Pawns for credit on the Atlantic coast

From the 17th to the 19th century people in much of Atlantic Africa were held as pawns, collateral for debts usually incurred by relatives, to raise credit for trade or for funerals, weddings and religious obligations, and pawnship was part of the trade with European and American ships at Calabar, Gabon, Cameroon, the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast and upper Guinea. It was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and in Portuguese Angola, and not used with Europeans at Bonny or Ouidah.

The mechanism

CAPTURE

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
• Letter eraTHE SEAT MOVES TO THE BENCH 1713 to 1945
• SourcesRECORD — P. E. Lovejoy, 'Pawnship, Debt, and “Freedom” in Atlantic Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade: A Reassessment', Journal of African History 55:1 (2014) (abstract); P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, 'Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade', American Historical Review 104:2 (1999): 332-55 (citation checked, text not read) · checked 19 September: P. E. Lovejoy, 'Pawnship, Debt, and Freedom in Atlantic Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade', Journal of African History 55:1 (2014): 55-78, abstract via Crossref