DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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Based on the following documents, analyze the shifting historical interpretations about the Atlantic slave trade. In your argument discuss the factors that have led historians to re interpret the Atlantic slave trade in Western Africa during the Early Modern Period. Historical Background: Europeans began arriving along the Atlantic coast of Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. They were drawn there mainly for the trade in gold, spices, and other products, among them slaves. However, Europeans had no military success against African states as they were later to achieve against various American peoples. Over the next for centuries the Africans were willing and able to sell as many as 11 million people into the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Source: John Barbot, A Description of the coasts of North and South-Guinea . . . Now first printed from his original manuscript, In Awnsham and John Churchill (compilers), Collection of Voyages (London, 1732), vol. 5, plate 9, p. 156. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia; also, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

African canoes carrying slaves on board of ships at Manfroe. Also shows European trading vessels and slave ships in the background and various forts

Source 1

DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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Source: Curtin, Phillip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade; a Census. London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. p, 271 One model frequently found in the historical literature depicts the transformation of a previously peaceful peasant community into a militarized slave-catching society, where slave-raiding becomes an economic activity consciously pursued for the sale of the European imports that could be bought for slaves and slaves alone.

Source 2

Source 3

Source: Engerman, Stanley L., and Joseph E. Inkori, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. p. 70 Without a doubt, as far as this region is concerned, to speak of African slavery as being ancient, and to suggest that this provided the initial stimulus and early recruiting ground for slaves exported to Europe and the Americas is to stand history on its head. When the European powers involved in the area (namely Britain, France and Portugal) intervened to end slavery and serfdom in their respective colonies, they were simply undoing their own handiwork.

Source 4

Source: Fage, J.D. “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Context of West African History.” Journal of African History, 910, no. 3 (1969): 404. The European demand for slaves for the Americas, which reached its peak from about 1650 to 1850, accentuated and expanded the internal growth of both slavery and the slave trade.

DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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Source: Thomas Astley (ed.), A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745-47), vol. 3, plate 23, facing p. 257. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

King on throne surrounded by bodyguards/retainers with Dutch emissaries kneeling in front of him

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DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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Source 6

SOURCE: John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p, 125 In conclusion, then, we must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.

Source 7

Source: Law, Robin. “Between the Sea and the Lagoons: The Interaction of Maritime and Inland Navigation on the Precolonial Slave Coast.” Cahiers de’Estudes Africanes, 29, Cahier 114, Rivages 1 (1989):p. 237 The African coasting trade between the Gold and Salve Coasts was thus, strictly speaking, not a purely maritime enterprise but a hybrid form, grafting the sea-going navigational skills of the Gold Coast immigrants onto the older established lagoon traffic of the indigenous peoples. Like the Europeans in fact, the Gold Coast merchants on the Slave Coast exploited and depended upon the pre-existing technology of lagoon-borne transport

DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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SOURCE: Behrendt, Stephen D. David Eltis, David Richardson. “The Cost of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World.” The Economic History Review, New Series, 54, no. 3 (2001) pp.473-474 A second impact of Africans that goes beyond violence on slave ships followed from the natural African assumption of equal status in the trading relationship that came in the wake of holding Europeans at bay.

Source 8

Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: a History of Slavery in Africa, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p. 68 The export of about 11 million slaves from 1500 to 1800, including the astronomical increase between 1650 and 1800 in the Atlantic sector, could not have occurred without the transformation of the African political economy.

Source 9

DBQ for the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa During the Early Modern Period

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Source Louis de Grandpre, Voyage a la cote occidentale d'Afrique, fait dans les années 1786 et 1787 (Paris, 1801), vol. 2, facing p. 49. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia)

Capture and Coffle of Enslaved Africans, Angola, 1786-87

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