‘To get a cargo of flesh, bone, and blood’: Animals in the slave trade in West Africa

Abstract

This article examines how English and West African agents involved in the slave trade in Atlantic Africa used animals to establish trust, forge political bonds, connect distant spaces through a shared medium of exchange, and create regular trading networks from the late seventeenth century until the early eighteenth century. Slave traders from the Royal African Company and diverse West African polities offered each other livestock for sacrifice or as diplomatic gifts to formalise political or commercial alliances. Traders used the shells of cowry sea snails as abstract currency to purchase captives. These exchanges gradually produced and constituted an ecocultural network of human and animal social relationships and cross-cultural negotiations that enabled the expansion of England’s involvement in the slave trade from the Gambia River to the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. However, vermin animals impeded these connections by destroying valuable commodities, including trade goods and human captives. This article aims to deepen our understanding of how animals bound European and African slave traders together into new networks of exchange, and how some animals threatened the stability of their partnerships.