The diary of Antera Duke is one of the earliest and most extensive surviving documents written by an African residing in coastal West Africa predating the arrival of British missionaries and officials in the mid-19th century. Antera Duke (ca.1735-ca.1809) was a leader and merchant in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar, a cluster of Efik-speaking communities in the Cross River region. He resided in Duke Town, forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean in modern-day southeast Nigeria. His diary, written in trade English from 18 January 1785 to 31 January 1788, is a candid account of daily life in an African community during a period of great historical interest. Written by a major African merchant at the height of Calabar's overseas commerce, it provides valuable information on Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce and provisions. It is also unique in chronicling the day-to-day social and cultural life of a vibrant African community. Antera Duke's diary is much more than a historical curiosity; it is the voice of a leading African-Atlantic merchant who lived during an age of expanding cross-cultural trade. The book reproduces the original diary of Antera Duke, as transcribed by a Scottish missionary, Arthur W. Wilkie, ca. 1907 and published by OUP in 1956. A new rendering of the diary into standard English appears on facing pages, and the editors have advanced the annotation completed by anthropologist Donald Simmons in 1954 by editing 71 and adding 158 footnotes. The updated reference information incorporates new primary and secondary source material on Old Calabar, and notes where their editorial decisions differ from those made by Wilkie and Simmons. Chapters 1 and 2 detail the eighteenth-century Calabar slave and produce trades, emphasizing how personal relationships between British and Efik merchants formed the nexus of trade at Old Calabar. To build a picture of Old Calabar's regional trading networks, Chapter 3 draws upon information contained in Antera Duke's diary, other contemporary sources, and shipping records from the 1820s. Chapter 4 places information in Antera Duke's diary in the context of eighteenth-century Old Calabar political, social and religious history, charting how Duke Town eclipsed Old Town and Creek Town through military power, lineage strength and commercial acumen.

The transatlantic slave trade played a major role in the development of the modern world. It both gave birth to and resulted from the shift from feudalism into the European Commercial Revolution. James A. Rawley fills a scholarly gap in the historical discussion of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by providing one volume covering the economics, demography, epidemiology, and politics of the trade. This revised edition of Rawley's classic, produced with the assistance of Stephen D. Behrendt, includes emended text to reflect the major changes in historiography; current slave trade data tables and accompanying text; updated notes; and the addition of a select bibliography. James A. Rawley is Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of several books, including Turning Points of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, both available in Bison Books editions. Stephen D. Behrendt is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He has coauthored a data archive of 27,233 slave voyages, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.

The transatlantic slave trade played a major role in the development of the modern world. It both gave birth to and resulted from the shift from feudalism into the European Commercial Revolution. James A. Rawley fills a scholarly gap in the historical discussion of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by providing one volume covering the economics, demography, epidemiology, and politics of the trade. This revised edition of Rawley's classic, produced with the assistance of Stephen D. Behrendt, includes emended text to reflect the major changes in historiography; current slave trade data tables and accompanying text; updated notes; and the addition of a select bibliography. James A. Rawley (1916-2005) was Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of several books, including Turning Points of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, both available in Bison Books editions. Stephen D. Behrendt is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He has coauthored a data archive of 27,233 slave voyages, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.

In his diary, Antera Duke (ca.1735-ca.1809) wrote the only surviving eyewitness account of the slave trade by an African merchant. A leader in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar, a cluster of Efik-speaking communities in the Cross River region, he resided in Duke Town, forty-five miles from the Atlantic Ocean in what is now southeast Nigeria. His diary, written in trade English from 1785 to 1788, is a candid account of daily life in an African community at the height of Calabar's overseas commerce. It provides valuable information on Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce, and provisions.
This new edition of Antera's diary, the first in fifty years, draws on the latest scholarship to place the diary in its historical context. Introductory essays set the stage for the Old Calabar of Antera Duke's lifetime, explore the range of trades, from slaves to produce, in which he rose to prominence, and follow Antera on trading missions across an extensive commercial hinterland. The essays trace the settlement and development of the towns that comprised Old Calabar and survey the community's social and political structure, rivalries among families, sacrifices of slaves, and witchcraft ordeals. This edition reproduces Antera's original trade-English diary with a translation into standard English on facing pages, along with extensive annotation. The editors draw on Antera's first language, Efik, to illuminate his diary. The Diary of Antera Duke furnishes a uniquely valuable source for the history of precolonial Nigeria and the Atlantic slave trade, and this new edition enriches our understanding of it.

These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume.

In his Introduction Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.