Prof. Dr. Sean Kelley

My project examines Atlantic slavery during the long sixteenth century, when the Portuguese enjoyed a near-monopoly on African trade. During these years, the Cape Verde/upper Guinea space prefigured what historians call the North Atlantic system. Cape Verdean merchants integrated themselves into the societies of modern-day Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and established a commercial slave trade. Many of the captives in this trade were taken to Cape Verde itself, where they were employed on early cotton plantations, while others were shipped back to Portugal, and still later to the Americas. The São Tomé/lower Guinea space developed differently. Located further south, it too became a slave trading zone, incorporating modern-day coastal Nigeria. Many of the captives were exchanged for gold in present-day Ghana. São Toméan traders also initiated what would eventually become a massive slave trade from the eventual Portuguese colony of Angola, founding what historians call the South Atlantic system. In addition to slave trading, São Tomé developed its own plantation economy based on sugar and was Europe’s leading source for most of the century. Many of the features of Cape Verdean and São Toméan society, including economic institutions like the slave trade and the plantation system, as well as political/cultural phenomena like race and the emergence of creole cultures, played out initially in these islands before they did in the Americas.

• 2023. American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865. Yale University Press.
• 2023. With Paul E. Lovejoy. "Oldendorp's Amina: Ethnonyms, History, and Identity in the African Diaspora." In Journal of Global Slavery 8: 303–330.
• 2020. "Enslavement in Upper Guinea in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Biographical Perspectives." In African Economic History 48(1): 46–73.
• 2019. "New World Slave Traders and the Problem of Trade Goods: Brazil, Barbados, Cuba, and North America in Comparative Perspective." In English Historical Review 134(567): 302–333.
• 2016. The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina. University of North Carolina Press. (Paperback, 2019).