Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies

Chapter 12

199 Chapter 12 Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade David Richardson Violent and nonviolent resistance by Africans against their enslavement by Europeans has during the last half century been a constant theme in the literature on transatlantic slavery. That literature has helped to put to rest, in the words of one eminent historian, “the myth of slave docility and quiescence” (Genovese 1979, xxiii). It has also been overwhelmingly concerned with slave resistance in the Americas, even in those cases when it is claimed that plantation-based revolts were but one element in a spectrum of resistance that transcended Africa, the middle passage, and the Americas (Craton 1982, 14, 27–28). A few studies of slave resistance in Africa and in the middle passage have, nevertheless, appeared. This chapter further redresses the imbalance in the literature by examining patterns of slave revolts onboard ships at the African coast and in the Atlantic crossing between about 1690 and 1810. Using new quantitative data, it also attempts to uncover explanations of these revolts and to assess their impact on the level of the slave trade as well as its structure. The analysis suggests that rebelliousness by slaves onboard ship and the resulting efforts by European carriers of slaves to curb such behavior reduced shipments below what they would have been in the 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. 200 David Richardson absence of resistance. It also exposes, however, major variations in the incidence of revolts through time and, equally important, by coastal origin. These cannot be explained by reference to failure of European management regimes onboard slave ships but seem instead to be rooted in differences within the political economy of the various African slave supply regions. Overall, therefore, it appears that patterns of shipboard revolt shed important light on the impact of Africa and Africans on the organization and scale of the Atlantic slave trade as well as on the relationship of the trade in enslaved Africans to the development of Atlantic history. {} Whether as organizers or as victims of the transatlantic traf¤c in slaves, Africans had a major in¶uence on the course of Atlantic history between 1500 and 1850. African merchants retained control over the trade in slaves within Africa and thus helped to determine the magnitude and coastal distribution of shipments from the African coast.1 Although the role of African political leaders and merchants in shaping the structure of the Atlantic slave trade is increasingly acknowledged , the position of Africans and their descendants as victims of slavery has, for obvious reasons, attracted far more attention. The scale of surpluses generated by enslaved Africans and appropriated by whites have been central to discussions of Western economic development and continue to provoke debate. So too does the resistance of enslaved Africans to exploitation and oppression by their owners. In common with plantation-based resistance to slavery, resistance by Africans to enslavement in Africa or in the Atlantic crossing has been the subject of a number of studies (Greene 1944; Mannix and Cowley 1962, 107–11; Wax 1966; Uya 1976; Piersen 1977; Rathbone 1986; McGowan 1990, 14– 26; Postma 1990, 165–68; Inikori 1996, 64–74; Palmer 1997). Most focus on more than one form of resistance but all provide important evidence on shipboard revolts or mutinies, events that, according to one historian, were “vastly more serious” than other forms of noncooperation since they “came closer to a true political reaction to the socioeconomic system” (Craton 1982, 53). Notable among the features of revolts are the terror associated with them; the savage retribution exacted by ships’ crews, the substantial losses of life involved, and the concentration of revolts on ships at the African coast.2 There has, however, been no attempt to explore the relationship of shipboard slave revolts to either ethnic patterns of resistance to slavery on plantations, the structural characteristics of the slave trade (such as its coastal distribution in Africa), or their relationship to the political economy of slavery within Africa.3 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. Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Trade 201 Information relating to revolts derives primarily from European...