American Rum, African Consumers, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Written on the Body

“…3664). Hiram's sentence points to the inseparable link between the labour of enslaved people and their bodies as both a commodity and means of production; that is, slave bodies are both the commodity traded in the economy and the means to produce more tradeable commodities, including chattel slaves (Kelley 2018). Thus, the corporeal existence of enslaved people could not be separated from the products (crops, objects, humans) they were forced to labour for.…”

Cadeias mercantis e a história ambiental global das Américas coloniais

“…The product satisfied specific demands in Africa, especially on the Gold Coast, which then became the main slave trading area for US-based merchants. Sean Kelley (2018) finds a few cases in which basically all captives were exchanged for full cargoes of rum. A non-negligible number of those slaves were carried to North America (including Massachusetts, where a small number ended up in the shipyards, building the ships that would carry other slaves), but the great majority went to the French and British Caribbean, especially to Barbados, where they produced not only sugar, but also the molasses (and coffee and indigo, among a few other staples) that would be transformed into rum to be exchanged for other captives that would then be carried on North American ships to the Americas.…”