Session Abstract

The existing literature on slave procurement strategies in West Central Africa has revolved around two main approaches. On the one hand, scholars have explored questions of European procurement on the coast, focusing heavily on the use of kidnapping and war as methods of enslavement. On the other hand, scholars who have engaged in the study of African procurement have also drawn attention to the role of war as a source of slaves, though with a greater emphasis on the caravan trades operating deep in the interior that were able to supply the growing demand for slaves on the coast. Newer research, however, has begun to challenge both these approaches, reconsidering not just the nature of European slave procurement, especially in relation to the Dutch and Portuguese, but also local strategies of procurement, both at the Atlantic ports of West Central Africa and in the interior.

In conjunction with the 2013 theme of “Lives, Place, Stories,” this panel will explore the evolution of trading and procurement strategies used by Dutch, Portuguese, Loango, and Angolan merchants in within West Central Africa. It will also explore the identities of both the merchants and the slaves who passed through their hands into the Atlantic world. The papers in this panel will provide perspectives drawn from three consecutive time periods. The first concerns European strategies of procurement at West Central African ports in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the second considers enslavement practices in relation to minor African merchants on the Loango and Angola Coasts in the eighteenth century; and the final paper argues that debt, kidnapping, and punishment were the primary methods of slave procurement in Angola in the nineteenth century.

This panel will be of primary interest to scholars of the transatlantic slave trade, Atlantic history, the African diaspora, Economic History, and World History. It covers themes including merchant communities, market strategies, enslavement, slave identity, and the evolution of the World Economy.