4 - The Seventeenth Century: The Early Shadow of Transatlantic Slavery

Summary

The Gradual Impact of the Creation of the Slave Economy on Norfolk and Suffolk

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century African population in Norfolk and Suffolk was small. It seems probable that some of these Africans were free of any formal enslavement, although it is conceivable that others may have been held in some form of slavish servitude. It is imaginable, nonetheless, that some of the first-generation Africans who arrived in the ports and villages of Norfolk and Suffolk may have had some experience of enslavement in their pasts, but that this would have been in the Mediterranean or in North Africa before they had travelled to England. Their arrival in the region was not a direct consequence of the activity of people from Norfolk and Suffolk in slaving networks or economic structures that were dependent on slavery. Instead, if enslavement in some sense had been part of their personal history, it would have been tangentially connected to Norfolk and Suffolk, in that their arrival would have occurred because of the interface between the mercantile economy of the region – in the form of the trading voyages of its merchants and sailors – and the North African/Mediterranean slaving economy. The initial settlement process of the African population should probably be understood as an effect of the ‘ripples’ of the internal African slave trade as it then intersected with the cultures and trading patterns of the Mediterranean, which in turn interacted with the counties’ trading networks. While the region was not actively involved in any slaving activities in this early period, it seems that it was possible for people in the region to be enslaved or held in a condition of slavish servitude. This was not a direct function of their skin colour, however, but related to social situation. In theory, a person who was enslaved elsewhere, and was not an English Christian, could have been purchased by someone from Norfolk and Suffolk and taken back to the region as a slave, as happened to the Russian in Cartwright’s Case.

In the seventeenth century this approach to Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk would encounter a new geographic and economic situation, as the region became involved in the cultures that appeared in the newly established colonies in English/British North America and then the West Indies.