The Development of the African Transatlantic Slave Trade
Overview
The Development of the African Transatlantic Slave Trade
The advance of a world-wide market economy and capitalism provided a framework for the development of Transatlantic trade and the slave trade.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the factors that led to the development of the African Slave Trade in Europe, Americas, and Africa.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
- Mercantilism: an economic system consisting of a royal government controlling colonies abroad and overseeing trade and land-holdings at home. (The ultimate example of this system was the biggest owner of colonies that produced bullion: Spain.)
- Triangle Trade: a trading system between Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Slaves from Africa were shipped to the New World to work on plantations. Raw goods—e.g. sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee—were processed and shipped to Europe. Finished and manufactured goods were then shipped to Africa to exchange for slaves.)
- Indentured Servants: Europeans who worked as slaves in the New World under contact for 4-7 years typically in exchange for passage across the Atlantic
- Asiento System: direct slave trading contracts between the Spanish government and European merchants to sell slaves within the Spanish Empire in Latin America (This system broke up the Portuguese slave trade monopoly after 1580. The Dutch took advantage of these contracts to compete with the Portuguese and Spanish for direct access to African slave trading, and the British and French eventually followed.)
Prelude to Trade Empires and Early Capitalism
European society underwent a major change during the early modern period with regards to its outlook on wealth and property. Along with that change came the growth of a new kind of state and society, one not only defined by the growth of bureaucracy seen in absolutism but also in the power of the moneyed classes whose wealth was not predicated on owning land. The rise of that class to prominence in certain societies, especially those of the Netherlands and England, accompanied the birth of the most distinctly modern form of economics: capitalism.
In the Middle Ages, wealth, land, and power were intimately connected. Nobles were defined by their ownership of land and by their participation in armed conflict. That changed by the early modern period, especially as it became increasingly common for monarchs to sell noble titles to generate money for the state. By the seventeenth century the European nobility were split between “nobles of the sword”—who inherited their titles from their warlike ancestors— and “nobles of the robe”—who had either been appointed by kings or purchased titles. Both categories of nobility were far more likely to be owners of land who exploited peasants than to be warriors. Among almost all of them, there was considerable contempt for merchants, who were often seen as parasites who undermined good Christian morality and the proper order of society. Even nobles of the robe, who had only joined the nobility within the last generation, tended to cultivate a practiced loathing for mere merchants, who they felt were socially inferior.
In addition, the economic theory of the medieval period posited that there was a finite, limited amount of wealth in the world, and that the only thing that could be done to become wealthier was to get and hold on to more of it. In the medieval and even Renaissance-era mindset, the only forms of wealth were land and bullion (precious metals), and since there is only so much land and so much gold and silver out there, if one society grew richer, by definition every other society grew poorer.
According to this finite resource mindset, kingdoms could only increase their wealth by seizing more territory, especially territory that would somehow increase the flow of precious metals into royal coffers. Trade was only important insofar as trade surpluses with other states could be maintained, thereby ensuring that more bullion was flowing into the economy than was flowing out. Colonies abroad provided raw materials and bullion itself. As a whole, this concept was called mercantilism: an economic system consisting of a royal government controlling colonies abroad and overseeing landholdings at home. The ultimate example of this system was the biggest owner of colonies that produced bullion: Spain.
Mercantilism worked well enough, but commerce fit awkwardly into its paradigm. Trade was not thought to generate new wealth, since it did not directly dig up more silver or gold, nor did it seize wealth from other countries. Trade did not "make" anything according to the mercantilist outlook. Of all classes of society, bankers in particular were despised by traditional elites since they not only did not produce anything themselves but also profited off of the wealth of others.
These attitudes started undergoing significant changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly as a result of the incredible success of overseas corporations—groups that generated enormous wealth outside of the auspices of mercantilist theory. Many of the beneficiaries of the new wealth of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not noblemen; they were instead wealthy merchant townsfolk, especially in places like the Dutch Republic and, later, England. These were men who amassed huge fortunes but did not fit neatly into the existing power structure of landholding nobles, the church, and the common people. These changes inspired an increasingly spirited battle over the rights of property, spurring the idea that not just land but wealth itself was something that the state should protect and encourage to grow.
Early Capitalism
The growth of commercial wealth was closely tied to the growth of overseas empires. The initial wave of European colonization (mostly in the Americas) had been driven by a search for gold and a desire to convert foreigners to Christianity. However, European powers came to pursue colonies and trade routes in the name of commodities and the wealth they generated by the seventeenth century. In this period of empire-building, European states sought additional territory and power overseas primarily for economic reasons. Because of the enormous wealth to be generated from not only gold and silver but also from commodities like sugar, tobacco, and coffee (as well as luxury commodities like spices that had always been important), the states of Europe were willing to war constantly among themselves as well as to perpetrate one of the greatest crimes in history: the Atlantic Slave Trade.
In short, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the first phase of a system that would later be called capitalism arises— an economic system in which the exchange of commodities for profit generated wealth to be reinvested in the name of still greater profits. In turn, capitalism is dependent on governments that enforce legal systems that protect property and, historically, by wars with rivals that tried to carve out bigger chunks of the global market. To reiterate, capitalism was (and remains) a combination of two major economic and political phenomena: enterprises run explicitly for profit and a legal framework to protect and encourage the generation of profit. The pursuit of profit was nothing new, historically, but the political power enjoyed by merchants, the political focus on overseas expansion for profit, and the laws enacted to encourage these processes were new.
Overseas Expansion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The development of early capitalism was intimately connected with overseas expansion. Europe was an important center of a truly global economy by the seventeenth century, and it was that economy that fueled the development of capitalistic, commercial societies in places like the Netherlands and England. While the original impulse behind overseas expansion during this period was primarily commercial—focusing on the search for commodities and profit, it was also a major political focus of all of the European powers by the eighteenth century. In other words, European elites actively sought not just to trade with overseas territories but also to conquer and control, both for profit and for their own political "glory" and aggrandizement. The result was a dramatic expansion of European influence or direct control in areas of the globe in which Europe had never before had an influence. In result, by 1800 roughly 35% of the globe was directly or indirectly controlled by European powers.
Military technology and organization were key factors in this European global expansion. The early-modern military revolution (i.e. the evolution of gunpowder warfare during and after the Renaissance period) resulted in highly-trained soldiers with the most advanced military technology in the world by the late seventeenth centuries. As European powers expanded, they built fortresses in the modern style and defended them with cannons, muskets, and warships that often outmatched the military forces and technology they encountered. In the case of China, Japan, and the Philippines, for instance, local rulers learned that the easiest way to deal with European piracy was not to try to fight European ships, but instead to cut off trade with European merchants until restitution had been paid.
European states also benefited from the relative political fragmentation of parts of the non-European world. There were powerful kingdoms and empires in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that defied European attempts at hegemony, but much of the world was controlled by smaller states. A prime example is India. This region had become divided into dozens of small kingdoms, along with a few larger ones due to the decline of the Mughal Empire by the early eighteenth century. When the British and French began taking control of Indian territory, it was against the resistance of small Indian kingdoms, not some kind of (nonexistent) overall Indian state.
An important note regarding European colonial power: this period saw the consolidation of European holdings in the New World and the beginning of empires in places like India, but it did not include major landholdings in Africa, the Middle East, or East Asia. In places with powerful states—China, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan—even the relative superiority of European arms was not sufficient to seize territory. Likewise, not only were African states able to successfully fight off Europeans as well, but African diseases made it impossible for large numbers of Europeans to colonize or occupy much African territory. As the Slave Trade burgeoned, Europeans did launch slave raids, but most slaves had been captured by African slavers who enjoyed enormous profits from the exchange.
Likewise, European states and the corporations they supported worked diligently to establish monopolies on trade with various parts of the world. However, "monopolies" in this case only meant monopolies in trade going to and from Europe. There were enormous, established, and powerful networks of trade between Africa, India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and the Pacific, all of which were dominated by non-European merchants. To cite one example, the Indian Ocean had served as an oceanic crossroads of trade between Africa and Asia for thousands of years. Europeans broke into those markets primarily by securing control of goods that made their way back to Europe rather than seizing control of intra-Asian or African trade routes, although they did try to dominate those routes when they could, and Europeans were able to seize at least some territories directly in the process.
The Netherlands
The Dutch were at the forefront of these changes. During their rebellion against Spain in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch began to look to revenue generated from trade as an economic lifeline. They served both as the middlemen in European commerce, shipping and selling things like timber from Russia, textiles from England, and wine from Germany. They also increasingly served as Europe’s bankers. The Dutch invented both formalized currency exchange and the stock market, both of which led to huge fortunes for Dutch merchants. A simple way to characterize the growth of Dutch commercial power was that the Netherlands replaced northern Italy as the heart of European trade after the Renaissance.
In 1602, Dutch merchants, with the support of the state, created the world's first corporation: the Dutch East India Company (VOC in its Dutch acronym). It was created to serve as the republic's official trading company—a company with a legal monopoly to trade within a certain region: India and Southeast Asia. The VOC proved phenomenally successful in pushing out other European merchants in the Indies, through a combination of brute force and the careful deployment of legal strategies. A common approach was to offer “protection” from the supposedly more rapacious European powers, like Portugal, in return for trade monopolies from spice-producing regions. In many cases, the VOC simply used the promise of protection as a smokescreen for seizing complete control of a given area, especially in Indonesia which eventually became a Dutch colony. In other areas local rulers remained in political control but lost power over their own spice production and trade. For the better part of the seventeenth century, the Dutch controlled an enormous amount of the hugely profitable trade in luxury goods and spices from the East Indies as a result.
The profits for Dutch merchants and investors were concomitantly high. As an example, above and beyond direct profits by individual members of the company, all stockholders in the VOC received dividends of 30% on their investments within the first ten years, in addition to a dramatic boost in value of the stocks themselves. The other states of Europe were both aghast at Dutch success and grudgingly admiring of it. In 1601, there were 100 more Dutch ships in the port of London at any given time than there were English ships, and by 1620 about half of all European merchant vessels were Dutch.
In 1652, the Dutch seized control of the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, allowing them to control shipping going around Africa in route to Asia. They also exerted additional military force in the Indies to force native merchants to trade only with them and not other Europeans. The Dutch takeover of the Cape of Good Hope was the historical origin of the modern nation of South Africa; they were the first permanent European settlers. The Dutch were also the only European power allowed to keep a small trading colony in Japan, which was otherwise completely cut off to westerners after 1641 (thanks to a failed Portuguese-sponsored Christian uprising against the Japanese shogun).
The iconic moment in the history of the Dutch golden age of early capitalism was the tulip craze of the 1620s – 1630s. Tulips grow well in the Netherlands and had long been cultivated for European elites. A tulip fad among Dutch elites in the 1620s drove up the price of tulip bulbs dramatically. Soon, enterprising merchants started buying and selling bulbs with no intention of planting them or even selling them to someone who would; they simply traded the bulbs as a valuable commodity unto themselves. In 1625, one bulb was sold for 5,000 guilders, about half the cost of a mansion in Amsterdam. However, the real height of the craze was the winter of 1636 – 1637, when individual bulbs sometimes changed hands ten times in a day for increasing profits. This was the equivalent of “flipping” bulbs; it had nothing to do with the actual tulips any longer. The element to emphasize is not just the seemingly irrational nature of the boom, but of the mindset: the Dutch moneyed classes were already embracing speculative market economies, in which the value of a given commodity has almost nothing to do with what it does, but instead from what people are willing to spend on it. In capitalist economies this phenomenon often leads to "bubbles" of rising values that then eventually collapse. In this case, the tulip craze did indeed come crashing down in the winter of 1637 – 1638, but in the meantime, it presaged the emergence of commodity speculation for centuries to come.
The development of this early form of capitalism unquestionably originated in the Netherlands, but it spread from there. One by one, the other major states of Europe started to adopt Dutch methods of managing finances: sophisticated accounting, carefully organized tax policy, and an emphasis on hands-on knowledge of finances up to the highest levels of royal government. For example, Louis XIV insisted that his son study political economy and Colbert, Louis’ head of finance, wrote detailed instructions on how a king should oversee state finances. This was a significant change, since until the mid-seventeenth century at the earliest, to be a king was to refuse to dirty one’s hands with commerce. It was because of the incredible success of the Dutch that kings and nobles throughout Europe began to change their outlooks and values. Ultimately, at least among some kings and nobles in Western Europe, humanistic education and the traditional martial values of the nobility were combined with practical knowledge, or at least appreciation of mercantile techniques.
Ultimately, the Dutch Golden Age was the seventeenth century. When the Netherlands was dragged into the wars initiated by Louis XIV toward the end of the seventeenth century, it spelled the beginning of the end for their dominance. The other states of Europe began to focus their own efforts on trade and were able to surpass Dutch efforts, although not their prosperity as the Netherlands has remained a resolutely prosperous country ever since. During that period, however, the Dutch had created a global trade network, proved that commercial dominance would play a crucial factor in political power in the future, and overseen a cultural blossoming of art and architecture.
Britain and the Slave Trade
Of the other European states, the British were the most successful at imitating the Dutch. In 1667 the British king Charles II officially designated the royal treasury as the coordinating body of British state finances and made sure it was overseen by officials trained in the Dutch style of political economy. The British parliament grew increasingly savvy with financial issues as well, having numerous debates about the best and most profitable use of state funds.
In 1651, both to try to seize trade from the Dutch and to fend off Britain's traditional enemies—France and Spain, parliament passed the English Navigation Acts, which reserved commerce with English colonies for English ships. This, in turn, led to extensive piracy and conflict between the powers of Europe in their colonial territories, as they tried to seize profitable lands and enforce their respective monopolies. Ultimately, the British fought three wars with the Dutch, defeating them each time and, among other things, seizing the Dutch port of New Amsterdam in North America (which the English promptly renamed New York). Britain also fought Spain in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ultimately acquiring Jamaica and Florida as colonies.
In terms of trade, the major prize, at least initially, was the Caribbean, due to its suitability for growing sugar. Sugar quickly became the colonial product, hugely valuable in Europe and relatively easy to cultivate compared to exotic products like spices, which were only available from Asian sources. And it was ultimately the profits of sugar that helped bankroll the British growth in power in the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries. During this period, sugar consumption in Europe doubled every 25 years. The only efficient way to grow sugar was through proto-industrialized plantations with rendering facilities built to extract the raw sugar from sugar cane. That, in turn, required an enormous amount of back-breaking, dangerous labor. Most Native American slaves quickly died off or escaped and hence the Atlantic Slave Trade between Africa and the New World began in earnest by the early seventeenth century.
The Slave Trade between Africa and the New World was, quite simply, one of the worst injustices of human history. Millions of people were ripped from their homeland, transported to a foreign continent in atrocious conditions, and either worked to death or murdered by their owners in the name of "discipline.” The contemporary North American perception of the life of slaves—that of incredibly difficult but not always lethal conditions of work—is largely inaccurate because only a small minority of slaves were ever sent to North America. The immense majority of slaves were instead sent to the Caribbean or Brazil, both areas in which working conditions were far worse than the (still abysmal) working conditions present in North America. Sugar was the major crop of the Caribbean and one of the major crops of Brazil. And the average life of a slave once introduced to sugar cultivation was seven years before he or she died from exhaustion or injury. In sum, most slaves were sent to be worked to death on sugar plantations.
The slave trade was part of what historians have described as the “triangle trade” between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Slaves from Africa were shipped to the New World to work on plantations. Raw goods—e.g. sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee—were processed and shipped to Europe. Finished and manufactured goods were then shipped to Africa to exchange for slaves. This cycle of exchange grew decade-by-decade over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The leg of the triangle trade that connected Africa and the Americas was known as the Middle Passage because slave ships went directly across the middle of the Atlantic, most traveling to Brazil or the Caribbean, as noted above. Slaves on board ships were packed in so tightly they could not move for most of the voyage, with slave ship captains calculating into their profit margins the fact that a significant percentage of their human cargo would die in route. Over a million slaves died in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the Middle Passage. In turn, over 90% of the millions of slaves that were sent to the Caribbean or Brazil perished from exhaustion or injury while cultivating sugar and coffee, well as while mining in Brazil. This resulted in a demand for constant slave replacements.
The Atlantic Slave Trade was the first time in history that slavery was specifically racial in character. Because it was Africans who were enslaved to work in the Americas under the control of Europeans, Europeans developed a range of racist theories to excuse the practice from its obvious immorality. In fact, the whole idea of human "race" is largely derived from the Slave Trade. Biologically, "race" is nothing more than a handful of unimportant cosmetic differences between people, but thanks to the history of the enslavement of Africans, Europeans in the early modern period led the charge in describing "race" as some kind of fundamental human category, with some races supposedly enjoying "natural" superiority. That conceit would obviously cast a perverse shadow on the present.
The Enslavement of Africans
The transatlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history and, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, formed the major demographic well-spring for the re-peopling of the Americas following the collapse of the Amerindian population. Cumulatively, as late as 1820, nearly four Africans had crossed the Atlantic for every European, and, given the differences in the sex ratios between European and African migrant streams, about four out of every five females that traversed the Atlantic were from Africa. The Atlantic Ocean was once a formidable barrier that prevented regular interaction between those peoples inhabiting the four continents it touched; beginning in the late fifteenth century, it became a commercial highway that integrated the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas for the first time. As the above figures suggest, slavery and the slave trade were the linchpins of this process. With the decline of the Amerindian population, labor from Africa formed the basis for the exploitation of the gold and agricultural resources from the Americas, with sugar plantations absorbing well over two thirds of slaves carried across the Atlantic by the major European and Euro-American powers. For several centuries slaves were the most important reason for contact between Europeans and Africans.
European expansion to the Americas mainly affected tropical and semi-tropical areas. Several products that were either previously unknown to Europeans (like tobacco) or previously had been a luxury for Europeans (like gold or sugar) could be now obtained by Europeans in abundant amounts. But while Europeans could control the production of such exotic goods, it became apparent in the first two centuries after 1500 that they chose not to supply the labor that would make such output possible. Free European migrants and indentured servants never traveled across the Atlantic in sufficient numbers to meet the labor needs of expanding plantations. Convicts and prisoners—the only Europeans who were ever forced to migrate—were too few in number. Slavery or some form of coerced labor was the only possible option if European consumers were to gain access to more tropical produce and precious metals.
Europeans came rely on Africans as slaves due to the different values of societies around the Atlantic and, more particularly, the way groups of people involved in creating a trans-Atlantic community saw themselves in relation to others. In short, how they defined their identity. Ocean-going technology brought Europeans into large-scale face-to-face contact with peoples who were culturally and physically more different from themselves than any others with whom they had interacted in the previous millennium. In neither Africa nor Asia could Europeans initially threaten territorial control, with the single and limited exception of western Angola. African capacity to resist Europeans ensured that sugar plantations were established in the Americas rather than in Africa. But if Africans, aided by tropical pathogens, were able to resist the potential European invaders, some Africans were prepared to sell slaves to Europeans for use in the Americas. As this suggests, European domination of Amerindians was complete. Indeed, from the European perspective it was much too complete. The epidemic diseases of the Old World destroyed not only native American societies, but also a potential labor supply.
Every society in history before 1900 provided at least an unthinking answer to the question of which groups are to be considered eligible for enslavement, and normally they did not recruit heavily from their own community. A revolution in ocean-going technology gave Europeans the ability to get continuous access to remote peoples and move them against their will over very long distances. Strikingly, it was much cheaper to obtain slaves in Europe than to send a vessel to the coast of Africa without proper harbors and remote from European political, financial, and military power. That this option was never seriously considered suggests a European inability to enslave other Europeans. Except for a few social deviants, neither Africans nor Europeans would enslave members of their own societies, but in the early modern period, Africans had a somewhat narrower conception of who was eligible for enslavement than Europeans had. It was this difference in definitions of eligibility for enslavement which explains the dramatic rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery, which had disappeared from northwest Europe long before this point, exploded into a far greater significance and intensity than it had possessed at any point in human history. The major cause was a dissonance in African and European ideas of eligibility for enslavement at the root of which lies culture or societal norms, not easily tied to economics. Without this dissonance, there would have been no African slavery in the Americas. Europeans shared a common Christian identity that discouraged them from enslaving fellow European believers, whereas African peoples were divided into diverse religions and cultures, who were willing to enslave peoples of opposing cultures. The slave trade was thus a product of differing constructions of social identity and the ocean-going technology that brought Atlantic societies into sudden contact with each other.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade grew from a strong, initially European, demand for labor in the Americas, driven by consumers of plantation produce and precious metals. Because Amerindians died in large numbers, and insufficient numbers of Europeans were prepared to cross the Atlantic, the form that this demand took was shaped by conceptions of social identity on four continents, which ensured that the labor would comprise mainly slaves from Africa. But the central question of which peoples from Africa went to a given region of the Americas, and which group of Europeans or their descendants organized such a movement, cannot be answered without an understanding of the wind and ocean currents of the North and South Atlantic. There are two systems of wind and ocean currents in the North and South Atlantic that follow the pattern of giant wheels—one lies north of the equator turns clockwise, while its counterpart to the south turns counterclockwise. The northern wheel largely shaped the north European slave trade and was dominated by the English. The southern wheel shaped the huge traffic to Brazil, which for three centuries was almost the almost exclusive preserve of the largest slave traders of all, the Portuguese. Despite their use of the Portuguese flag, slave traders using the southern wheel ran their business from ports in Brazil, not in Portugal. Winds and currents thus ensured two major slave trades: the first rooted in Europe, the second in Brazil. Winds and currents also ensured that Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola, with south-east Africa and the Bight of Benin playing smaller roles. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left from mainly West Africa, with the Bights of Biafra and Benin and the Gold Coast predominating. Just as Brazil overlapped on the northern system by drawing on the Bight of Benin, some slaves from northern Angola were carried into the Caribbean by the English, French, and Dutch.
Early Slaving Voyages
The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. There were few vessels that carried only slaves on this early route, so that most would have crossed the Atlantic in smaller groups on vessels carrying many other commodities, rather than dedicated slave ships. Such a slave route was possible because an extensive traffic in African slaves from Africa to Europe and the Atlantic islands had existed for half a century before Columbian contact, such that ten percent of the population of Lisbon was black in 1455, and black slaves were common on large estates in the Portuguese Algarve. The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526. Before mid-century, all transatlantic slave ships sold their slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, with the gold mines in Cibao on Hispaniola emerging as a major purchaser. Cartagena, in modern Columbia, appears as the first mainland Spanish American destination for a slave vessel, which landed in the year 1549. On the African side, the great majority of people entering the early slave trade came from the Upper Guinea coast, and moved through Portuguese factories initially in Arguim, and later the Cape Verde islands. Nevertheless, the 1526 voyage set out from the other major Portuguese factory in West Africa—Sao Tome in the Bight of Biafra—though the slaves almost certainly originated in the Congo.
The slave traffic to Brazil, eventually accounting for about forty percent of the trade, got underway around 1560. Sugar drove this traffic, as Africans gradually replaced the Amerindian labor force on which the early sugar mills (called engenhos) had depended from 1560 to 1620. By the time the Dutch invaded Brazil in 1630, Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro were supplying almost all of the sugar consumed in Europe, and almost all the slaves producing it were African. Consistent with the earlier discussion of Atlantic wind and ocean currents, there were two major branches of the trans-Atlantic slave trade operating by 1640: one to Brazil, and the other to the mainland Spanish Americas. Together they accounted for less than 7,500 departures a year from the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, almost all of them by 1600 from west-central Africa. The sugar complex spread to the eastern Caribbean from the beginning of the 1640s. Sugar consumption steadily increased in Europe, and the slave system began two centuries of westward expansion across tropical and sub-tropical North America. At the end of the seventeenth century, gold discoveries in first Minas Gerais, and later in Goias and other parts of Brazil, began a transformation of the slave trade which triggered further expansion of the business. In Africa, the Bights of Benin and Biafra became major sources of supply, in addition to Angola, and were joined later by the more marginal provenance zones of Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, and South-east Africa. The volume of slaves carried off reached thirty thousand per annum in the 1690s and eighty-five thousand a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans pulled into the traffic in the era of the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after 1700.
Establishing the Trade
In the fifteenth century, Portugal became the first European nation to take significant part in African slave trading. The Portuguese primarily acquired slaves for labor on Atlantic African island plantations, and later for plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, though they also sent a small number to Europe. Initially, Portuguese explorers attempted to acquire African labor through direct raids along the coast, but they found that these attacks were costly and often ineffective against West and Central African military strategies. For example, in 1444, Portuguese marauders arrived in Senegal ready to assault and capture Africans using armor, swords, and deep-sea vessels. But the Portuguese discovered that the Senegalese outmaneuvered their ships using light, shallow water vessels better suited to the estuaries of the Senegalese coast. In addition, the Senegalese fought with poison arrows that slipped through their armor and decimated the Portuguese soldiers. Subsequently, Portuguese traders generally abandoned direct combat and established commercial relations with West and Central African leaders, who agreed to sell slaves taken from various African wars or domestic trading, as well as gold and other commodities, in exchange for European and North African goods. Over time, the Portuguese developed additional slave trade partnerships with African leaders along the West and Central African coast and claimed a monopoly over these relationships, which initially limited access to the trade for other western European competitors. Despite Portuguese claims, African leaders enforced their own local laws and customs in negotiating trade relations. Many welcomed additional trade with Europeans from other nations.
The Portuguese developed a trading relationship with the Kingdom of Kongo, which existed from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in what is now Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Civil War within Kongo during the trans-Atlantic slave trade would lead to many of its subjects becoming captives traded to the Portuguese. When Portuguese, and later their European competitors, found that peaceful commercial relations alone did not generate enough enslaved Africans to fill the growing demands of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they formed military alliances with certain African groups against their enemies. This encouraged more extensive warfare to produce captives for trading. While European-backed Africans had their own political or economic reasons for fighting with other African enemies, the end result for European traders in these military alliances was greater access to enslaved war captives. To a lesser extent, Europeans also pursued African colonization to secure access to slaves and other goods. For example, the Portuguese colonized portions of Angola in 1571 with the help of military alliances from Kongo, but were pushed out in 1591 by their former allies. Throughout this early period, African leaders and European competitors ultimately prevented these attempts at African colonization from becoming as extensive as in the Americas.
The Portuguese dominated the early trans-Atlantic slave trade on the African coast in the sixteenth century. As a result, other European nations first gained access to enslaved Africans through privateering during wars with the Portuguese, rather than through direct trade. When English, Dutch, or French privateers captured Portuguese ships during Atlantic maritime conflicts, they often found enslaved Africans on these ships, as well as Atlantic trade goods, and they sent these captives to work in their own colonies. In this way, privateering generated a market interest in the trans-Atlantic slave trade across European colonies in the Americas.
After Portugal temporarily united with Spain in 1580, the Spanish broke up the Portuguese slave trade monopoly by offering direct slave trading contracts to other European merchants. Known as the Asiento system, the Dutch took advantage of these contracts to compete with the Portuguese and Spanish for direct access to African slave trading, and the British and French eventually followed. By the eighteenth century, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade reached its trafficking peak, the British (followed by the French and Portuguese) had become the largest carriers of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority of enslaved Africans went to plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, and a smaller percentage went to North America and other parts of South and Central America.
Empire and Slavery
In the second half of the eighteenth century six imperial systems straddled the Atlantic, each one sustained by a slave trade. The English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish all operated behind trade barriers (termed mercantilistic restrictions) and produced a range of plantation produce: sugar, rice, indigo, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and some precious metals, with sugar usually being the most valuable. It is extraordinary that consumers’ pursuit of this limited range of exotic consumer goods, which collectively added so little to human welfare, could have generated the horrors and misery of the Middle Passage and plantation slavery for so long. Given the dominance of Portuguese and British slave traders, it is not surprising that Brazil and the British Americas received the most Africans, though both nations became adept at supplying foreign slave systems as well. Throughout the slave trade, more than seven out of every ten slaves went to these regions. The French Americas imported about half the slaves that the British did, with the majority going to Saint-Domingue. The Spanish flag, which dominated in the earliest phase of the trade before retreating in the face of competition, began to expand again in the late nineteenth century with the growth of the Cuban sugar economy.
By the next century—between 1750 and 1850—every one of these empires had either disappeared or become severely truncated. A massive shift to freer trade meant that, instead of six plantation empires controlled from Europe, there were now only three plantation complexes: two of which—Brazil and the United States—were independent, and the third, Cuba, was far wealthier and more dynamic than its European owner. Extreme specialization led to the United States producing most of the world’s cotton, Cuba most of the world’s sugar, and Brazil with a similar dominance in coffee. Slaves thus might disembark in six separate jurisdictions in the Americas in the eighteenth century. But by 1850 they went overwhelmingly to only two areas: Brazil and Cuba. American cotton planters drew on Africa for almost none of their labor needs, relying instead on natural population growth and a domestic slave trade. Indeed, overall the United States absorbed only 5 percent of the slaves arriving in the Americas. This massive reorganization of the traffic and the rapid natural growth of the US slave population had little immediate impact on the size of the slave trade. The British, Americans, Danish, and Dutch dropped out of the slave trade, but the decade 1821 to 1830 still saw over 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more—one tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade era—followed in the next twenty years.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The African Slave Trade involved interaction of different peoples fron Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the factors that led to the delevlopment of the African Slave Trade in Europe, Americas, and Africa
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Yemasee War: A conflict between English colonists and the indigenous Yemasee people (1715 -1717) that arose due to the enslavement of the Yemasee by colonial slave traders.
Dahomey: An African kingdom in West Africa that grew wealthy on the Transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century.
Black Caribs: Peoples on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean where Africans intermarried and adopted the culture of the indigenous Carib people.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The emergence of Trans-Atlantic Slave trade overlaps with other important historical developments of the Early Modern World: the growth of capitalism and the Age of Exploration. Due to the demand in European markets for luxury goods from distant lands, merchants desired to obtain these commodities such as tobacco and sugar, which were cultivated in the newly discovered lands of the Western Hemisphere. However, epidemic diseases, introduced by the Columbian Exchange that accompanied the Age of Exploration, had decimated the indigenous population. There was thus a severe shortage of labor across the Western Hemisphere. To meet the demand for labor, slave traders exported African slaves across the Atlantic to the colonies of the New World in large numbers beginning in the 16th century. In the English colonies of Barbados, Virginia, Carolina, and Maryland in North America in the 17th century, European indentured servants and enslaved natives at first served primarily as the labor force. However, the enslavement of natives resulted in costly wars between native tribes and the colonists (Yemassee War -1715-1717) and indentured servants had to be set free after an contractually agreed period (usually 4 -7 years). Consequently, by the early 18th century African slaves had become the primary labor force in these colonies as well.
What was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a flourishing business in world trade from the 16th through the 19th century. Although the term ‘African’ can refer to any native of the African continent, the African peoples enslaved and exported across the Atlantic largely inhabited west central and east central Africa in what is the modern nations of Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique. The enslavement and sale of slaves was a business operation that required the cooperation of European and African agents. Africans did not hesitate to sell other Africans into slavery. For example, the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa in the 18th century conducted raids and wars against neighboring peoples to secure a steady supply of slaves to sell to European slave traders. Likewise, Scandinavian Vikings in the 9th century CE had no qualms about enslaving European Slavs in what is today Russia and selling them to Muslim slave traders. African Muslims did object to enslaving African Muslims, but the Muslim Fulani people (modern northern Nigeria) would enslave the non-Muslim Igbo and Yoruba peoples (modern southern Nigeria) into slavery. Likewise, European slave traders justified their actions because the enslaved Africans were not Christians. The Transatlantic slave trade was also a risky venture. Slave traders in crossing the Atlantic, limited the number of adult males in their cargoes and transported a majority of woman and children since they feared slave uprisings on their ships. Once successfully transported and sold in the Western Hemisphere, African slaves escaped and formed new independent communities in areas where the control of colonial authorities was weak or non-existent, such as the Black Caribs of St Vincent in the Caribbean, the Maroons in the interior highlands of Jamaica, the Quillombos of Brazil, and the Angola community in Spanish Florida. Enslaved Africans also rose up violently in open rebellion against their owners, such as the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina (1739), the Nat Turner Rebellion in Virginia (1831), and the so-called “Baptist War” in Jamaica (1831). The massive slave rebellion on the French colony of Saint-Domingue (1791) resulted ultimately in the creation of the independent republic of Haiti in 1804. The experience of enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere also varied from region to region. Across much of Latin America and the Caribbean, slave owners often freed their African slaves or their children after the Roman Catholic Church baptized these slaves as Christians. Consequently, slave traders constantly imported new slaves from Africa into these regions. Children born from the unions of slave owners and slave women were also free. In the English North American colonies and later the United States, however, slave owners rarely freed their slaves even when these slaves converted to the Christian faith, and children born from enslaved women largely remained slaves even if their fathers were slave owners. Consequently, the slave population continued to expand in the United States even after the United States banned the import of African slaves in 1807. Even though the sale and ownership of slaves was a risky and dangerous business investment, the enslavement and transportation of an estimated 12 million Africans to the Western Hemisphere over three centuries is a testament to the power of the profit motive in a capitalist system.
Attributions
Title Image
Illustration in anti-slavery book by Blake, William, 1860 - Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Adapted from:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
https://guides.hostos.cuny.edu/lac118/3-1
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-tcc-worldciv2/chapter/the-transatlantic-slave-trade-2/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/