Skip to main content

Home/ University of Johannesburg History 2A 2023/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by keanosmith

Contents contributed and discussions participated by keanosmith

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
keanosmith

Bondsmen: Slave Collateral in the 19th-Century Cape Colony.pdf - 4 views

diigo.com/0se6a1

Ryan Smith

shared by keanosmith on 24 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • During the 18th and 19th centuries, enslaved people in the Cape Colony were used as collateral on loans. In the near absence of formal lending institutions, private credit agreements predominated among slave-owners, as researchers have established in earlier studies. Based on a sample of 19th-century mortgage records, I use network analysis in this article to visualise the flow of credit among slave-owner debtors and creditors, showing the position of banks in a network dominated by private creditors and highlighting the role of widows in the male world of credit.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Kate Ekama writes about slavery in the Cape Colony and how slave owners used their slaves as insurance on loans.
  • Craa offered the council collateral as security, in the form of the enslaved man Anthony of Malabar. Anthony of Malabar was the first enslaved person to be mortgaged at the Cape; the practice grew over the course of the 18th century and persisted into the 19th such that, by the 1830s, the enslaved were ‘the principal mortgageable assets of the colony’.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Craa was the first slave owner to offer one of his slaves as collateral on loans, this salves name was Anthony of Malabar.
  • A close analysis of 19th-century mortgage records reveals a continuity: mortgages on slave collateral continued into the apprenticeship period, and new mortgages were agreed after 1 December 1834 on the value of the formerly enslaved.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Slaves used as collateral persisted from the 18th century well into the 19th century and was thought to be abolished in the 1830s. However, later records state that this may not be the case and that some slave owners still used slaves as collateral even after emancipation during the apprenticeship period.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The property rights side – the enslaved as assets belonging to slave-owners – has received less attention
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Slave owners saw slaves as their property, hence they used the slaves as collateral.
  • slave-owners at the Cape received compensation when the enslaved were freed, albeit far below the appraised value of their human property. Yet, as Nigel Worden argues, compensation money that flowed into the Cape aided former slave-owners in the immediate aftermath of emancipation and, as Aaron Graham argues, secured over the longer term the dominance of former slave-owners over former slaves.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      After emancipation, the slave owners received compensation, probably in the form of money or other valuable goods, as compared to other parts of the world. Aaron Graham state that the former slave owners may still display dominance over the former slave. This means that the former slaves may still be ill-treated by their former owners and the former slave owners as a whole.
  • Martin shows that mortgages on human property enabled slaveowners to purchase more slaves on credit (equity loans), and those who did not yet own slaves to purchase slaves without raising the full purchase price (purchase-money loans).
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Slave owners used the slaves they had as collateral to buy more slaves and by doing so they would pay less in other forms of payment as the price would than drop.
  • One repercussion for the enslaved was probably increased risk of family separation, because enslaved people who were collateral would have to be sold or handed over to the creditor if the slave-owner defaulted.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      If the slave-owner that used their slaves as collateral did not pay the remainder of their loan payments to the creditor they would keep the slaves and this would then separate these slaves from their families.
  • Gonzalez, Marshall and Naidu write, it was the property rights in slaves that ‘yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force’ and it is that historical provision to mortgage human property that ‘magnifies [slavery’s] importance to historical American economic development’. 2 The same might be said of the enslaved at the Cape.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Slaves were used to boost economic growth in the Cape of Good Hope.
  • Delays, they predicted, would mean the ruin of the slave-owners before the compensation money arrived in the colony. 21
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      They predicted delays and said that if the compensation money did not come within a certain period the creditor may demand their payment and this would then make them bankrupt as they have nothing to offer but their farms.
  • At emancipation, according to contemporary opinion, some £400,000 – equivalent to over 5.3 million Rixdollars (Rds) – was mortgaged on slave collateral. 13 Such an amount was close to one-third of the total compensation earmarked for the Cape Colony, highlighting just how significant and valuable a practice it was.
  • Cape officials objected to this plan because of the fundamental part that slave property played in financial transactions.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      The Cape officials did not want the emancipation of slaves because they knew it would dismantle their economy as they so depended on the slaves. The slaves were a big part of the Cape economy at the time.
  • Cou nt er -cl ai mant s claimed payment not from slave-owners, but directly from the compensation commission. In this way, their claims were privileged. That mortgage holders were reasonably assured of recouping money lent on slave collateral even once slavery was abolished probably had a significant stabilising effect on the economy in a period of upheaval
  • In March 1834, a meeting of slaveowners and ‘others interested in Slave Property’ addressed their concerns and attendant recommendations to Governor Sir Benjamin D’Urban, which memorial was published in Cape Newspapers, including, unsurprisingly, in the pro-slave-owner publication De ZuidAfrikaan.
  • Generally, the memorialists’ view was that emancipation and compensation as it had been planned would be ruinous for Cape slave-owners.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      This point goes back to the point of how the Cape Colony was so dependent on slaves as collateral on loans.
  • The detail provided in these records offer rich insight into the way in which credit networks were organised in the colony in the period before commercial banking expanded. In addition, the records offer the opportunity to subvert their original purpose by naming the enslaved individuals who were pledged as collateral and acknowledging the role of these individuals beyond their labour in the functioning and growth of the Cape economy.
  • The sample of mortgages used here consists of 144 unique mortgages agreed by 50 unique debtors, all of whose surnames begin with ‘A’. 28 Because some debtors agreed more than one mortgage and did not always borrow from the same creditor, we see many more unique creditors than debtors in the sample.
  • Apprenticeship, perceived as a period of adjustment for both former owner and owned, was an integral part of the compensation granted by the British government not only for the continued access to labour for former slave-owners but also for the opportunities to raise credit that it offered.
  • From 30 January 1818 onwards, Cape Colony Governor Somerset made it compulsory to register mortgages secured on slave collateral in the Slave Office. The practice had, of course, existed before that date, from at least the 1730s, as mentioned above, and there was a colonial debt registry in use. But, from January 1818 onwards, both pre-existing and new slave mortgages had to be recorded in registry offices across the colony.
  • Legislation from 1816 and 1817 had established the legally binding nature of the Slave Registers for slave-ownership, apparently motivated by the need to limit the slippage
  • between freedom and slavery for the so-called Prize Slaves. 25
  • The 1818 proclamation added to this administration the register of slave mortgages and established the records as legally binding and useful in courts as evidence in disputes. 26
  • The recording process was more or less standardised and, as a result, each debtor’s folio looks similar, set up in a proto-spreadsheet style. Each entry contains details of the debtor, creditor and enslaved who were collateral, the notary and his location, the date the mortgage was registered and notarised (and sometimes cancelled), and the amount of credit raised.
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      The proclamation helped in ensuring that the process of using slaves as collateral was legal and ensured that everyone involved was getting what they promised to offer.
  • That each debtor was the legal owner of the slave collateral that he pledged was an important part of maintaining the system. The top right-hand side of the page was used to link each debtor to the relevant Slave Register.
  • The conviction of C.P. Zinn for ‘Falsification and Plagium’ is evidence that the accuracy of the Slave Registers and mortgage records was protected and that enslavement by false registration of free persons was punishable by imprisonment.
  • Zinn’s offence was found out and he was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island. 27
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      The prosecution of Zinn shows that everyone was protected and ensured that the process of properly stating everything during the process needed to be followed.
  • The complete alphabetical series of mortgages probably contains thousands of entries. I focus on a small sample of these mortgages: only those agreed by debtors with a surname beginning with ‘A’. From a survey of the series, it appears that the ‘A’ sample is of a middling size (not as large as ‘B’, where the branches of the Brink, Burger and van Breda families feature prominently, nor as small as, for instance, ‘I’, but similar in size to ‘F’).
    • keanosmith
      keanosmith on 24 Apr 23
       
      Kate Ekama state that there may be a thousand or more alphabetical entries in the register but she only focuses on a small portion of the register.
  • the debtor side, there seems little reason to suspect that families with an ‘A’ surname would display borrowing patterns markedly different from any other surname. While small, the sample benefits from a wide geographical and temporal scope. On the creditor side, one would expect a small sample to include some but perhaps not all of the large, repeat creditors, which is confirmed by surveying other volumes in the series and the Legacies database.
  • On the other end of the creditor scale, one would expect to find many unique creditors who lend to neighbours and kin, following from Dooling’s arguments, which is likely to mean they appear infrequently or not at all in other letter groups.
  • Through the submission of counter-claims, at least 130 individuals in the Cape Colony received compensation as mortgage holders, with some receiving payment for multiple mortgages, indicative of the clearing off that compensation facilitated. 23
  • Creditors and debtors are represented by grey nodes: widow creditors are dark grey, all other creditor nodes medium grey; the pale grey
  • nodes represent debtors
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page