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10 J. Hist. Int'l L. 229 (2008)
The Asiento de Negros and International Law

handle is hein.journals/jhintl10 and id is 237 raw text is: MARTINUS I-II B I ERF Journal of the History of International Law 10 (2008) 229-257 wwbilltbljhil The Asiento de Negros and International Law Andrea Weindl Institut fur Europdiische Geschichte, University of Mainz, Germany Introduction The year 2007 marked the 2ooth anniversary of the beginning of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Causing one of the largest forced migrations in the history of humankind,' the trade was not the result of ag- gressive entrepreneurial activity outside of law and order. For a long period, European states had tried to organise the trade within a legal framework. In addition to agreements with African states and trading partners, which in large part were defined by the Africans,2 a decisive role in these attempts were played by agreements among European states in regard to African trading posts, trade monopolies and terms of supply. Thus, for a long period, the I) There is still no exact number on the scale of the transatlantic slave trade. Most scholars estimate for the period between 15oo and 187o a number of about 11.8 million slaves who were embarked in Africa, and about 10.3 million people who reached America alive on board of slave vessels. See David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, Herbert S. Klein, Introduction, in: idem, booklet of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. A Database on CD-Rom, (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 999), p- 5. 1) Needless to say, that the conditions in Africa were subject to changes. Nevertheless, for the period analysed in this article it may be valid to assert that, due to the situation of Eu- ropean concurrence at the West African coast, Africans were able to dictate their conditions to European trade partners. Of course, there was no unitary African trade partner but several ethnical groups, states and stakeholders. However, African conditions of the trade are not the subject of this article. Thus seen from a European point of view, this assertion may be the case. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157180508X359846

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