The Contrast Between Moral Interaction and Amoral Conduct in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Humanities
HIS 190X The Atlantic World
The trade of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean was a driving force behind the concatenation of areas adjacent to the Atlantic into what historians now refer to as the Atlantic World. This slave trade was perpetrated by networks of ambitious merchants seeking wealth within the new realms of exchange across the Atlantic from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. The violent and immoral conduct of the slave trade contrasts sharply with the gentile and morally conscientious manner with which these slave trading merchants address one another in letters of correspondence.
This paper explores the seemingly contradictory coexistence of moral awareness and immoral actions within the letters of Henry Laurens, a prominent merchant, and later political figure in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Bright and Meyler merchant families of Bristol, England from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. This paper presents a refined understanding of how trade networks functioned in the transatlantic slave trade, with adherence to moral codes associated with a culture of gentility serving as a sort of economic signaling of trustworthiness amongst merchants. Furthermore, questions about how morality was selectively applied, or perhaps entirely ignored by slave traders in understanding their participation in the transatlantic slave trade are developed and examined.
