Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies

Chapter 7

101 Chapter 7 Anglo-E¤k Relations and Protection against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740–1807 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson Get Slaves honestly, if you can, And if you cannot get them honestly, Get them. —Traditional saying Resistance by enslaved Africans to their status has been an important theme in the literature on transatlantic slavery. Most attention has focused on rebellion and other forms of resistance by slaves in the Americas, where evidence of such activities is perhaps most readily found. Resistance by enslaved Africans onboard ship and within Africa itself is attracting increasing attention, too, as violent and nonviolent forms of resistance come to be recognized as common to each stage of transatlantic slavery.1 Transatlantic slavery was shaped, however , by both African resistance to and participation in the processes that You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 102 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson resulted in the shipment of up to twelve million Africans as slaves to the Americas . Africans were, in other words, both victims and suppliers of the Atlantic slave trade. While the resistance of the enslaved to their conditions on the African coast has been recognized, the ways in which the slave suppliers protected themselves against seizure and deportation has received scant attention. It is dif¤cult to believe that in the absence of such forms of protection—and the security for suppliers that it created—the Atlantic slave trade could have reached the scale it did at its height, between 1750 and 1850. Understanding how certain groups were able to protect themselves from arbitrary enslavement also yields insights into the political economy of slave trading in Africa. In particular , it exposes not only how the risks of participation in the slave trade were managed but also how pro¤ts from that trade were distributed and how it in¶uenced African economic development. In focusing on those who directed the trade in Africa, we recognize that it is not always easy to see the mechanisms by which people tried to protect themselves against enslavement. Sometimes protection involved efforts to enslave others considered as enemies. Sometimes protective measures may have given the appearance of resistance to the slave trade, notably in safeguarding the status of privileged groups, which clearly was not a challenge to the institution of slavery itself. At some ports along the Atlantic coast it is possible, nevertheless, to disentangle those who were protected from enslavement from those who were not. Moreover, one may discern some of the mechanisms used to protect the status of “insiders”—that is, those protected from enslavement—from being seized and transported to the Americas and, sometimes, the conditions in which such mechanisms could fail, even if only temporarily. Our analysis focuses on the port of Old Calabar, which supplied over a quarter of a million persons for export to the Americas between 1740 and 1807, making it the second largest slave port in the Bight of Biafra after Bonny, and one of the principal ports in Atlantic Africa at this time.2 Although the French shipped some slaves from the port, largely in the decade after 1783, the British dominated the shipments supplied by local E¤k traders before 1807. Anglo-E¤k relations were thus pivotal to Old Calabar’s trade with the Atlantic world from 1740 to 1807 (see Lovejoy and Richardson 1999, 337–38). Relative to other ports in the Bight of Biafra, information on trading arrangements in this period at Old Calabar is substantial, allowing us to identify how and with what success local E¤k dealers in slaves were able to protect themselves from enslavement and shipment to the Americas. Our study of Old Calabar focuses on how insiders were de¤ned, or at least de¤ned themselves, as being immune from enslavement. It also explores how local instiYou are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Anglo-E¤k Relations 103 tutions were adapted to serve the interests of group protection. While such efforts were not always successful, as we shall see, it is perhaps surprising to discover how successful they could be. Defining Insider Status Old Calabar comprised by the mid-eighteenth...