Monopolizing Violence: African Slave Trading Companies and the End of Native Slavery

During the sugar boom of the 1670s and 1680s, investors in the French Compagnie du Sénégal paid a band of Dutch privateers to intercept shipments of enslaved Natives en route from mainland South America to Martinique. They justified the attacks by arguing that the selling of Native slaves to French colonies violated their exclusive right to the slave trade, giving them authority to protect their contractual monopoly by force. The merchants selling the enslaved Natives demanded compensation, appealing to the French governor of the Caribbean colonies, Michel Bégon, to force their attackers to restore their losses. This paper uses this dispute to explore two important, but understudied, aspects of Caribbean slavery in the seventeenth century. First, it traces the routes and volume of Native slave trades from northern South America to the Lesser Antilles, focused on the French islands but gesturing beyond them. Second, it shows how African slave trading companies, by actively suppressing competing slave trading networks, played an important role in diminishing Native American slavery, suggesting new and important ways of thinking about the relationship between Native and African slaveries in the early modern Americas.