People database
People from the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, 15th–19th centuries. Search by name or filter by role, place, network and period.
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Barbaria Giorgio
1776–1800 (part of century)In the last quarter of the eighteenth century he was the most important producer and merchant of glass beads in Venice and a member of the guild of the Perleri. His business combined large-scale production and trade, with shipments to the western (Ponente) ports. His beads were destined above all for large merchant houses involved in the Atlantic slave trade, which used them as goods of exchange on the African coasts. Decisive for his success was his relationship with the firm Juvalta, Frisoni & Giese of Lisbon, active in Atlantic trade (colonial goods, ivory, enslaved people) and with partners in Luanda. His case shows the link between Venetian manufacturing and the circuits of the slave trade.
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Barbaria Giovanni
c. 1781–1800Brother of Giorgio Barbaria and like him a manufacturer and merchant, in the last decades of the eighteenth century he shipped glass beads to the western (Ponente) ports.
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Ca da Mosto Alvise
1455–1462A Venetian navigator in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, in 1455 he reached the mouth of the Senegal, where he exchanged horses for enslaved people, and continued as far as the Gambia. On the expedition of 1456 he sailed with the Genoese Antoniotto Usodimare towards the Casamance, the Bijagós Islands and Cape Verde; he then remained seven years in Lagos, before returning to Venice in 1462.
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Cadena Gaspar
c. 1595–1610He purchased licences to export enslaved people from Cape Verde. From Lisbon he moved to Brazil, where he prospered by transporting enslaved Africans destined for the sugar plantations.
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dalla Man Isach
1763–1768From about 1763 he started a direct trade in glass beads between Venice and Liverpool, entering into relations with the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa and, in 1766-1767, with the slave-trading house William Davenport & Co., of which he was a supplier with shipments from Venice and from the Livorno branch. In 1768 the Venetian authorities excluded him from this trade, accusing him of having delivered beads of poor quality.