Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

"This work explores a neglected aspect of the forced migration of African laborers to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of captive Africans continued their journeys after the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Colonial merchants purchased and then transshipped many of these captives to other colonies for resale. Not only did this trade increase death rates and the social and cultural isolation of Africans; it also fed the expansion of British slavery and trafficking of captives to foreign empires, contributing to Britain's preeminence in the transatlantic slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century. The pursuit of profits from exploiting enslaved people as commodities facilitated exchanges across borders, loosening mercantile restrictions and expanding capitalist networks. Drawing on a database of over seven thousand intercolonial slave trading voyages compiled from port records, newspapers, and merchant accounts, O'Malley identifies and quantifies the major routes of this intercolonial slave trade. He argues that such voyages were a crucial component in the development of slavery in the Caribbean and North America and that trade in the unfree led to experimentation with free trade between empires."--Publisher's Web site Contents 12 Introduction 18 1. Final Passages 47 2. Black Markets for Black Labor 102 3. Captive Markets for Captive People 131 4. To El Dorado via Slave Trade 156 5. The North American Periphery of the Caribbean Slave Trade, ca. 1700-1763 188 6. A for Asiento 236 7. Entrepots and Hinterlands 281 8. American Slave Trade, American Free Trade 308 Epilogue 354 Appendix 368 Index 400