revolution has focused on the English islands, this article draws on detailed research in Dutch and French archives to show how Dutch merchants were crucial actors in promoting the sugar revolution in the Lesser Antilles. Despite the fact that both English and French islands experienced similar developments, the relationship between these islands is barely known in English literature largely due to the language barrier. Illustrating the Dutch-French relationship allows us to develop a more regionally inclusive and trans-national perspective that shows how the early Caribbean economy, French and English, benefitted from a web of links forged by ambitious Dutch merchants between Europe, Brazil, and the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]