Resisting Slavery

Resisting Slavery

"Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade" by David Richardson, in The William and Mary Quarterly (Jan. 2001), Box 8781, Williamsburg, Va. 23187–8781.

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"Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade" by David Richardson, in The William and Mary Quarterly (Jan. 2001), Box 8781, Williamsburg, Va. 23187–8781.

It’s now well known that Africans sometimes violently resisted enslavement by Europeans, but historians have focused almost entirely on slave revolts in the Americas. Recently amassed data from European shipping records on more than 27,000 voyages show that many Africans also fought back on the African coast and at sea.

Between about 1650 and 1860 there were at least 485 collective acts of violent rebellion, including 392 shipboard revolts and 93 "attacks from the shore by apparently ‘free’ Africans against ships or longboats," says Richardson, an economic historian at the University of Hull, in Great Britain. More than 360 ships were involved, some more than once.

Ninety percent of the shipboard revolts occurred in (or shortly before or after) the 18th century. Despite gaps in records and a lack of data on ships other than those of the French, Dutch, and British, Richardson estimates that as many as 10 percent of the ships in that period may have experienced an insurrection.

The revolts rarely succeeded, he says, but they were common enough to induce traders to take preventive measures, including doubling the number of crew members, which increased the pecuniary costs of the Middle Passage. Had there been no revolts, the number of slaves shipped across the Atlantic—at least 11 million embarked at the African coast, including more than six million between 1700 and 1810—would undoubtedly have been considerably greater. Richardson estimates that the resisters "saved perhaps 600,000 other Africans from being shipped to America in the long 18th century and one million during the whole history of the trade."

Enslaved Africans from the Senegambia region (the basins of the Senegal and Gambia rivers) appear to have been especially likely to fight back.

America was hardly the only market for slaves from Senegambia, Richardson notes. "For centuries before contact by sea with Europeans, Senegambia was an important source for the trans-Saharan slave trade as well as for the trade in the desert." There was also a substantial local demand for slaves.

Most of the slaves shipped to America from Senegambia had been captured in warfare or by slave raiders, usually employed by Muslim states in the far interior or by "warrior states" near the coast. Historians have tended to think that most slaves shipped to America from Senegambia in the 18th century came from the far interior. As the American demand grew after 1750, slavers probably worked the coastal areas more intensively, instead of moving inland, as they did elsewhere in Africa.

That, Richardson says, may well have contributed to a breakdown in political order. It, in turn, may have led to more warrior regimes and perhaps to a new willingness among the Africans there to sell previously protected domestic slaves and other persons to the Europeans. The explosive end result, now newly visible in the amassed shipping records: more attacks on ships and more shipboard revolts.

 

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