Historical Method
What is a polity?
A politically organized community capable of mobilizing resources.
Was the Slave Coast one kingdom?
No. It was a region containing multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous political communities.
Why is 1619 important but not the beginning of Black History in the United States?
Africans were already present in Spanish-controlled North America before 1619.
If a European trader said Whydah could supply 10,000 captives, does that prove 10,000 were exported?
No. Capacity, expectation, purchase, ship capacity, and actual embarkation are different evidentiary categories.
A European factory on the Slave Coast was what?
A trading establishment or lodge, not necessarily a colony or evidence of territorial control.
Why does Law warn us against projecting late-seventeenth century evidence backward?
Because the detailed evidence often comes after Atlantic commerce had already transformed the societies being studied.
What did the Captain of the Market at Whydah tells us about African economies?
Markets were politically regulated through taxation, currency oversight, inspection, pricing practices, and maintenance of order.
What larger Atlantic story is hidden behind John Rolfe's phrase "20 and odd Negroes"?
Capture in Angola, Portuguese trafficking aboard the Sao Joao Bautista, English privateering, and arrival/sale in Virginia.
Europeans remain dependent upon African rulers for permission, access, commerce, protection, and residence.
What do Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, and El Requerimiento have in common?
They supplied religious/legal language Europeans used to justify claims of conquest, dominion, conversion, and/or enslavement.
What is the difference between evidence and interpretation?
Evidence is what the historical record supports; interpretation is the conclusion historians construct from that evidence.
Why does Law challenge the idea that Dahomey represented a complete political revolution?
Many Dahomean institutions had precedents in Allada, Whyday, and earlier Slave Coast political structures.
What does partus sequitur ventrem mean and why was it significant?
Baby follows belly. It meant that a child born of an enslaved woman conceived by a white man would be born enslaved.
Who coined the development of the small pox vaccination in America?
Onesimus
Why is Afonso I's 1526 letter important?
It shows an African Christian monarch asserting sovereignty, attempting to regulate commerce, and protesting kidnapping and uncontrolled slave exports.