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SUMMARY:‘Cross-Cultural Trade and the Slave Ship the Bonne Société: Ba
 skets of Goods\, Diverse Sellers\, and Time Pressure on the African Coast
 ’ - Anne Ruderman (London School of Economics)
DTSTART:20220524T160000Z
DTEND:20220524T173000Z
UID:TALK173306@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gareth Austin
DESCRIPTION:The French slave ship the Bonne Société traded bundles of go
 ods in exchange for slaves in the port of Loango in the late eighteenth ce
 ntury. This paper presents detailed evidence from the ship’s trading log
  that decomposes the goods in the bundle and\, uniquely\, identifies the E
 uropean and African merchants who sold captives to the boat. We examine th
 e cross-cultural trade documented by this dataset and show that total pric
 es increased throughout the trade\, since the ship faced time pressure as 
 soon as the first captive was aboard\, and that the captain increased the 
 price of the bundle by adding more goods and especially by adding high-pri
 ce goods. We also show that sellers participated both as one-shot traders 
 and as repeat traders\, selling the ship captives at multiple points in th
 e trade\, and that sellers with honorifics indicating status positions did
  not appear to earn greater prices as observed in the trading log. The mar
 ket we observe was neither purely based on barter nor based on goods as su
 bstitutes for currency. Our results thus add a nuanced picture of how a tr
 ade that destroyed the lives of millions of people worked “on the ground
 .”
LOCATION:Zoom. The link will be sent to everyone on the seminar e-list. To
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 .cam.ac.uk/event-series/global-economic-history
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