History Dept. Lester Lecture: Dr. Balakrishnan on “The Weight of Small Fortunes: How Women’s Incarceration Financed Slavery & Commerce in Atlantic West Africa”

The Davidson College History Department's Lester Lecture presents Dr. Sarah Balakrishnan, who will speak about “The Weight of Small Fortunes: How Women’s Incarceration Financed Slavery & Commerce in Atlantic West Africa”

For roughly five hundred years, African merchants would forfeit their wives, sisters, or children to creditors—African or European—to be held temporarily as pawns until African merchants repaid their loans in slaves or goods. However, an analysis of Atlantic credit practices reveals that pawns in Ghana often stood security for loans twenty times the sale value of an enslaved captive. This talk offers a new financial history of the Atlantic slave trade through examining the intimate value of women and children held as collateral in southern Ghana.