This groundbreaking volume addresses the enslavement and experiences of Black Africans in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, particularly La Española (or Hispaniola) and Puerto Rico, two of the earliest colonies. Spanning nearly four hundred years and rooted in extensive archival research, Transatlantic Bondage sheds light on a number of relatively underexamined topics in these locales, including the development and application of slavery laws, disobedience and its consequences, migration, gender, family, lifestyle, and community building among the free Black population and white allies. In bringing together new and recent work by leading scholars, including two essays translated into English here for the first time, the book is also a call for further study of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean and its impact on the region.

The history of Ghana attracts popular interest out of proportion to its small size and marginal importance to the global economy. Ghana is the land of Kwame Nkrumah and the Pan-Africanist movement of the 1960s; it has been a temporary home to famous African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois and Maya Angelou; and its Asante Kingdom and signature kente cloth-global symbols of African culture and pride-are well known. Ghana also attracts a continuous flow of international tourists because of two historical sites that are among the most notorious monuments of the transatlantic slave trade: Cape Coast and Elmina Castles. These looming structures are a vivid reminder of the horrific trade that gave birth to the black population of the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade explores the fascinating history of the transatlantic slave trade on Ghana's coast between 1700 and 1807. Here author Rebecca Shumway brings to life the survival experiences of southern Ghanaians as they became both victims of continuous violence and successful brokers of enslaved human beings. The era of the slave trade gave birth to a new culture in this part of West Africa, just as it was giving birth to new cultures across the Americas. The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade pushes Asante scholarship to the forefront of African diaspora and Atlantic World studies by showing the integral role of Fante middlemen and transatlantic trade in the development of the Asante economy prior to 1807. Rebecca Shumway is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Newly available in paperback, this edition is an important volume of international significance, drawing together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field and edited by a team headed by the acclaimed historian David Richardson. The book sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery and addresses issues in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery, including African agency and trade experience. Emphasis is placed on the human characteristics and impacts of transatlantic slavery. It also opens up new areas of debate on Liverpool’s participation in the slave trade and helps to frame the research agenda for the future. ‘Anyone seeking a clear, balanced and thoughtful presentation of the issues surrounding one of the most shameful episodes of human history could not do better than to arm themselves with a copy of this absorbing and well-edited book.’ Urban History Journal ‘Undoubtedly of use to anyone who has more than a passing interest in the role the African slave trade played in developing one of the Atlantic World’s most prominent ports.’ Journal of African History

This book contributes to the debate over the culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave from various disciplinary perspectives. The general thesis that undergirds the book is that by knowing who was predisposed to benefit the most from the trade and why, prompting them to initiate it, appropriate culpability can be assigned.

This African slave trade history is a detailed account of Africa's slave history that started in the fifteenth century. It was started by the southern European Portuguese monarchs, the family of royal lineages. Portugal's golden age of discovery in sea exploration led Portugal to Africa by sea by the 1430s. Then later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus accidentally landed on the Native Indian American continent. Columbus's trip was sponsored by Spanish royal families. That was the period when the Roman Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain, were the dominant European nations. Spain liberated her whole territory from Islamic occupation in late 1400s. The Catholic Church was also very involved in signing treaties with their Roman Catholic spheres of influence nations. By then, Portugal already monopolized the African trade in African goods and human slave trade in the Portuguese-dominated African territories. Portugal first started shipping the African slaves to Europe. With Spain's possession of the Americas, this changed the African slave trade greatly. The American territory promoted the biggest international African slave trade and economic gains for European prosperity to this day. By the sixteenth century, Catholic religious theocracy became challenged by other northern European powers. The reformation movement in northern Europe led to the breaking away by northern European realms from the dominant Catholic religion and established their Protestant Christian religions. These new emerging northern European realms also challenged Portugal's domination and grip of Africa's territories and Africa's slave trade and goods. Based on the treaties signed between Portugal and Spain by Catholic popes, Portugal was supplying the slaves, and Spain was procuring and shipping the African slaves from Portugal's control and forced African slave labor to develop Spain's Americas through extended overseas colonies, and Portugal's Brazil new colony. Meanwhile, Spain's takeover was contracting with European mercenaries the conquistadors to capture the American land from the Native Indians, the original occupiers of the Americas. The paradigm or blueprint of this African slave trade pattern already established by the Portuguese was later replicated by other European realms in Africa and the Americas, and they continued the lucrative African slave trade for more than two hundred years. The establishing of extended overseas territories or colonies by Europeans to build their economies both at home in Europe and the Americas using forced African labor, goods, and repatriation of European colonists to establish the new overseas extended to the Americas. This book is information rich with the African slave trade history dynamics, the European realms, names of monarchs that participated, European slave wars, rivalries, slave laws, European merchants, African noblemen and merchants, slave ships, religions, European and African rituals, Main African territories, overseas sea routes used, African chiefs, merchants, European slave ships, ship captains' accounts, numbers of slaves shipped per trip, goods exchanged, major African tribes, stories of names of slave warriors, slave contracts, European slave treaties, African slave harbors, slave rebellions on land, on ships, the making of American colonies, America's Independence and Latin American countries, the making of the first British Crown, Freed slaves returned to the colony of Province of Freedom, Sierra Leone, etc.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States—a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny. But most importantly, Kelley tracks the cohort of slaves aboard the Hare from their purchase in Africa to their sale in South Carolina. In tracing their complete journey, Kelley provides rare insight into the communal lives of slaves and sheds new light on the African diaspora and its influence on the formation of African American culture. In this immersive exploration, Kelley connects the story of enslaved people in the United States to their origins in Africa as never before. Told uniquely from the perspective of one particular voyage, this book brings a slave ship's journey to life, giving us one of the clearest views of the eighteenth-century slave trade.