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56 books match the query 'Slave trade' and 3 start with o

cover of On Slavery and the Slave Trade: <i>De Iustitia et lure</i>, Book 1, Treatise 2, Disputations 32-40

On Slavery and the Slave Trade

<i>De Iustitia et lure</i>, Book 1, Treatise 2, Disputations 32-40

Luis De Molina

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

In his monumental On Justice and Rights, the Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535-1600) discussed the legal and ethical aspects of the Portuguese trade in African and Asian enslaved persons. Molina surveys, develops, and problematizes the criteria necessary for the legitimate possession, sale, and purchase of human freedom. He insists that, even under legally valid slavery, persons who have sold or lost their freedom have inalienable rights as human beings, such as the freedom to make contracts, to marry, and even, under certain circumstances, to sue their owners in court. Molina also devotes attention to the ways in which slavery could be ended and whether and under what circumstances slaves had the right to escape from their owners. Well informed about the political structures and customs of many peoples in Africa, as well as Japan, China, and India, Molina paints a vivid and detailed picture of Portuguese trade. He gives specific accounts of the origins and development of the slave trade, region by region, and of the nature of the relationship between local rulers and the Portuguese kingdom. In doing so, he carefully describes the deception, coercion, and general indifference that pervades this trade regarding the rights to freedom of these people. It also attempts to identify the political, ecclesiastical, and market agents involved in this great injustice and their varying degrees of culpability. While Molina does not condemn slavery as a legal institution, the deeply flawed and even immoral behavior of sellers, buyers, regulators, and political rulers both in Portugal and in the slave-supplying regions that Molina denounces casts a heavy shadow on the morality of the trade.
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cover of Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892

Ouidah

The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892

Robin Law

Ohio University Press, 2004

Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the Slave Coast. This is the first detailed study of the town’s history and of its role in the Atlantic slave trade.

Ouidah is a well-documented case study of precolonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular of the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.

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cover of Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

Our New Husbands Are Here

Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

Emily Lynn Osborn

Ohio University Press, 2011

In Our New Husbands Are Here, Emily Lynn Osborn investigates a central puzzle of power and politics in West African history: Why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with colonization? Osborn addresses this question by exploring the relationship of the household to the state. By analyzing the history of statecraft in the interior savannas of West Africa (in present-day Guinea-Conakry), Osborn shows that the household, and women within it, played a critical role in the pacifist Islamic state of Kankan-Baté, enabling it to endure the predations of the transatlantic slave trade and become a major trading center in the nineteenth century. But French colonization introduced a radical new method of statecraft to the region, one that separated the household from the state and depoliticized women’s domestic roles. This book will be of interest to scholars of politics, gender, the household, slavery, and Islam in African history.

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