Lovejoy, Paul and David Richardson. "Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade". The American Historical Review, Vol.104, No.2 (1999): 333-355.

Lovejoy, Paul and David Richardson. "Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade". The American Historical Review, Vol.104, No.2 (1999): 333-355.

• Many have argued that the dominance of the Atlantic slave trade by British merchants, specifically those from Liverpool, built the capital and connections that allowed British merchants to benefit from the growth of plantations in the American South and ultimately allowed industrialization to develop there (333).
• "Nearly one out of every two enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic was transported in British vessels between 1660 and 1807, and in the quarter-century before British abolition, the British share of the trade accounted for more than half the slaves transported to the America" (334).
• In the Port of Old Calabar, in the Bight of Biafra, British merchants used a system of pawning to guarantee the delivery of slaves at scheduled times. Often they would arrange for the deliver of goods as payment before slaves had been acquired, but required that these goods be exchanged for human 'pawns' consisting of the servants or relatives of the African merchant. If the slaves were not delivered, the pawns were taken instead as collateral (336, 351).
• This system of credit was likely used by British merchants throughout Africa because it meshed well with African conceptions of slavery, as most slavers were willing to give up servants, and pawns were more obedient that slaves, making them healthier and easier to transport (336).
• Before the 1740s, the Bight of Biafra made up only a tiny portion of slaves exported, but by the end of the 18th Century is accounted for nearly 20% of all slaves and even more within the British slave trade. Almost 90% of all slaves from Biafra left onboard a British slaver (337-338).
• Within the Bight of Biafra, the port of Old Calabar only began to be used extensively during the later half of the 1700s, and almost entirely by ships from Bristol and Liverpool, which dominated 60% and 20% of the trade, respectively (338).
• The export of slaves depended heavily on credit systems, with British merchants delivery goods to African merchants who would export those products to slave traders further inland in exchange for the requested slaves to sell to the British. The gap between the delivery of European goods and the receipt of slaves could be quite large and depended on trust (339).
• Both the Liverpool, Bristol, and Old Calabar slave merchant networks seem to have been dominated by a few families with extensive connections in the community (340). This allowed the community to develop strong ties of trust (341, 343).
• The sons of wealthy elites in Old Calabar were sometimes sent to Liverpool to receive a 'proper' English education to further assist them in dealing with European slave merchants in the future. This exchange does not appear to be uncommon (342).
• When tension did develop between European and Calabar slavers it appears to have been focused on retaliatory seizure of 'free men'. Sometimes freemen of Calabar were seized as slaves, trigger the confiscation of British goods or the enslavement of English sailors found in the area (344).
• Old Calabar seems to have been partially controlled through an organization called Ekpe, orginally an all-male religious group, it quickly transformed into a political power and established a protection racket over almost all of Old Calabar by the 1790s by forcing all men to pay tribute into Ekpe (347-348).
• In some ways, Ekpe replaced the government institutions of Old Calabar, especially regarding the enforcement of debts. Merchants found to have defrauded European slavers could be subject to punishment and the sale of themselves and their family into slavery (348).
• The Ekpe spread through-out the Cross River basin and Cameroon alongside slave networks, serving to tie most slave merchants into its rules and organization through regulation of the trade and enforcement of credit and debt relations between traders (349).
• The systems of rule developed by Ekpe did not necessarily act in favor of British interests, particularly regarding the enforcement of tariffs and treatment of pawns. On several occasions, Ekpe prevented British ships from leaving habour because of non-payment of tariffs or seizure of pawns, delivering justice to the British transgressors (349).
• The extension of human pawnship, or 'hostage-taking', to the conduct of trade with Europeans was beneficial for the merchants of Old Calabar, because they could sell European goods on credit to Africans, thereby expanding the number of people indebted to them and 'harvesting' more potential pawns (350).
• Pawning has a historical basis in Baifra society, with pawns often being given in indebted relationship as collateral, however the nature of these contract was blurred and pawns could sometimes fulfill roles as servants, slaves, or bribes to the creditor family. The explicit distinction in slave-trading between slave and pawn was an innovation (350-351).
• Although there are a number of cases of ships sailing with pawns after a credit default, including relatives of the Old Calabar merchant (353), this latter case triggered intervention by Ekpe, which sometimes prevented ships of leaving with certain pawns onboard (352).
• British merchants understood the costs of social capital involved in sailing with pawns onboard, especially relatives, and seem to have sought to avoid this by trading pawns to other ships in exchange for slaves or less valuable pawns (352).
• With the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, pawning hostages was no longer a practical way of conducted business in new goods like palm oil, because British law prevented the seizure of pawns in cases of non-payment. Instead, Britain came to depend on the trading standards enforced by Ekpe to guarantee delivery of goods (355).