A few years ago, I was invited to prepare for this conference a paper on credit in the slave trade. Over the years, I had accumulated some scraps of data on this topic, as well as bibliographic references to the vast and ever-growing library of scholarly books on slavery. After accepting this deceptively easy assignment, I proceeded through a very long shelf of publications on the slave trade – including many by those here today – only to discover that most of these erudite works had relatively little to say about credit. Thus, of necessity, this chapter is not a rich synthesis of existing scholarship but an exploratory essay suggesting some questions and answers hinted at by our still scrappy evidence.

We can perhaps usefully start with a generalized if simplified way of thinking about the problem of credit in the slave trade and slave economies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dynamic areas of the slave economies, the principal destinations of the slave trade, were in most cases what can be described from a European perspective as initially frontier areas, underpopulated territories of new settlement. In such areas, land is characteristically abundant and cheap, whereas capital and labor are scarce and, by European standards, expensive. Such almost valueless land can be made productive and valuable – a process succinctly expressed is the French phrase mettre en valeur – only by the application of capital and labor.