Being both free and unfree. The case of selected Luso-Africans in sixteenth and seventeenth-century western Africa: Sephardim in a Luso-African context

Abstract

Our paper looks at Africans, Luso-Africans, and Sephardic merchants on the Upper Guinea Coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. We study the interrelationship of work and kinship among the groups that came together in the coastal trade. We look at identity transformations, at attitudes towards work, and at the interrelation between free and unfree labor on the Upper Guinea Coast. Finally, how did marriage ties, whether permanent or transient, affect commercial relations both for the Sephardim and for local African trading women who married Portuguese merchants? In Senegambia, the production of these extended (inter-continental) kinship systems, while it facilitated commerce, was of relatively short duration.