Summary

The fateful encounter between a cadre of European seafarers, military men, traders, and West and West Central African fishermen, seafarers, and merchants spurred one of world history’s longest and most intensive forced migrations. The transatlantic slave trade initiated the formation of an integrated Atlantic world characterized by mass population movements, colonization, political conflict, militarization, and increasing transregional commerce. Consequently, the transoceanic traffic in human beings spurred not only great pain but also profound innovations in the generation and usage of new financial instruments, which provided the means for the expanding webs of market exchange that fed the evolving demand for the enslaved. Finance tied together far-flung communities, paradoxically through a dehumanizing institution that was also an inventive, adaptive, and dynamic one. Because traders had to navigate an array of political contexts, currency systems, cultures of transaction, and modes of contract making, flexibility was key. Slaving—both slave raiding and later mercantile exchanges of those held in bondage—preceded and helped catalyze the emergence of Atlantic capitalist modernity and generated many of the financial techniques that people are familiar with today. Transformations in the financing of the transatlantic slave trade encompass over four hundred years of history and include many permutations such as the sea loan, the family firm, the royally sponsored monopoly trading company, and the merchant firm. Because financing long-distance rather than local trade required specific mechanisms for profit-making calculations, merchants had to be attentive to dynamic contexts such as the growth of plantation agriculture in tropical parts of the Americas, the increasing availability of specie-based forms of currency due to an efflorescence of gold and silver mining in West Africa and Central and South America, political centralization in West Africa, and the emergence of European fiscal–military states. Despite this, there was not a linear progression of financial organizational forms, as merchants and buyers relied on strategies that responded to varied local economic and political conditions within the ports at which they traded.