Transatlantic Slave Trade

10 Key excerpts on "Transatlantic Slave Trade"

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  What is Slavery?

  • Brenda E. Stevenson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  2 African Beginnings and the Atlantic Slave Trade

  “Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner conveyed to a state of horror and slavery.”

  Ottobah Cugoano, a Fanti free boy enslaved in Granada1

  The evolution of the trade in African labor to the Americans from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, known as the Atlantic slave trade, marked a significant change in the definition and practice of slavery. The sheer volume of the trade itself – in terms of the millions of Africans enslaved; its four centuries length; the numbers of slave-trading institutions, industries, professionals, and skilled laborers responsible for the multiple attributes of the business of slavery; the geophysical space of the continent of Africa and the continents of North and South America affected; the global mercantile implications; the destruction of vast expanses of western and central western Africa; the numbers of European countries engaged; the immense wealth that the trade produced; the new crops advanced that became household necessities for some and markers of elite status for others – made certain that the Atlantic slave trade would have tremendous impact on creating, and shaping, the modern world. This is to say nothing of the creation of “race” as a category of social, economic, political, cultural, and “biological” significance upon which some of the most basic human interactions would, and still, depend.

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The trade in human flesh also offended many who embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment. For rational people, the sale of one human being by another seemed indefensible. Thomas Paine asked his fellow revolutionaries in North America how they could seek freedom from Great Britain yet continue to trade in human lives.

  The work of British abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce bore fruit in 1807 when Great Britain outlawed the slave trade, although five years earlier Denmark had been the first country to stop trading in slaves. Between 1808 and 1836, the United States, Holland, France, and Portugal followed suit. Most of the newly in­dependent states of Latin America also banned the slave trade at this time. However, because slavery itself continued to exist, especially in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil, a clandestine Transatlantic Slave Trade continued until after the close of the American Civil War (1865) and the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888).

  Interpretive Essay

  Kenneth Banks

  The Atlantic slave trade was the largest and most gruesome forced migration of people in history. People from western Europe transported people from West Africa to labor in the mines and on the plantations of the Americas. In the process, the slave trade disrupted traditional societies in West Africa, created entirely new societies in the Americas, and greatly influenced European thought on natural rights and race. But even as the slave trade reached its height in the eighteenth century, widespread opposition to it grew apace, reaching the point where many in western Europe and the new United States associated it with evil and economic inefficiency. Why the slave trade became vilified at the height of its economic success is a riddle that continues to intrigue many people today.

  Scholars have hotly contested the dimensions and impact of the slave trade. One of the most controversial aspects is determining the total number of Africans enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. Because records of the actual numbers of people captured and transported were rarely kept, the total will never be known for sure. A further complicating factor is that the Atlantic slave trade drew on the same region of West Africa as the concurrent, smaller, but longer-lived slave trade to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. Most scholars now believe that European ships delivered some 10 or 11 million Africans to the New World between 1450 and 1850. Of this number, nearly 5.5 million arrived in the eighteenth century alone, making it by far the most important period of the slave trade. This number far outstripped the half million free European immigrants who arrived during the same time. The trade reached its peak in the 1780s, when more than 80,000 slaves crossed the Atlantic every year.

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  Tropical Babylons

  Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680

  • Stuart B. Schwartz(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650

  Herbert Klein

  The forced migration of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade is traditionally associated with the rise of sugar production in the Old and New Worlds. But, in fact, the slave trade evolved independently of the expansion of the sugar economy. For the first 160 years, the Atlantic boat trade in African slaves was correlated with a host of different factors, from the use of Africans in domestic slavery in Europe and Spanish America, to the evolution of sugar and other products for the European market in the Atlantic islands and America. It is only after 1600 that the movement of Africans across the Atlantic became so intimately tied to the expansion of American sugar production. Moreover, until 1700, Africa earned more from the exportation of gold, ivory, and pepper than it did from slaves.

  Though of limited importance, slavery still existed in Europe in 1492. Like almost all complex societies in world history until that time, the nations of Europe had known slaves, and slavery in earlier centuries had been a fundamental labor institution. From the sixth century B.C. until the eighth century A.D., under the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire slave labor had been almost as important as peasant labor in the production of goods for local and long distance markets. Under the Islamic states of the Mediterranean world from the eighth century onward, slavery also had been important, though less tied to production and more associated with the state and private household economies. But in fifteenth-century Christian Europe, as in most such societies, slavery was primarily domestic slavery, which meant that the labor power of the household was extended through the use of these workers.

  Equally, slavery existed in the African continent from recorded times. But like Medieval Christian Europe, it was a relatively minor institution in the period before the opening up of the Atlantic slave trade. It could be found as a domestic institution in most of the region’s more complex societies, and a few exceptional states may have developed more industrial forms of slave production. But African slaves were to be found outside the region as well. With no all-embracing religious or political unity, the numerous states of Africa were free to buy and sell slaves and to even export them to North African areas. Caravan routes across the Sahara had existed from recorded times, and slaves formed a part of Africa’s export trade to the Mediterranean from pre-Roman to the modern times. But a new dimension to that trade occurred with the expansion of Islam in the eighth century. As the Islamic world spread into India and the Eastern Mediterranean, Islamic merchants came to play an ever more important part in the African slave trade. The frontier zones of the sub-Saharan savannas, the Red Sea region, and the East Coast ports on the Indian Ocean, in turn, became major centers for the expansion of Moslem influence. From the ninth to the fifteenth century, a rather steady international slave trade occurred, with the majority of forced migrants being women and children. Some six major and often interlocking caravan routes and another two major coastal regions may have accounted for as many as 5,000 to 10,000 slaves per annum in the period from 800 to 1600 A.D., accounting for anywhere from 3.5 to 10 million Africans who left their homelands.1

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  The Routledge History of Slavery

  • Gad Heuman, Trevor Burnard, Gad Heuman, Trevor Burnard(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1998 : 72–97).

  The organisation of the trade

  Few early modern transatlantic trades were as complex as the Atlantic slave trade. It was inherently risky, as it involved myriad business decisions that had to be undertaken in combination with a variety of people in several places across the Atlantic world, and required a great degree of entrepreneurial skill as well as steely nerves. It is often described as the triangular trade, as ships involved in the slave trade followed a triangular route between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Goods produced in Europe were placed on ships that sailed to Africa, where these goods were exchanged for slaves. These slaves were transported to the Americas in the second leg of the voyage, usually termed the Middle Passage – a particularly risky leg of the voyage for merchants and ship captains, and a notoriously dreadful experience for traumatised African captives. On arrival in the Americas, these captives were sold in various forms of auction, with most captives becoming slaves on American plantations, producing tropical crops such as sugar, rice and similar goods. The final leg of the voyage saw ships returning to Europe, carrying either tropical produce or, more often over time, bills of exchange and specie that had been gained through the sale of slaves. If it all went well for the slave traders, which it often did not, then the profits that could be made were considerable. Evidence from Bristol and Liverpool in the 1770s and 1780s suggests that merchants could expect a rate of return between eight and ten per cent from slave-trading voyages. Such returns on invested capital were over twice what might be gained from less risky investments, such as government consols, and justified the risks and long-drawn-out nature of the voyages (Morgan, 2007

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  Atlantic Lives

  A Comparative Approach to Early America

  • Timothy Shannon(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Even before Columbus’s voyages to America, Portuguese and Spanish ships were exploring the West African coast, engaging in trade with the people they encountered there, and bringing slaves back to their homeports. Once the Portuguese began cultivating sugar in Brazil, African slaves became an important part of the trans-Atlantic trade with the New World. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately 10 million Africans came to the Americas as a result of the Atlantic Slave Trade, making them the largest immigrant group to the New World during that time. Of those 10 million, about 60 percent went to the Caribbean, 35 percent to Latin America, and 5 percent to North America; the majority arrived between 1700 and 1800, with the peak years of the trade occurring around 1780. African slaves provided labor for plantation colonies that produced sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton, and coffee, and they worked as miners, domestic servants, and urban craftsmen. Regardless of its location, climate, geography, or nationality, each colony in the New World recognized the legitimacy of slavery and used the labor of African slaves.

  Throughout the Americas, European colonists came to equate slavery with sub-Saharan Africans and the color of their skin. Slavery had been an important part of the social and economic orders of the ancient Roman and medieval Islamic worlds, but in both of those cases, people of various ethnicities, religions, and races were eligible for enslavement, most typically as a result of warfare and captivity. In the Atlantic World, slavery acquired a distinctive racial designation: it became a lifelong, hereditary status most often justified by the use of racial classifications that defined Africans as inherently unequal and best suited to serve whites. Thus, while using a form of labor as old as history itself, the colonization of the Americas created an entirely new kind of slavery that would have profound ramifications for the intellectual and social development of the Western World.

  The Atlantic Slave Trade was also a business involving the exchange of manufactured goods for human beings. The bulk of this trade took place along the West African coast, near the mouths of four major river systems: the Senegal, the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo (also known as the Zaire) (see Map 5.1

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  Africa and the Expansion of International Society

  Surrendering the Savannah

  • John Anthony Pella, Jr(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Above, in what is one of the earliest communications between African and European monarchs, King Afonso writes to his Portuguese counterpart to explain a law recently passed by himself and the royal council of Kongo. The intention of the law was to protect both Kongolese citizens and Portuguese merchant interests, and was triggered by confrontations between these parties along the Kongo coastline. There, as Portuguese merchants sought to embark slaves on their ships Kongolese guards would often protest, claiming that some of these slaves were actually free men of Kongo. Such confrontations were worrisome for Afonso; they demonstrated that the safety of both his people and his political system were being undermined, while simultaneously showing that the Portuguese traders, who were becoming increasingly integral to his state’s economy, were “offended” (to use Afonso’s words). While limited to Kongolese–Portuguese relations, this letter, these confrontations and these worries do well to capture the fundamental issues that were present throughout much of West-Central Africa during this period. Specifically, as Africans and Europeans gradually came to form an associative-type society based on calculated economic self interest, Africans were at the same time forced to balance their trade in slaves with the destabilizing impact extensive trading could have upon the institutions, norms and values shared across the West-Central African system.

  Such are the issues explored in this chapter, which in its totality traces how Africans and Europeans constructed the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the various consequences this had for the West-Central African international system, and how this brought West-Central Africa and Europe into a common international system. Scholars estimate that the individuals involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade managed to ship anywhere between 8,000,000 and 15,000,000 Africans to the Americas over the course of nearly 400 years,1 and the capture, exchange and shipment of such an astounding number clearly necessitated a high level of cooperation between West-Central Africans and Europeans (Curtin 1969: 275; Inikori 1976; Inikori 1997; Database 2010). To trace how this cooperation developed, the first two sections of this chapter detail how the trans-Atlantic slave trade evolved in West-Central Africa, firstly in what is termed the period of first contact,2

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  From the Galleons to the Highlands

  Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas

  • Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat, Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat, Wheat David(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • UNM Press

    (Publisher)

  Two-thirds of the more than two million enslaved Africans arriving in the Spanish Americas disembarked before 1810—prior to the era of large-scale sugar cultivation in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Even in Cuba, the size and significance of this island’s slave-based economy was large and diverse well before 1789, which is a useful corrective to studies that have portrayed Cuba as an underdeveloped backwater prior to the sugar boom. This large inflow of captives during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is indeed remarkable when we remember that the labor force sustaining the most valuable export of Spain’s American colonies—silver—was largely Amerindian. In every other European empire in the Americas, by contrast, enslaved Africans and their descendants produced all significant exports until well into the nineteenth century. British military and industrial ascendancy in the eighteenth century and the meteoric rise and fall of Saint-Domingue have blinded scholars to the continued expansion of the Spanish colonies and their populations of African descent through to independence. Black populations had a key role in the growth of the Spanish Americas before 1800.

  In addition to revealing the slave trade’s importance for the colonization and development of the Spanish Americas, the chapters in this volume provide insight into the Spanish colonies’ significance for the broader history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and consequently, for Atlantic history. The history of the slave trade to Spanish America had implications for the whole Atlantic in the sense that it drew on all European branches of this traffic, and captives from all African regions engaged in this traffic landed in at least one of the many Spanish colonies. It was not only the metropolitan authorities of the different European powers who fought over and negotiated slave trade contracts but also, at the local level, officials and merchants. As Bianca Premo’s recent work indicates, Africans and people of African descent—even, in some cases, the very subjects being trafficked—played a role in shaping Spanish and Spanish American law pertaining to slavery and the slave trade.6 All these groups helped to influence the transimperial trade flows of the New World.

  For the first decades of the slave traffic, as for the last, the slave trade provides a previously overlooked means of gauging the economic strength of the Spanish Americas relative to that of other European empires. Spain’s reliance on enslaved Africans in various sectors beginning in the early 1500s (in addition to coerced Amerindian labor) may help to explain the speed and scope of Spanish expansion across much of the Caribbean, in comparison to the relatively slow development of Portuguese colonization in Brazil during the same decades.7 In the mid-nineteenth century, the sugar sector of Cuba ensured that this island probably had a higher per capita output than the United States, as well as the first railroad network in Latin America.8 But even in the eighteenth century, exports to Europe from the Spanish Americas had a far greater value than those from their British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese counterparts. In 1700, the total output of the non-Spanish Caribbean, more than 90 percent of which comprised sugar and sugar by-products, amounted to 1.7 million pounds sterling, or 7.6 million pesos.9 In the Spanish possessions, by contrast, bullion production alone averaged eight million pesos annually from 1696 to 1700, an amount that made them more valuable to Spain than Brazil was to Portugal and than both mainland and Caribbean colonies were to the British. Seventy years later, the supremacy of the Spanish was only slightly eroded. The total annual value in pesos of French Caribbean output was 23.1 million, and of British, 16.2 million, whereas the Spanish Empire generated exports worth close to 31 million pesos—29.2 of which was bullion. Even if we include the thirteen mainland colonies in the British total, the Spanish Americas still come out well ahead—it is just that they no longer outproduced all their competitors combined.10 The cession of Jamaica to Britain and Saint-Domingue to France apparently did not enable the British and French to catch up prior to the era of independence; Spanish America grew vigorously until at least 1800.11 Alongside specie exports and population estimates, the slave trade can be used as an indicator of the continued dynamism of Spanish America in the Atlantic prior to 1800, and in Cuba specifically, to 1867. Economic divergence between the Spanish Americas and the United States began only in the nineteenth century.12

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  Humanitarianism, empire and transnationalism, 1760-1995

  Selective humanity in the Anglophone world

  • Joy Damousi, Trevor Burnard, Alan Lester, Joy Damousi, Trevor Burnard, Alan Lester, Andrew S. Thompson(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  Transatlantic humanitarianism, 1760–1838

  Passage contains an image

  1 Anthony Benezet: A Short History of Guinea and its impact on early British abolitionism

  Trevor Burnard

  One enduring question in the vast historiography of slavery and abolition is how the institution of Atlantic slavery, based on African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, came under attack in Britain in the 1780s. Atlantic slavery was transformed from an institution that had the full support of Western European states, notably Britain and France – one that had brought considerable economic benefits to Europe, as well as forming the foundation for colonial prosperity in the plantation societies of British North America, and the French and British Caribbean – into one that was a focus of the greatest moral reform movement of modern times. This moral reform movement – abolitionism – hardly existed before the Seven Years War (1756–63), although it can be argued that the philosophical case against slavery had been established by Montesquieu and John Locke in the late seventeenth and through the early eighteenth centuries.

  1

  That philosophical case, however, was theoretical and did little to stop the juggernaut that was the slave and plantation interest, focused in particular on the necessity to continue the slave trade to the Americas, especially to the West Indies, where it was an essential bulwark in a highly destructive plantation system. Criticisms of the slave trade and the plantation system on economic grounds – the grounds that mostly held in France until very late in the abolition process – also tended to have academic intentions rather than practical outcomes. The start of abolitionism as a problem within the small religious sect of Quakers during the Seven Years War, when a few marginal figures within Quakerism began to convince followers that being involved in the Atlantic slave trade was akin to violating the long-held Quaker concept of pacifism, did little to harm the slave trade. In both Britain and France, the trade expanded rapidly after the end of the Seven Years War and continued to expand until the 1790s, feeding the plantation system of the French and British Antilles, when the production of sugar and other tropical crops was increasing at a rapid rate.2

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  Slave Trades, 1500–1800

  Globalization of Forced Labour

  • Patrick Manning(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  White Over Black, ch. 7.

  65 Greene, Negro in New England, pp.28-31, 57-60; McManus, Black Bondage, pp. 18-19, 29-30; Westbury, ‘Colonial Virginia and the Trade’, 128-31; Duncan ‘Servitude in South Carolina', 138-41; Rawley, Transatlantic Slave Trade, pp.336-7.

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  11 A Marginal Institution on the Margin of the Atlantic System: The Portuguese Southern Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century

  Joseph C. Miller

  Slaving's economic contribution to the Atlantic system has proven a slippery beast, simultaneously of sensible significance1 but difficult to measure.2 Examination of the economics of slave trading on the scale of an “Atlantic system," often mixed with the function of slavery in America, a closely related but analytically distinct economic sector, has until very recently focused narrowly on its direct contribution to the most dramatic and portentous development in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century Atlantic economy: Britain's transition to in- dustrial capitalism.3 Now, however, Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman have productively both broadened the range of economic effects relating slavery and slave trading to European growth and expanded the focus beyond the boundaries of separate imperial systems to explore the entire Atlantic system as an integrated economic unit extending from the banks of the Zambezi, Plate, and Mississippi - if not also the Indus - to the Bank of England.4 A paradoxical leitmotif that emerges from this recent work, if not a dominant theme, is that the economic significance of slavery and the slave trade lies not in their centrality to the course of British or European economic growth, where others have sought it and that they demonstrably lacked,5 but precisely in their marginality to the main currents of economic growth and development around the Atlantic.

  Slaving was marginal to the Atlantic economy in structural terms, in a sense not so much inconsistent with formal analysis of a fully market economy as one highlighting the institutional aspects of a mercantilist system fraught with monopoly, privilege, and other imperfections. As it was an integrated economic market, growth occurred throughout the system, and the groups competing within it each found niches in which they enjoyed comparative advantages. Specialization of economic function increased as the scale expanded and the parts worked out their complementarities, with financial resources - central banking, efficient currencies, and credit, allocated responsively to more productive and profitable sectors - and, eventually, fossil fuel-powered technology and higher productivity becoming concentrated in a northern Atlantic core with the capital to stimulate, direct, and draw monetary profits from the other sectors. As the large economies with their gold and silver reserves concentrated as monetary reserves, rather than, say, on gilded altars, Britain, northern Europe, and the United States became central to the system, and Portugal, Brazil, and Africa became marginal.

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  The Slave Trade & Migration

  • Paul Finkelman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE CONTEXT OF WEST AFRICAN HISTORY

  BY J. D. FAGE

  THERE have been at least three widely held and influential views about slavery and the slave trade in West Africa, and also about their relation to its society in respect both of their origins and of their effects on it.

  The first is that the institution of slavery was natural and endemic in West African society, so that the coming of foreign traders with a demand for labour, whether from Muslim North Africa or from the countries of maritime Europe, led swiftly and automatically to the development by West Africans of an organized trade in slaves for export.

  The second is a contrary view, that it was rather these external demands for labour which led to a great growth of both slavery and slave-trading in West Africa, and so corrupted its indigenous society.

  The third view, which may or may not be associated with the second, is that the external demand for West African labour, especially in the period ca. 1650 to ca. 1850, was so great that the export of slaves to meet it had a disastrous effect on the peoples of West Africa, disrupting not only their natural demographic development but their social and moral development as well.

  In this paper it is proposed to examine and reassess these views in the light of recent research and thinking, and, as a result, to offer an interpretation of the roles of slavery and the slave trade in the history of West Africa which may be more in accord with its economic and social realities.

  The first view, namely that the export slave trade was possible because both slavery and trading in slaves were already deeply rooted in West African society, was of course a view propagated by the European slave-traders, especially perhaps when the morality of their business was being questioned. Norris’s and Dalzel’s books on Dahomey towards the close of the eighteenth century are developed examples of this attitude;1

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