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showing 317 library results for 'slave trade'

Robert Hibbert 1772-1780 : detailing a merchant family's involvement in defence and of the colonial slave "The Jamaican Diaries of Robert Hibbert 1772-1780 is a deeply personal work that has evolved over the last 15 years. It is intended to foster a greater understanding of a very difficult time in history, in which the enslaved and the enslavers inhabit different, disturbing interlocking narratives, now distorted by time and politics. At its core is the dark stain of an empire and many fortunes built upon the enslavement of the unfortunate. It contains much thorough research into people, places, events and sources that developed as the author followed the twists and turns of a family history often frustratingly opaque and sometimes sensationally public. The book is part genealogy and part social history: a previously unpublished diary of a major figure in the West Indian slave trade, with contemporary sources and biographical notes on those that strutted the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century. It lays down a chronology to allow a picture of the day-to-day happenings in Jamaica to emerge. This work exposes the deep, raw wounds that have resonated through the centuries, creating a need for a deeper study into many facets of British Atlantic history from a different perspective ? one in which the narrative of the enslaved and the enslavers can be read together in both the geopolitical context of the times and the legal, ethical, humanitarian and religious belief systems of those times on both sides of the Atlantic. In order to consider how the slave trade was run, financed, organised and evolved, the author provides a detailed examination of the Jamaican economy of the time, and offers a better and more balanced understanding of the slave trade?s establishment, adoption, adaption, abolition and, lastly, its legacy, in all its hydra-like forms. The second volume of this work will cover the years when the Diaries resume, 1787 to 1802. The Robert Hibbert diaries and the family involvement with Jamaica extend past the abolition (1834) and emancipation (1838) of slaves to the middle of the nineteenth century."--Provided by the publisher. 2020. • BOOK • 1 copy available. txt
That most precious merchandise : the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves, 1260-1500 /Hannah Barker "The history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to human trafficking networks in the present day. At its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the sole source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought captives taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean Sea. Yet the trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of women, men, and children. Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the three most important strands in the web of the Black Sea slave trade, they have rarely been studied together. Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery. Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled, with wide-ranging effects. Genoese and Venetian disruption of the Mamluk trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to scathing criticism by supporters of the crusade movement who demanded commercial powers use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam. Reading notarial registers, tax records, law, merchants' accounts, travelers' tales and letters, sermons, slave-buying manuals, and literary works as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker gives a rich picture of the context in which merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate."--Provided by the publisher. 2019. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 306.3/6209822
The temptations of trade : Britain, Spain, and the struggle for empire /Adrian Finucane. "The British and the Spanish had long been in conflict, often clashing over politics, trade, and religion. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, these empires signed an asiento agreement granting the British South Sea Company a monopoly on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic, opening up a world of uneasy collaboration. British agents of the Company moved to cities in the Caribbean and West Indies, where they braved the unforgiving tropical climate and hostile religious environment in order to trade slaves, manufactured goods, and contraband with Spanish colonists. In the process, British merchants developed relationships with the Spanish--both professional and, at times, personal. The Temptations of Trade traces the development of these complicated relationships in the context of the centuries-long imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. Many British Merchants, in developing personal ties to the Spanish, were able to collect potentially damaging information about Spanish imperial trade, military defenses, and internal conflict. British agents juggled personal friendships with national affiliation--and, at the same time, developed a network of illicit trade, contraband, and piracy extending beyond the legal reach of the British South Sea Company and often at the Company's direct expense. Ultimately, the very smuggling through which these empires unwittingly supported each other led to the resumption of Anglo-Spanish conflict, as both empires cracked down on the actions of traders within the colonies. The Temptations of Trade reveals the difficulties of colonizing regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war."--Provided by the publisher. 2016 • BOOK • 1 copy available. 382.0941
A fistful of shells : West Africa from the rise of the slave trade to the age of revolution /Toby Green "By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art. Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions."--Provided by the publisher 2019. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 966
making of early American libraries : British literature, political thought, and the transatlantic book trade "Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce-the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery."--Provided by the publisher. 2019. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 070.5