The physician and slaver Dr. Daniel Botefeur. The transition to the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic and in the Americas and the trafficking in West Africa. Microhistories of Knowledge

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Max Paul Zeuske
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 328158832

The project comes to biographical and microhistorical dimensions of intercontinental slave trade from Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas at a time of global transition from Atlantic free trade with enslaved to illegal trafficking on the hidden Atlantic (Zeuske 2009). In the US and in the UK Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1808, in the Spanish Empire in 1820, in the Portuguese Empire in 1836, in France and Brazil in 1831 (in Brazil finally 1851). However, there was up to 1880, despite abolition, illegal smuggling of 2-4 Millions of people. During this time, a new group of Atlantic merchants arose, which generated in West Africa and the Atlantic slave trade / trafficking profits and capital and moored this in the form of Atlanticization in Slavery and plantation areas of America (both in cash as well as in capital of human body, especially in the Iberian territories, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico and Brazil, with links to the US). Atlanticization means that capital, people, knowledge, goods (commodities) could mainly come to the Americas through the space and the networks of the Atlantic, whereby this space won its own, also cultural quality. The new Atlantic elites coined from about 1830-40 the history of societies of Second Slavery (especially Cuba and Brazil; not so directly in the United States, which remains to research). At the same time, this period of the 19th century was, since about 1808/1815, as mentioned, a time of abolitions (first slave trade in 1794 / 1808 until 1840 and then Sklavereien (1794 / 1838 until 1888), the real abolition (not only legal discourses) was operated as a civilizing project before all by the United Kingdom.As a working hypothesis, the project assumes that to this group of new Atlantic merchants belonged mainly Iberian men, but also a number of Americans and men of other origins (as Daniel Botefeurfrom Hanover) and large groups of support staff (Atlantic Creoles, sailors and especially Luso-African brokers (tangomãos, grumetes)). The micro-historical dimension in the form of the life history of the physician and slaver Daniel Botefeur (around 1770 Hannover -1821 Charleston) as normative exception or exception that proves the rule with respect to the group of Atlantic entrepreneurs should show how first in West Africa, and then across the Atlantic and in the port cities of the colonial powers profits were generated and how societies were changed and modernized in the form of the mentioned atlanticization both in Africa, but especially in the regions of slavery in America. In a double micro dimension (Daniel Botefeur and his slave Robin Botefeur) the role of formal (medical) and empirical knowledge in the rise of Daniel Botefeur remains to be analyzed; in particular the knowledge of body, but also knowledge about the lives of the enslaved as well as the contacts in Africa.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants