Summary

• Captive people were offered as commodities by African traders who would not or could not use gold to buy European goods

• Captives boarded in small groups

• Gold was among the least expensive items to carry in Atlantic shipping lanes in the early modern period

• As shipping costs were the greatest part of the price of goods transported to overseas markets in the Atlantic world, maritime trade proved commercially viable only to the extent that it was possible to compensate for those costs by buying people cheaply on the African coast

• Slaves became mere physical units that could be arranged and molded at will

• The number of bodies stowed aboard a ship was limited only by the physical dimensions and configuration of these bodies

• Slave hold space on ships

• Because a ship’s physical dimensions were fixed, crowding even more bodies onto its decks was the only means to extend the limits of its carrying capacity

• They also used children as filler to top off the cargoes

• Captains had to deign novel ways to organize space aboard their ships to accommodate human cargo

• Captives were segregated by sex to disable normal social relations among the human cargo

• When there was so specific need to off-load large numbers of war captives, it was the arrival of ships that triggered the flow of people toward the water’s edge

• Preference: men, young, healthy

• African sellers were in an advantageous position because they could exploit the market reality that pressured European buyers to accept whatever was made available to them

  • Market was shaped by stringent time constraints and fierce competition between and among national groups of European buyers

• The productive and reproductive capital women represented was the primary concern of kinship institutions

• African merchants were expert at making European buyers pay for the human specimens they most valued and pushing them to take lesser captives in order to realize an affordable cargo

• Demand for slave exports vs the supply of captive people available

• After 1698, all English traders were free to mount voyages to the African coast, provided they paid a 10% duty on the value of their outgoing cargo of trade goods

• Increasing number of other nations’ merchants

• The concentration of political and military power in Asante brought the threat of saltwater slavery to new communities in the central and western hinterlands of the Gold Coast

• What appears as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast