Slavers, Traders and Privateers


Book Description

This book presents a factual and fascinating portrait of Liverpool during the slave trade.







Dark Voyage


Book Description

Dark Voyage: An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade is the never-before-told story of the extraordinary 1778 voyage of the American ship Marlborough that sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attack the heart of the British slave trading empire in West Africa. Conceived and funded by prominent Rhode Island merchant John Brown, the 20-gun double-decked brig and its mission would have been forgotten were it not for the little-known primary source document, Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, recognized by the author for its extraordinary importance to the history of slavery and the American Revolution.




History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letter of Marque


Book Description

First Published in 1967. Using a number of original sources of newspapers, rare documents, magazines and records this book offers the history of Liverpool privateering and the delicate subject of the Liverpool slave trading.




Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves


Book Description

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more than a thousand pirates poured from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. There, according to Kevin P. McDonald, they helped launch an informal trade network that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, connecting the North American colonies with the rich markets of the East Indies. Rather than conducting their commerce through chartered companies based in London or Lisbon, colonial merchants in New York entered into an alliance with Euro-American pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves explores the resulting global trade network located on the peripheries of world empires and shows the illicit ways American colonists met the consumer demand for slaves and East India goods. The book reveals that pirates played a significant yet misunderstood role in this period and that seafaring slaves were both commodities and essential components in the Indo-Atlantic maritime networks. Enlivened by stories of Indo-Atlantic sailors and cargoes that included textiles, spices, jewels and precious metals, chinaware, alcohol, and drugs, this book links previously isolated themes of piracy, colonialism, slavery, transoceanic networks, and cross-cultural interactions and extends the boundaries of traditional Atlantic, national, world, and colonial histories.




History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque


Book Description

The most detailed period document on privateering and the slave trade. The first half of the book concentrates on privateering, covering historically important eras such as the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. In the second half, the focus is on the slave trade and how privateers profited from it, including extensive chapters on specific captains, the abolition movement, and corporate ties to the slave trade.




History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque


Book Description

Excerpt from History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque: With an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade In dealing with the delicate subject of the Liverpool Slave Trade - a subject which, for reasons that may be guessed, has been lightly touched upon by most local writers - the author has endeavoured to confine himself to a plain statement of facts - facts which need no comment or exposition. He has directed his indignation against the system, or national sin, rather than against individuals, for many of the slave merchants and slave-captains of old Liverpool claim our regard as patriots and worthies of no common order. Though we are on the threshold of the Twentieth Century, with its tremendous possibilities, there are indications that white men still exist who would gladly revert to the iniquitous system of a bygone age, and enslave the African in his own land. If anything in this book should help to awaken the public conscience to jealously watch that under no specious pretext shall the bodies and souls of African labourers be again handed over to the tender mercies of greedy and unscrupulous adventurers, the author will rejoice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




The Prince of Slavers


Book Description

Much scholarship on the British transatlantic slave trade has focused on its peak period in the late eighteenth century and its abolition in the early nineteenth; or on the Royal African Company (RAC), which in 1698 lost the monopoly it had previously enjoyed over the trade. During the early eighteenth-century transition between these two better-studied periods, Humphry Morice was by far the most prolific of the British slave traders. He bears the guilt for trafficking over 25,000 enslaved Africans, and his voluminous surviving papers offer intriguing insights into how he did it. Morice’s strategy was well adapted for managing the special risks of the trade, and for duplicating, at lower cost, the RAC’s capabilities for gathering information on what African slave-sellers wanted in exchange. Still, Morice’s transatlantic operations were expensive enough to drive him to a series of increasingly dubious financial manoeuvres throughout the 1720s, and eventually to large-scale fraud in 1731 from the Bank of England, of which he was a longtime director. He died later that year, probably by suicide, and with his estate hopelessly indebted to the Bank, his family, and his ship captains. Nonetheless, his astonishing rise and fall marked a turning point in the development of the brutal transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.




The Two Princes of Calabar


Book Description

In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Randy Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it. They were transported from the coast of Africa to Dominica, where they were sold to a French physician. By employing their considerable language and interpersonal skills, they cleverly negotiated several escapes that took them from the Caribbean to Virginia, and to England, but always ended in their being enslaved again. Finally, in England, they sued for, and remarkably won, their freedom. Eventually, they found their way back to Old Calabar and, evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading. The Two Princes of Calabar offers a rare glimpse into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and slave trade from an African perspective. It brings us into the trading communities along the coast of Africa and follows the regular movement of goods, people, and ideas across and around the Atlantic. It is an extraordinary tale of slaves' relentless quest for freedom and their important role in the creation of the modern Atlantic World.




American Slavers


Book Description

The first telling of the unknown story of America’s two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery. Engaging with both African and American history and addressing the trade over time, Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island. In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.