Nicholas Radburn
Lancaster University, Department of History, Faculty Member
- Johns Hopkins University, History, Graduate StudentUniversity of Southern California, Early Modern Studies Institute, Post-Docadd
- History, African Studies, African History, Latin American and Caribbean History, History of Slavery, Slavery, and 19 morepre-colonial West Africa, African Economic History, Dutch West India Company, Caribbean Slavery, Slave Trade, Liverpool Slave trade, Plantations, Caribbean History, Colonial America, Jamaica, Dutch overseas history, Merchant networks, Black Atlantic, Atlantic World, Global History, Black/African Diaspora, Atlantic Slave Trade, Atlantic history, and African Diaspora Studiesedit
How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar... more
How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.
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Jobbing gangs—large groups of enslaved people who were principally hired out to dig sugarcane holes—were a crucial component of the British Caribbean slave economy. Emerging first in the early eighteenth century, they comprised... more
Jobbing gangs—large groups of enslaved people who were principally hired out to dig sugarcane holes—were a crucial component of the British Caribbean slave economy. Emerging first in the early eighteenth century, they comprised approximately 10 percent of enslaved people in the British Caribbean by the late eighteenth century before declining after the abolition of the slave trade. The growth in jobbing gangs stemmed from elite sugar planters’ desires to temporarily augment their permanent captive labor force, boost productivity, and simultaneously preserve the health of their own enslaved laborers. The enormous profits that middling whites could earn by buying captive Africans and hiring them out as a jobbing gang accelerated social mobility in the islands. The captives whom these whites enslaved were highly mobile, enabling them to escape the confines of a single plantation. But they also experienced some of the worst working and living conditions of any enslaved people in the Americas, exposing significant inequalities among British Caribbean slaves. Examining the origins, operation, and eventual decline of jobbing gangs thus reveals the British Caribbean sugar economy as an insidiously adaptable institution that combined the flexibility of wage labor with the unmitigated violence of racial slavery.
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Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary... more
Crowding on slave ships was much more severe than historians have recognized, worsening in the nineteenth century during the illegal phase of the traffic. An analysis of numerous illustrations of slave vessels created by then-contemporary artists, in conjunction with new data, demonstrates that the 1789 diagram of the British slave ship Brooks—the most iconic of these illustrations—fails to capture the degree to which enslaved people were crowded on the Brooks, as well as on most other British slaving vessels of the eighteenth century. Five other images of slave ships sailing under different national colors in different eras further reveal the realities of ship crowding in different periods. The most accurate representation of ship-board conditions in the eighteenth-century slave trade is in the paintings of the French slave ship Marie-Séraphique.
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This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship... more
This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship captains considered these differences when electing where to land enslaved Africans. Our dataset also shows that credit terms were highly erratic, especially in the last quarter of the century, contributing to both surges and collapses in the slave trade to individual colonies, and in the trade as a whole. Four such instances are examined in detail to show that instability in credit terms played an important and hitherto unacknowledged role in the volume and direction of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade in the second one-half of the eighteenth century.
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In 1783 Scottish native John Tailyour arrived in Jamaica, where he hoped to make his fortune after a string of failed business ventures in North America. Fifteen years later he retired as a rich man. His newfound wealth came in large part... more
In 1783 Scottish native John Tailyour arrived in Jamaica, where he hoped to make his fortune after a string of failed business ventures in North America. Fifteen years later he retired as a rich man. His newfound wealth came in large part from his career as a “Guinea factor,” a merchant who sold captive Africans from newly arrived slave ships. During his years as a Guinea factor, Tailyour sold 17,295 Africans into slavery through a traumatizing process that channeled captives to different buyers according to their age, sex, and health. Tailyour’s history reveals the important ways that Guinea factors shaped the transatlantic slave trade within the Americas and, in doing so, powerfully conditioned the lives of the Africans they sold into slavery. The rapidity with which Tailyour built his fortune also suggests that the fabled profits of the slave trade were available for men who sold slaves in the Americas rather than investing directly in slave ships. Tailyour’s case thus encourages future historians to look beyond the notorious Middle Passage and focus on the slave trade within the Americas.
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This thesis examines the business history of William Davenport (1725-1797), a Liverpool slave trading merchant from 1748 until 1786. Through an examination of a recently discovered collection of Davenport's business papers and personal... more
This thesis examines the business history of William Davenport (1725-1797), a Liverpool slave trading merchant from 1748 until 1786. Through an examination of a recently discovered collection of Davenport's business papers and personal letters, this thesis places Davenport in the context of Liverpool's development as a slaving port, and the growth of the town's slaving merchant community. It explains how Davenport became one of the largest slaving merchants of his generation, and one of the wealthiest Guinea merchants in Liverpool's history. To explain Davenport's rise this thesis focuses on how he managed his slaving company by studying two geographically close, but economically distinct, areas of the Guinea coast where he traded for slaves - Old Calabar and Cameroon. This thesis demonstrates how Davenport cultivated merchant partners, and developed a supply chain of trading goods, to suit the unique conditions of both African markets. This thesis also explores Davenport's business profits by examining his returns from several different areas of investment, including the slave trade, the ivory trade and his speculation in financial securities. By building a composite picture of Davenport's diverse business concerns this thesis argues that the profits of the slave trade underpinned his financial success.
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When Europeans first reached Jamaica in 1494, they thought that they had arrived in paradise: a sun-kissed tropical island covered with rainforests, dramatic mountains, and exotic flora and fauna. By the early nineteenth century,... more
When Europeans first reached Jamaica in 1494, they thought that they had arrived in paradise: a sun-kissed tropical island covered with rainforests, dramatic mountains, and exotic flora and fauna. By the early nineteenth century, colonization had fundamentally transformed this supposedly pristine island. Over the academic year, you will explore this process of environmental change. You will study the numerous ways that colonists exploited the Jamaican environment: the clear-cutting of forests to make way for monoculture plantations; the importation of plants and animals to replace decimated native species; and the extraction and exhaustion of natural resources. You will simultaneously examine enslaved Africans' and Native Americans' environmental perspectives and see how both groups used Jamaica’s mountains and surviving forests to resist the violent process of colonization. We will conclude by examining the colonists’ growing awareness that they had transformed Jamaica’s climate and environment, just as the island was fundamentally changed through abolition and emancipation. You will thus emerge from this module with a detailed understanding of the natural history of Jamaica—one of the most fascinating places in the Early Modern Atlantic World—and the vibrant field of environmental history.
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Course Description: Between 1501 and 1866, Europeans embarked twelve and a half million captive Africans on slave ships for transportation to the Americas, the largest forced trans-oceanic migration in human history. This course examines... more
Course Description: Between 1501 and 1866, Europeans embarked twelve and a half million captive Africans on slave ships for transportation to the Americas, the largest forced trans-oceanic migration in human history. This course examines African slavery and the slave trade in the context of broader trends in Atlantic history. Students will first explore the origins of slavery in the ancient world and then see how the institution diminished in Europe during the late Middle Ages, just as Europeans began to systematically explore the Atlantic basin. They will then see how the institution of slavery rapidly expanded in tandem with the development of the Atlantic World, as Europeans enslaved increasing numbers of Africans to work in the fields and mines of the Americas. The course concludes by examining the abolition of chattel slavery during the nineteenth century, and the persistence of slavery and human trafficking today. By the completion of the course, students will thus grasp how slavery has been a constant phenomenon in history and one that still affects millions of people today.
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In recent years, a new field has emerged that seeks to historicize the emergence of capitalism. Building upon the previous work of economic, business and labor historians, scholars studying the history of capitalism challenge long-held... more
In recent years, a new field has emerged that seeks to historicize the emergence of capitalism. Building upon the previous work of economic, business and labor historians, scholars studying the history of capitalism challenge long-held assumptions about the nature of markets and circuits of global trade. In this course, we will read new works in the field alongside older texts written by economic and business historians to analyze the history of capitalism in the United States from colonial times until the present. We will discuss the link between slavery and capitalism; the emergence of factories, banks and railroads during the nineteenth century; and uneven patterns of economic development. We will conclude by examining inequality and deindustrialization in the late twentieth century, phenomena that have underpinned recent debates about the future of American capitalism. By the completion of the course, we will thus have surveyed both how capitalism developed, and how it powerfully shaped the history of America.
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Research Interests: Finance and Slave Trade
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How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar... more
How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.
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... Wimpey 1772-1793, Liverpool, D/DAV/19; Davenport Family 1794, Liverpool, D/DAV/20 38 Badger's 3rd Voyage 1774-1776, Liverpool ... Amongst these ―merchants of opulence‖ were Africa traders Gill Slater, James Bridge, Joshua Rose,... more
... Wimpey 1772-1793, Liverpool, D/DAV/19; Davenport Family 1794, Liverpool, D/DAV/20 38 Badger's 3rd Voyage 1774-1776, Liverpool ... Amongst these ―merchants of opulence‖ were Africa traders Gill Slater, James Bridge, Joshua Rose, and William Gregson, who was ―one ...