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We develop the concept of the slave-trade balance of payments and generate its table for the United States for 1790–1860. In the process, we construct new data for the slave trade, including both the physical movement and revenue figures, and we analyze these numbers. The balance of payments includes slave imports, carrying trade in slaves, purchases of slaves that fail to be imported, outfitting and provisioning slave ships, and slave-ship sales. The slave-trade balance is integrated into the standard balance of payments. Among the findings are the following: slave imports were dominated by natural growth except for one decade; US ships had the greater role than foreign ships in the import trade, but were of small—and eventually nil—consequence in the carrying trade; federal and state laws to prohibit the slave trade in all its aspects were generally effective; and the slave-trade balance of payments was a small component of the overall balance.

Why, despite clear economic incentives, did eighteenth-century slave traders fail to defend their business interests against the abolition campaign? We focus on the outport of Bristol as a case in point. Our main argument is that slave traders lacked an organizational basis to translate their economic interests into political influence. Supporting evidence from merchant networks over the 1698–1807 period shows that the Society of Merchant Venturers offered such an organizational site for collective political action. Members of this chartered company controlled much of Bristol’s seaborne commerce and held chief elective offices in the municipal government. However, the Society evolved into an organization that represented the interests of a closed elite. High barriers to entry prevented the slave traders from using the Society as a vehicle for political mobilization. Social cohesion among slave traders outside the chartered company hinged on centrally positioned brokers. Yet the broker positions were held by the few merchants who became members of the Society, and who eventually ceased their engagement in slave trading. The result was a fragmented network that undermined the slave traders’ concerted efforts to mobilize against the political pressure of the abolitionist movement.

In a previous issue of Serials Review, I described the three international organizations that I then assumed were the principal ones concerned with the protection of threatened tribal peoples throughout the world. I now know that I had overlooked one very important organization that is in fact coterminous with the organized effort to eradicate slavery. Until very recently, that organization was known as the Anti‐Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights. Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations places the foundation of this society in 1839, a date that is off by fifty‐one years, inasmuch as it can be shown that the society under at least two earlier names is continuous with the society that emerged, reorganized, redefined, and renamed in 1839 and with the society that remains vigorously active today.

Adam Smith recognized that slavery, despite its economic disadvantages, was the rule rather than the exception in the eighteenth-century commercial society. How did he explain the massive employment of enslaved Africans in the American and Caribbean colonies? Several scholars have been highlighting that Smith attributed the persistence of slavery to an almost natural inclination of humanity toward tyranny and dominion. However, the mere reference to the love of domination is not enough to fully answer the question above. This paper addresses another feature of Adam Smith’s account of Atlantic slavery: the relation between the love of domination and the mercantile policies regulating colonial trade. We conclude that Smith saw the extraordinary profitability arising from such policies as an enabling condition to the massive employment of slave labor in the sugar and tobacco colonies.

State building in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa is a much-neglected subject in historical sociology. This paper, which begins to close that gap accounts for state building and transformation in pre-colonial Yorubaland and highlights slavery, slave-taking, and other distinctive features of the Yoruba states. The paper argues that slavery and slave-taking affected warfare in the Yoruba states with remarkable consequences for the Yoruba state system. Furthermore, the paper applied some aspects of existing analytical approaches in historical sociology and comparative politics to elucidate our understanding of the role and limitations of warfare, slave-taking, and slavery in state development in pre-colonial Yorubaland.

Middle level teachers, at times, link historical content with relevant English literature in interdisciplinary units. Elementary teachers periodically employ history-themed literature during reading time. Interconnections between language arts and history are formed with developmentally appropriate literature for students. Historical misrepresentations, however, proliferate in children’s literature and are concealed behind engaging narratives. Since literacy and historical thinking are essential skills, children’s literature should be balanced within, not banished from, the classroom. Using America’s peculiar institution of slavery as a reference point, this article examines children’s literature, identifies almost a dozen areas of historical misrepresentation, and proffers rich primary source material to balance the various misrepresentations. We provide teachers with reason for caution when including such literature; but also model how to locate, use, and, at times, abridge primary source material within an elementary or middle level classroom. Such curricular supplements provide balance to engaging but historically-blemished children’s literature and enable educators to attain the rigorous prescriptions of Common Core.

This chapter is about child labour as slavery in modern and modernizing societies in an era of rapid globalization.

For the most part, child slavery in modern societies is hidden from view and cloaked in social customs, this being convenient for economic exploitation purposes.

The aim of this chapter is to bring children's ‘modern slavery’ out of the shadows, and thereby to help clarify and shape relevant social discourse and theory, social policies and practices, slavery-related legislation and instruments at all levels, and above all children's everyday lives, relationships and experiences.

The main focus is on issues surrounding (i) the concept of ‘slavery’; (ii) the types of slavery in the world today; (iii) and ‘child labour’ as a type, or basis, of slavery.

There is an in-depth examination of the implications of the notion of ‘slavery’ within international law for child labour, and especially that performed through schooling.

According to one influential approach, ‘slavery’ is a state marked by the loss of free will where a person is forced through violence or the threat of violence to give up the ability to sell freely his or her own labour power. If so, then hundreds of millions of children in modern and modernizing societies qualify as slaves by virtue of the labour they are forced – compulsorily and statutorily required – to perform within schools, whereby they, their labour and their labour power are controlled and exploited for economic purposes.

Under globalization, such enslavement has almost reached global saturation point.

Slavery was originally practised in West Africa as a means of integrating into society individuals who had been cut off from their families after an inter-tribal war or some form of natural calamity. The entire dynamics changed drastically when the Portuguese and Arabian traders went to West Africa. Because of the need for cheap labor supply in their home lands, these foreign traders switched to trading in slaves by exchanging their Mediterranean or Asian goods for West African slaves. Between 1441 and the middle of the 19th century, the expanding slave trade became the Black African's only link with Europe and America especially, the Americas where cheap supply of human labor was needed on the cotton and sugar cane plantations. Before the Missionaries arrived on the West African Coast, the natives practised traditional African or Islamic religions. With the slave traders came the Christian Missionaries who, prior to the exportation of slaves, preached to them, converted them, baptized them and gave them biblical names. The slaves left their home land of West Africa with clouds of spiritual confusion on their minds and coupled with these was their inability to worship freely in the New World.While most or all the original slaves lived and died uneducated, enslaved, and emotionally traumatized, their children, grand children and great grand children after them enjoyed freedom to worship the way they wanted, attended schools and became literate. They moved as freely as they wanted, and raised their own families with as much unrestrained freedom as they dreamed of, However, the psychological and spiritual bruises on their psyche left them perpetually traumatized to the extent that most of them forgot their West African origin, custom, culture, and their traditional African religious belief systems.Today, however, descendants of former West African slaves who live in the Diaspora appear to be more privileged than their West African brethren. This paper traces the brief history of slavery from its unsavory beginning in the 14th century, to the period of its final abolition in the United States in 1865. The majestic roles of representative samples of the liberated Africans of the Diaspora are presented, the ongoing problems plaguing West African countries are highlighted, and specific intervention programs to correct for the ills of the past brought about by the slave traders and the Western Christian Missionaries are discussed. It is concluded that while the Missionaries might have had good intention, the end result did not justify the means; converted West African slaves were bruised emotionally and spiritually than they were blessed. This paper highlights series of the appropriate reparations that should be paid to measurably alleviate the centuries old posttraumatic stress syndrome and spiritual confusion suffered by the original slaves and their descendants.

Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans as a founding moment in the making of today's racial hierarchies. Yet their narrative of this initial moment often mischaracterizes early European states, erases Indigenous and African states, and naturalizes racial group belonging. Such practices are counterproductive to the antiracist project. Following the lead of decolonial scholarship, much recent work by historians has sought to recover and reconstruct the institutions, social structures, and agency of African and Indigenous peoples, as well as revisit assumptions about European power, institutions, and agency in their historical encounters with their continental “others.” I highlight the potential of this approach for sociologists of “race” by narrating two significant historical events in the making of the modern Atlantic world: the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire, and the transatlantic enslavement of subjects of the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo (in today's Angola) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I analyze how particular European, Indigenous, and African actors made decisions in the context of their own and others' historically situated and dynamic political and social structures. I read these historical events through the lens of decolonial scholarship, and sociological literatures on group-making, state formation, and the emergence of capitalism, to make sense of the violent social process that led to the breakup of African, Indigenous, and European political and social structures and the making of colonial and racially hierarchical social structures in the Atlantic world.

This chapter traces the origin of racism and reviews the historical and contemporary debates around race and racialisation in western thought. There are persistent disagreements surrounding the origin and nature of racism. Because of the evolution of racist ideas, behaviours and institutional practices and policies, there are various views about the meaning and analytical application of racism. This chapter explores how ideas of race – understood as innate and immutable human differences that can be classified and ranked hierarchically based on race – has emerged in western history and evolved over time. It examines how this has influenced social and political practices and associated policies across the evolution of modernity. The chapter specifically discusses the Atlantic slave trade and how it shaped the historical development of race and racism within the context of colonialism. It concludes with a discussion and critical review of some of the racist systems and policies which have been enforced across different multiracial countries.