| The importance of the slave trade to the eighteenth-century economic, social and political development of the Atlantic World is an area of great debate. One reason for the debate is that most studies of the slave trade have focused upon the trade's direct participants: the merchants, captains, sailors, slave intermediaries, company officials, plantation owners, overseers and drivers whose primary labor brought them into the trade. This study redirects this ongoing debate by focusing on the missing element of indirect participants. These were the ship builders, coopers, general laborers, porters, watermen, canoemen, tradesmen, manufacturers and others whose labor, while not a direct part of the trade, contributed to the trade. Through an examination of this indirect participation, especially that of laborers, this study reveals new dimensions of the slave trade, showing it to be more extensive than once thought and emphasizing the importance to the slave trade of areas where the actual presence and use of slaves was minimal or absent. Two examples are a London ship carpenter who constructed a vessel that one day carried African slaves from West Africa to the Americas and a textile manufacturer in India whose cloth was included in sortings traded for slaves. By examining the slave trade's indirect participants in London and Cape Coast Castle, this study reveals the large number of laborers whose toil contributed to the slave trade's success and profitability. This study also illustrates how the ability of the direct participants to utilize both unfree and wage labor systems was vital to the trade's success. An understanding of indirect participation strengthens the argument of Philip Curtin and others of the global, not just Atlantic, consequences of the slave trade. Finally, through a review of the secondary literature concerning labor in Philadelphia, this study demonstrates that, in the city where the American abolitionist and revolutionary movements gained great momentum, many of its laborers indirectly contributed to the success of the slave trade. |
