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The Christian Science Monitor
Features
Thursday January 29, 1998 Edition
Books
THE SLAVE TRADE: THE STORY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: 1440-1870
By Hugh Thomas
Simon & Schuster 908 pp., $38
Ambitious History Of Atlantic Slave Trade Bogs Down in Detail
Leonard Bushkoff, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BOSTON -- Hugh Thomas is, quite simply, a phenomenon. This remarkably productive, popularizing historian has written a dozen or more books over a 35-year span. They range from his most famous work, on the Spanish Civil War, through studies of the cold war, modern Cuba, global technology, the conquest of Mexico, and now this overwhelming tome, "The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870."
But there are difficulties with this latest work: a lack of discipline and much structure beyond chronology.
Of course, Thomas is fluent in the French and especially the Spanish sources. Unfortunately, there is little penetration, little attempt to develop themes, present ideas, or get to the bottom of things.
The result is a bloated, slap-dash assemblage of facts and factlets that includes every conceivable name, but imposes a casual, occasionally cynical, irony on the vital questions of motivation and causality.
There are endless recitals of expeditions undertaken, African slaves carried off, sold in the New World, and marched to their new "homes"; of this profitable business fought over by Portuguese, then Spanish, then Dutch, then French, then British, and finally American slavers; of the pirates, privateers, and men of war that hovered around the edges; and of the changes in wealth and politics that influenced the trade.
The book contains not one, but two back-to-back texts, the first dealing with "high" slavery, its period of acceptance and expansion, principally by Spain and Portugal from the 15th century onward; the second with its rejection by the two expanding Western democracies, Britain and the United States, and the consequent efforts at worldwide elimination during 1780 to 1860.
The watershed between these two falls during 1776-1815, the period of the American and French nationalist and democratic revolutions. Entitled the "World Revolution of the West," this period destroyed the ideological - though not the economic - basis for a slavery that was seen thereafter in the northern US and especially in Great Britain as an unmitigated horror, unworthy of survival, and ripe for attack by the Royal Navy.
This massive shift in thinking goes essentially unnoticed by Thomas, aside from a very few pages on the Enlightenment. His text is too focused on the minutiae of the names of ships, of their captains, the number of guns they bore, and the events that befell them. Thomas does, to be sure, emphasize the role of William Wilberforce, the English statesman, the British Quakers and Methodists, but fails to convey their antislavery fervor.
Thomas is little interested in ideas and political movements, but very much in economic growth - sugar tonnage, cotton exports, the cost of slaves - and the wealthy entrepreneurs this involved. He is entirely oblivious to the individuals held as slaves, the great unknown in a book purporting to be about a process in which they were central. Though slave revolts are mentioned, for example, and clearly the masters were increasingly apprehensive about them from 1800 onward, nothing else is stated.
The result is an outmoded, virtually 19th-century-like history. It lacks context. It presents one fact after another, strung together chronologically. Only dominant men have roles. Its central figures are mere creatures, without feelings, let alone ideas.
* Leonard Bushkoff regularly reviews history for the Monitor.
David Brion Davis reviews The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn
Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books
Copyright © 1998 NYREV, Inc.
June 11, 1998
A Big Business
DAVID BRION DAVIS
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870
by Hugh Thomas
908 pages, $37.50 (hardcover)
published by Simon and Schuster
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
by Robin Blackburn
602 pages, $22.00 (paperback), $35.00 (hardcover)
published by Verso
By limiting their attention to nation-states, especially the United States, historians have usually fragmented and obscured our
understanding of the multinational Atlantic slave system. When most Americans hear the words "African-American
slavery," they immediately think of the South and the Civil War. The story supposedly begins in Virginia, in 1619, when a
colonist named John Rolfe casually noted that "a dutch man of warre… sold us twenty Negars."1 At best, the standard
texts make only passing reference to the flow of African labor to the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Portuguese Brazil. Even in US
history, the subject of slavery has traditionally been given a marginal place—a chapter, as it were, in the history of the South (or
recently a more prominent position in African-American studies).2 Even most American college graduates would probably be
astonished to learn that Portugal began importing slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1440s; that well before Columbus"s
famous voyages the Portuguese were exploiting black slave labor on sugar plantations in Madeira and São Tomé, off the coast of
West Africa; and that enslaved African migrants to the New World greatly outnumbered European immigrants in the first three
hundred and twenty years of settlement.
An understanding of the phenomenon of racial slavery, even in a specific locale such as Virginia or Texas, requires some knowledge
of what Robin Blackburn terms "The Old World Background of New World Slavery," as well as some knowledge of the
multinational character of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave colonies, and the growing markets that absorbed the latter"s
produce.
Why did "white slavery" flourish in the early Middle Ages and then disappear and become morally repugnant in the very
Northern European nations that became leaders in establishing plantation colonies and transporting millions of African workers to the
New World? Why was it that African kings and merchants from the Senegambia region on down to the Niger delta, the Congo, and
on south and eastward to Madagascar and Mozambique, continued to sell such staggering numbers of slaves, with only rare and brief
protests, to Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, English, French, Swedish, Danish, German, American, Cuban, and Brazilian traders?
Why did the representatives of so many different religions—Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, New Christians, even Moravians
and for a time Quakers—express so few scruples about buying and selling human beings? How can we explain the diffusion of racial
slavery into non-plantation regions, such as New England and French Canada, so that black slaves could be found by 1750 from the
St. Lawrence to the Rio de la Plata, from Québec and Boston to Santiago? If American colonists like young John Adams could
angrily claim in 1765 that the mother country was treating them like "Negroes," what does this say about the
psychological influence of African-American slaves on the construction of white Creole, or American, identities?3 Finally, what was
the relationship between New World slavery, traditionally interpreted as a backward or regressive institution, and the much-debated
industrial revolution and emergence of "modernity"?
Many thousands of scholarly works on New World slavery have appeared since the pioneering books in the 1940s and 1950s by Eric
Williams, Frank Tannenbaum, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Stanley Elkins. Nevertheless, very few historians have succeeded in
conveying the global dimensions of a ghastly system that first united five continents as Europeans traded Asian textiles, among other
commodities, for African slaves who, after surviving the horrors of the Middle Passage to North or South America, were forced to
produce the sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton that helped to stimulate and sustain modern consumer economies. There
are various reasons for this historical neglect, even apart from the racial myopia of white scholars and the parochial focus of histories
limited to a particular nation-state. We are only beginning to discover the immense quantity and relative inaccessibility of many
relevant records and sources. This problem is matched by the complexity and contentiousness of many issues, such as the effects
within Africa of exporting millions of slaves for some twelve centuries to Asia (between 869 and 883 CE black slaves rebelled and
fought Arab armies in the Tigris-Euphrates delta), and millions more for over four centuries to Portugal, Spain, and then the entire
Western Hemisphere. Moreover, few historians today have a command of the nine or more languages needed to study the most
important surviving records concerning the Atlantic slave trade.
Future scholars will fortunately have access to the records of at least 27,233 Atlantic slave trading voyages in a "data set"
gathered, organized, and put on CD-ROM by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard.4 This collection is said to cover some 90 percent of
all British, French, and Dutch slave trading voyages, and more than two thirds of the estimated grand total. By pressing a few keys on
their computers, historians and students will soon be able to track particular voyages on the Middle Passage and assemble
information on captains, ship owners, ship size, crew, mortality, the number and sex of slaves, slave revolts, and changing patterns of
the trade from 1562 to the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the UNESCO Slave Route Project has sponsored international
conferences and teams of researchers in an attempt to gather and preserve records in five continents regarding the greatest
involuntary human migration in history. While the UNESCO scholars have searched for materials from Haiti and Jamaica to the
Vatican, their most original and significant findings may well be indigenous African records, many of them in Arabic, which need to
be saved from various environmental hazards.5 It may be evidence of the speed of the information revolution that neither Hugh
Thomas nor Robin Blackburn mentions the Du Bois Institute data set, the UNESCO materials, or the flow of information and
continuing discussions on the Internet Slavery List.
There is a pressing need at the moment, however, for accurate and comprehensive syntheses of the specialized studies usually known
only to specialists. It is remarkable that the two long and immensely ambitious books under review were both published in the same
year, 1997, that both are the product of many years of extensive research (mostly in secondary sources), and that both are written by
Englishmen. Perhaps Britons, drawing on their own traditions of imperial history, find it easier to take on such immense subjects as
the making of New World slavery and 430 years of the Atlantic slave trade. As an unapologetic Marxist, editor of The New Left
Review, and author of the outstanding book The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848,6 Robin Blackburn writes in the great
tradition of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. Hugh Thomas, who was made a life peer in the House of Lords
in 1981, has written more popular works on a variety of subjects including the Spanish Civil War and the conquest of Mexico, as well
as World History: The Story of Mankind from Prehistory to the Present.
Thomas provides a straightforward narrative account of Muslim and Christian slave-making and how it was succeeded by the
fifteenth-century Portuguese naval expeditions that first captured and then began purchasing slaves along Africa"s western
coast. Thomas is especially knowledgeable about Iberian history and presents much new personal detail regarding the early
Portuguese and Spanish slave traders and the families who profited from the traffic. After moving on to the Dutch, English, and
French internationalization of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, Thomas devotes eight chapters to the ways Africans
were enslaved by other Africans and the stages of lethal transport from the interior of the continent to the putrid barracoons on the
coast and on the tightly packed, stifling slave ships to their ultimate destinations in the New World. The last part of the book deals
with the abolition movement, the nature of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and Britain"s aggressive measures to
suppress it. One senses that Thomas would like to be regarded as a pure empiricist and storyteller. He shuns theories and theorizing,
but deluges the reader with torrents of facts—facts which are often fascinating but which, as we shall see below, include a disturbing
number of mistakes.
Although The Making of New World Slavery is less well-written than Thomas"s book, it will have far greater appeal to
scholars. Blackburn"s introduction is dense and disjointed, and it contains obligatory quotations from Foucault and
Baudrillard, and addresses such fashionable themes as "modernity," "identity," and "the dynamics of
civil society."
It was long reassuring, as Blackburn rightly suggests, "to identify slavery with traditionalism, patrimonialism and
backwardness." This was the lesson of classical social science from the time of Adam Smith (Blackburn also mentions in this
connection Auguste Comte, Max Weber, and Ludwig von Mises, but not Karl Marx). While Robert William Fogel, Stanley L.
Engerman, Claudia Dale Goldin, and other "econometricians" have won much acclaim for documenting the productivity,
profitability, and capitalist character of slavery in the American South, Blackburn is the first historian to explore at some length the
role of the larger New World slave system in "the advent of modernity," by which he means the arrival of the modern
industrial economy. After making tantalizing but undeveloped references to a kind of Darwinian ""natural selection"
of social institutions and practices" that favored plantation slavery, he sensibly concludes that "slavery in the New World
was above all a hybrid mixing ancient and modern, European business and African husbandry, American and Eastern plants and
processes, elements of traditional patrimonialism with up-to-date bookkeeping and individual ownership." Blackburn"s
long chapters move from the Old World background and the uses of racial slavery in Portugal, Africa, and the various New World
colonies to the eighteenth-century economic boom and British industrialization.
With respect to the Africans" part in selling as many as eleven or twelve million slaves to Europeans, nothing in either book
rivals a succinct quotation from the late African-American scholar Nathan Huggins, which Blackburn uses as one of his first
epigrams:
The twentieth-century Western mind is frozen by the horror of men selling and buying others as slaves and even more stunned at the
irony of black men serving as agents for the enslavement of blacks by whites…. The racial wrong was lost on African merchants,
who saw themselves as selling people other than their own. The distinctions of tribe were more real to them than race, a concept that
was yet to be refined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western rationalists.
Despite inevitable overlap and repetition when discussing slavery or the slave trade in the centuries from the 1440s to the 1770s, the
new books by Thomas and Blackburn could hardly be more different. Thomas affirms at the outset that "historians should not
look for villains," but 784 pages later he praises "the heroes"—the French, British, American, and Spanish writers
and abolitionists who "achieved the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery in the Americas." Very little is said
in either book about slave heroes and slave resistance, though Blackburn discussed some slave resistance and especially the impact
of the Haitian Revolution in his 1989 book.
Blackburn succeeds in conveying a deep sense of the "superexploitation" of millions of black slaves working millions of
uncompensated hours to produce wealth that flowed into white industrial investment and conspicuous display. He shows no
hesitation in identifying the historical villains: not the Baroque governments and popes that first authorized the African slave trade so
much as the "civil society" that broke with the traditional "moral economy" and unleashed "rampant
capitalism and the free market." While Blackburn"s arguments regarding civil society and the transition "from
baroque to modern" are difficult to follow, he reinforces the often forgotten point made by Robert William Fogel (and many
others) that market forces and economic self-interest can produce the most immoral and humanly destructive institutions, epitomized
historically by racial slavery in the New World.7 I should emphasize that Blackburn does not see the New World slave system as the
necessary or optimum path to a modern society. But once chosen, because of its absolute centrality to the history of the past four
hundred years it left a profound taint on the Western world we know.
Whereas Thomas totally rejects Eric Williams"s "shocking argument" that profits from the slave trade financed the
Industrial Revolution (Williams had not confined his argument to the slave trade, but had spoken of the larger and more ambiguous
"triangular trade," which would presumably include the total profits from New World slavery),8 Blackburn carefully
considers the diverse views of various economic historians and concludes that while New World slavery did not produce capitalism,
profits from the New World slave system made a significant contribution to British economic growth and investment in
manufacturing.
In fact, Thomas provides telling examples that support this view, such as John Ashton, a Liverpool slave trader who helped finance
the canal to Manchester; John Kennion and Brian Blundell, also of Liverpool, who turned to cotton manufacture and coal mining; and
the great eighteenth-century French slave trader, René Montaudoin, who founded in Nantes "a factory in the modern sense of
the word which made the first dyed cottons." And quite apart from the disputed question of profits and investment, Blackburn
points to the slave system"s neglected contribution to "the evolution of industrial discipline and principles of capitalist
rationalization."
One thinks, for example, of Joseph J. Ellis"s recent portrait of Thomas Jefferson as an efficiency expert, a kind of proto-
Frederick Winslow Taylor, personally enforcing "a rigid regimen" on the dozen or so young slave boys, "from 10
to 16 years of age," who worked long hours producing nails at the small factory at Monticello.9 Blackburn goes on to note the
seeming paradox that "not by chance were prominent Abolitionists in the forefront of prison reform, factory legislation and the
promotion of public education." He might have added that English and American Quakers, who were in the vanguard of the
abolition movement, also led the way in devising and imposing new forms of labor discipline. There is a profound historical irony in
the fact that "Speedy Fred" Taylor, our century"s exponent of efficiency and the first to dispossess workers of all
control of the workplace, was born of Quaker parents in Germantown, Pennsyslvania, the site in 1688 of the world"s first great
petition against human bondage.10
British and American abolitionists initiated a tradition of sharply differentiating New World and especially Anglo-American slavery
from all previous forms of servitude. They were particularly intent on showing that modern plantation slavery was more inhumane and
oppressive than the bondage recognized and sanctioned in the Bible or the servitude found in contemporary Africa. This line of
argument later appealed to Marxists and other critics who were eager to demonize capitalism and market forces as the sources of the
world"s worst example of human exploitation. Blackburn is surely right when he insists that "the novelty of New World
slavery resided in the scale and intensity of the slave traffic and the plantation trades." But because Blackburn desperately
wants to see New World slavery as a unique aberration, as a tragic choice dictated by capitalist greed when other choices were
available, he tends to romanticize earlier forms of human bondage. He forgets that slaves in premodern societies have often been
subject to cannibalism, torture, ritual sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary death at the whim of an owner.
When Blackburn asserts that "the slavery of the Ancient World had not denied the basic humanity of the slave," he also
forgets the appalling descriptions of slaves in the mine shafts at Laurium in ancient Attica and in Ptolemaic Egypt. One need not dwell
on the laws that sanctioned the Romans" pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves convicted of raping a virgin or
crucifying four hundred household slaves after the murder of Pedanius Secundas, in 61 CE, in order to agree with the Quaker John
Woolman that no human being is saintly enough to be entrusted with the power of owning a slave as a piece of property, a power
which has always involved some degree of dehumanization.11 As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have demonstrated, while
small numbers of highly privileged slaves can be found throughout history, even in nineteenth-century Mississippi, the institution of
slavery has always depended on violent domination, dishonor, and a kind of "social death."
Hugh Thomas adopts an extremely effective literary device to convey the continuities between slavery in medieval Europe and the
New World. His book begins with what seems to be a dramatic turning point in world history: Gomes Eannes de Zurara"s vivid
description of the sale, on August 8, 1444, in southwest Portugal, of 235 African slaves, "some white enough," some
"like mulattoes," others "as black as Ethiops." This document has often been cited or reprinted to mark the
beginning of Europe"s exploitation of Africa. But Thomas proceeds to show that this sale of African slaves was part of a long
sequence of events that included centuries of warfare and mutual enslavement between Christians and Muslims; the Christian
reconquest of Portugal and Spain and the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, in North Africa, in 1415; the development of the Arab and
Berber caravan trade in gold and slaves, which brought increasing numbers of black slaves (classified as sclavi negri) to Christian
Sicily after the mid-1400s; and the westward shift in slave trading and sugar cultivation, which was hastened in 1453 by the Turkish
conquest of Constantinople and the decline of the Venetian and Genoese trade in "Slavic slaves" from the Black Sea.12
Neither Thomas nor Blackburn gives sufficient attention to the precedents set by Italian slave traders in the Black Sea and
Mediterranean. As Stephen P. Bensch has pointed out, "Mediterranean slavery has frequently been brushed aside in synthetic
treatments of Western servitude as a curious holdover, a peripheral phenomenon,…an unexpected detour on the road leading from
servitude to freedom, all the more unsettling because it appeared in the sophisticated urban societies of Italy, Southern France, and
Eastern Iberia."13 But Thomas does emphasize the direct continuities between medieval multiracial servitude and the kind of
black bondage that first emerged on the sugar-producing Atlantic islands such as Madeira and São Tomé and then spread in the early
sixteenth century to the New World. Blackburn provides much similar information, but by placing his brief discussion of the Atlantic
islands after his chapter on "The Old World Background to New World Slavery," he reinforces his theme of
discontinuity and distracts attention from the fact that when Columbus first entered the Caribbean, thousands of black slaves in the
Old World were already producing sugar for a European market.14
The most striking evidence of continuity can be seen in the great mercantile and banking families of the Italian Renaissance. The
Marchionnis of Florence, for example, had long engaged in the Black Sea slave trade (Kaffa, their base in the Crimea, resembled in
many respects the forts and trading posts Europeans would later establish along the West African coast). In 1470, after the Ottoman
Turks had endangered the Italian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and had diminished Europe"s supply of both sugar and
slaves, young Bartolommeo Marchionni moved to Lisbon, where he joined a growing community of Florentines.
Bartolommeo soon owned sugar plantations in Madeira and purchased from the Portuguese king the right to trade in slaves from
Guinea.
According to Thomas, Bartolommeo had ships in Vasco da Gama"s expedition to India in 1498 and in Cabral"s
expedition of 1500 that discovered Brazil; he became "a monopoly trader in slaves from the Benin River in the 1490s, carrying
captives not only to Portugal and Madeira but also to Elmina, on the Gold Coast, where he sold them to African merchants for
gold." One might add that this friend of the Medicis and Amerigo Vespucci also sent African slaves back to Pisa and
Tuscany.15 There were many other Florentines and Genoese who provided links from slave trading in the Mediterranean, which most
people took for granted except when Muslim raiders enslaved Europeans, to the new social orders in Madeira, the Canary Islands,
São Tomé, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
Judging whether enslavement was a continuous historical process or whether its American form was a historical exception is partly a
matter of what historians choose to emphasize, and both Thomas and Blackburn recognize the multinational sponsorship of the early
slave trade to the New World. In 1518 Spain"s young King Charles, soon to be the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, received
fervent pleas from various Spanish colonists who were alarmed by the mortality and "weakness" of the Indians and who
argued that only African slaves, like those in the Atlantic islands, could provide the labor needed to fulfill the New World"s
promise. King Charles agreed, and as Thomas puts it, the Flemish-born king awarded the coveted grant for supplying slaves to a
Savoyard friend, the governor of Bresse in Burgundy. He in turn sold his rights, through a Castilian, to Genoese merchants—
"who, in turn, would, of course, have to arrange for the Portuguese to deliver the slaves. For no Spanish ship could legally go
to Guinea [according to the papal Treaty of Tordesillas], the monarchs of the two countries were then allies, and anyway, only the
Portuguese could supply slaves in that quantity."
Perhaps the most startling point that Hugh Thomas makes about the early Portuguese slave trade is the way it became dominated by
New Christian or converso merchants. Fernão de Loronha, for example, an associate and successor of Marchionni, gained a
temporary monopoly of trade in the Bight of Benin and supplied slaves and wine to Elmina (Africans in the Gold Coast region
continued to buy slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for gold). José Rodrigues Mascarenhas and Fernando Jiménez were other
sixteenth-century merchants of Jewish ancestry who gained control over large segments of the slave trade to the Americas. King
Philip II of Spain awarded Portuguese New Christians with asiento contracts to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves.
Some of these merchants had relatives or close friends in Italy, Brazil, or Antwerp, long the major center for refining and marketing
sugar.
Thomas, unlike Blackburn, avoids the error of thinking of these converso merchants as Jews.16 Since there has been recent
controversy over the Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade,17 it is important to be on guard against the Inquisition"s or the
Nazis" definition of Jewishness: that is, having the taint of Jewish ancestry. In 1492 many of the Jews expelled from Spain
settled in Portugal, and in 1497 the Portuguese king banished all the Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Given the frequency
of intermarriage between New Christians and Old Christians, many of these New Christian families would have lost their converso
identity and been assimilated if there had been no doctrine of "purity of blood" and if the Inquisition had not become
obsessed with secret "judaizing" practices. Even so, with the passage of time, the great majority of New Christians
became absorbed in the Iberian Catholic culture. As Seymour Drescher has pointed out, most of the New Christians who made their
fortunes in Africa, Asia, or the Americas returned to Iberia and "were disinclined to resettle where they could openly practice
Judaism or even syncretic brands of family religiosity."18
But with respect to their participation in the slave trade, the genuineness of the conversos" Christian faith should be irrelevant.
Neither Blackburn nor Thomas fully grasps the central point. The Church and the Catholic crowns prohibited Jews from owning
baptized slaves or even traveling to the New World. What qualified men like Antônio Fernandes Elvas and Manuel Rodrigues Lamego
to transport thousands of African slaves to the Spanish New World was their convincing Christian identity. According to Thomas,
Pope Sixtus V thought so highly of Fernando Jiménez, despite his Jewish ancestry, that "he gave him the right to use his own
surname, Peretti." When doubts arose that a converso merchant or planter was not a genuine Christian, he was often burned at
the stake.
On an entirely different note, it would be irresponsible not to mention a problem of accuracy. Factual errors are inevitable in all
historical writing and are likely to increase in number as a historian takes on a global subject spanning many centuries. Nevertheless,
the frequency and character of Thomas"s mistakes shake the reader"s confidence in his book as a whole. Thus, contrary
to Thomas, Massachusetts and New Hampshire did not adopt gradual emancipation acts in the late eighteenth century, and New
Jersey"s law came in 1804, not before 1800. The article on the slave trade in Diderot"s Encyclopédie was not written by
Louis de Jaucourt, but was plagiarized by him from a work Thomas mentions, George Wallace"s System of the Principles of
the Laws of Scotland.19 Cotton Mather was anything but a Unitarian; indeed, his interest in Yale College (not yet
"University") arose from his fear that Harvard was becoming too liberal. The great slave revolt in St. Domingue (Haiti)
began in August 1791, not 1792. The American Whig party, moreover, did not yet exist in 1824, and Charles Fenton Mercer was not
an abolitionist. Thomas confuses Jonathan Edwards and James Stephen with their sons. It is simply wrong to assert that "slave
movements from Eastern to Western states numbered only about 127,000 between 1810 and 1860, and was worth only $3
million." (In that period the slave population in the Western states Thomas refers to increased by over 1,821,000.) The most
reliable recent studies estimate interregional movements of some 200,000 slaves each decade between 1820 and 1860. The United
States acquired Texas in 1845, not "in the wake of the Mexican War." According to Thomas, there were around six
million slaves in Brazil in 1851, an absurdly high figure. Nineteen years later, he writes, without the benefit of any emancipation act,
there were only one and a half million. Most embarrassing of all, it is the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, that
contains a "passage…where all men were declared free and equal, with inalienable rights."
To be scrupulously fair, one should stress that The Slave Trade contains over eight hundred pages and that Thomas typically
conveys dozens of "facts," most of them accurate or convincing, on each page. Given the immense amount of work
devoted to this volume, it is simply unfortunate that he and his editor were not more careful.
Taking all the more substantial points into account, the new books by Thomas and Blackburn complement each other. Thomas
provides much detail of the experiences of slaves and their owners that balances Blackburn"s rather arid but thought-provoking
arguments on the place of New World slavery in the cauldron of forces that created the modern world. Thomas"s The Slave
Trade will help many general readers grasp the magnitude and profound evil of the greatest forced migration in human history. In spite
of its shortcomings, The Making of New World Slavery should long be regarded, along with Blackburn"s The Overthrow of
Colonial Slavery, as a landmark in twentieth-century historiography.
1 It now seems highly probable that Africans arrived in Virginia before 1619. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "The
Founding Years of Virginia—and the United States," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Winter
1996), and William Thorndale, "The Virginia Census of 1619," Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, Vol. 33 (1995), pp. 155
-170 (I am indebted for this information to a communication on the Internet Slavery List by J. Douglas Deal). One should also note
the earlier arrival of numerous black slaves and freedpeople in Spanish Florida. For an excellent new and brief survey of the
beginnings of slavery north of Florida, see Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English
Colonies (Hill and Wang, 1997).
Gordon Wood, writing in these pages, has recently noted the encouraging trend toward comparative history and interest in
transatlantic connections ("Doing the Continental," The New York Review, November 20, 1997, pp. 51-55). But if one
looks at the way most academic jobs are defined and at the courses offered by most history departments, it becomes clear that the
teaching of history is still sharply categorized by nation-states and such geographic regions as colonial North America, early modern
Europe, and East Asia.
2 From the time of World War I, a succession of black historians, including Carter G. Woodson, William M. Brewer, Charles H.
Wesley, Benjamin Quarles, and Eric Williams, published significant work on African-American slavery, much of it in The Journal of
Negro History. But even the many editions of John Hope Franklin"s now classic work, From Slavery to Freedom, beginning in
1947, had little effect on the marginal treatment of slavery in most high school and college texts.
3 While historians have long been familiar with the American colonists" frequently expressed fear of being
"enslaved" by the activist British government, T.H. Breen has recently shown that Adams was more specific:
""We won"t be their Negroes," snarled a young John Adams in 1765, writing as "Humphry
Ploughjogger" in the Boston Gazette. Adams crudely insisted that Providence had never intended the American colonists
"for Negroes…and therefore never intended us for slaves…. I say we are as handsome as old English folks, and so should be
as free."" (Breen, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in
Need of Revising," The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1 [June 1997], p. 29.)
4 To be published in the coming year by Cambridge University Press. I am indebted to Professor David Eltis, of Queens University,
Ontario, for this information, which was given at a conference, "New Perspectives on Slavery and the Slave Trade,"
November 20-21, 1997, at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.
5 I am indebted for this information to Howard Dodson, of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public
Library, who presented a report at the November 20-21 Rutgers conference on slavery and the slave trade.
6 Verso, 1988. Reviewed by me in this journal, March 30, 1989.
7 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (Norton, 1989). In 1993 Fogel won the Nobel Prize in
Economic Science.
8 Some reviewers have confused this first "Williams thesis" with a second thesis that Williams makes: namely, that Britain
abolished the slave trade and then emancipated colonial slaves because the systems were in economic decline. This second line of
argument has been discredited by numerous studies. See, for example, my essay, "The Benefit of Slavery," The New
York Review, March 31, 1988, pp. 43-45.
9 American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf, 1997), p. 141.
10 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 233-
254; Sean Wilentz, "Speedy Fred"s Revolution," The New York Review, November 20, 1997, pp. 32-37. The fact
that Quakers were pacificists may lend support to Blackburn"s view that "unrestrained commercial calculation,"
not "the military revolution," was the decisive factor in leading to the "modern rational practices" described
by Foucault and Weber.
11 See my essay, "At the Heart of Slavery," The New York Review, October 17, 1996, pp. 51-54.
12 The word for "slave" in Western European languages was derived from the Latin sclavus, meaning a person of Slavic
origin. While most of the words for "slave" in ancient languages had no ethnic connotations, the association with Slavs
began in the early Middle Ages when captives from the Balkan region were often transported overland to Muslim Spain. Later, Italian
merchants extended the Slavic term to Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Mingrelians, Bulgarians, Turks, and Tatars who were
purchased along the coasts of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Though various terms for Africans, such as the French nègre,
sometimes became synonymous with "slave," it is significant that the Slavic linkage (esclave, sklave, esclavo) has
persisted for a millennium even though chattel slavery became almost wholly identified with people of sub-Saharan African descent.
13 "From Prizes of War to Domestic Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000- 1300,"
Viator, Vol. 25 (1994), pp. 63-64.
14 Unlike Stuart B. Schwartz"s Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge
University Press, 1985), which Blackburn closely follows in other respects, Blackburn minimizes the importance of São Tomé and
what he calls its "Afro-Jewish, Luso-Catholic planter class." He fails to note that 70 percent of the Jewish children (he
calls them "Jewish New Christian children") who were abducted from their parents, baptized, and then deported from
Portugal to São Tomé soon died; that the survivors who often mated with Africans had few if any ties with Judaism; and that the
island served as a crucial bridge between what Schwartz terms "the Mediterranean sugar complex" and American
plantation slavery.
15 Charles Verlinden, L"esclavage dans l"Europe médiévale, Tome deux: Italie- Colonies italiennes du Levant-Levant
latin-Empire byzantin (Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1977), pp. 235, 377.
16 Blackburn actually uses the term "Jewish "New Christians."" In his Introduction Thomas notes that
virtually no Jews were involved in the Anglo-Saxon slave trade and that whether a Portuguese New Christian "is to be seen as a
Jew is not something on which I should wish to pronounce: several of the traders concerned proclaimed their or their
forefathers" Christian conversion as genuine to the very last torture afforded by the Inquisition, even if the Holy Office caused
to be burned to death in Mexico and in Lima several prominent slave merchants, whom they accused of
"judaizing.""
Unfortunately, some Jewish historians, identifying with the conversos who were persecuted and burned at the stake, or wanting to
expand the extent of Jewish population, have accepted the Inquisitors" definition of "Jew," a position decisively
rejected by Benzion Netanyahu"s The Marranos of Spain (American Academy of Jewish Research, 1966) and The Origins of
the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Random House, 1995). Of course a few conversos (the word "marrano"
meant "swine") did revert to Judaism when they had the opportunity. For a review of the literature and the difficulties of
classifying most New Christians as Jews, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (Transaction Publishers, 1998),
pp. 50-62, and the essay by Seymour Drescher cited below.
17 See my article, "The Slave Trade and the Jews," The New York Review, December 22, 1994, pp. 14-16.
18 See Seymour Drescher, "Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade," in The Jews and the Expansion of
Europe to the West, 1450-1825, edited by Paolo Bernadini (2 volumes, forthcoming from Berghahn Books).
19 See my article, "New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28
(October 1971), reprinted in Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.
228-237.
- James M. Blaut
reflects on some special problems of doing African history and Jim La Velle pays tribute to James M. Blaut
- H-NET List for
African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
COMMENT: African history sources
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 01:02:22
From: James M. Blaut, University of Illinois at Chicago
John Dunn asks whether research on African history follows
different rules than research on European history. In one
important sense the answer is "yes." The issue is the way one
uses and interprets documents written by European slavers,
colonial officials, planters, and so on. Not only are these
people limited in their knowledge; not only do they interpret
what they see in ways that are strongly biased in cultural terms;
but, most importantly, they have an *interest* in purveying
certain notions of truth because doing so fits their purposes:
they are, after all, in Africa for a reason. Moreover, not often
are there multiple reports so that the reliability of any one
report can be checked against that of many others. Or, where
there are such multiple reports, they tend to be written by
people with the same limited knowledge, bias, and interests as
all or most of the other reports.
This is hardly news, but what must be emphasized is the fact that
research on European history does not require anything like this
degree of vigilance, of attention to reliability, and this degree
of skepticism about the reality being depicted in the documents
I raised this point on this list more than a year ago. John
Thornton answered, reasonably, "But what if we have no other
sources?" The answer is given in his own work: treat the sources
with extreme skepticism, and freely admit that we don't have the
answers to many important questions; indeed, to most of the truly
important questions.
This is why I persistently ask, skeptically, whether a given
traditional European belief about African history is really
reliable. And: have all of the traditional views on a given
question been *consciously* reviewed? I ask the same question of
all historians who work on formerly colonial peoples and places.
And I ask the same question of historians of Europe itself when
they evaluate the influence, or non-influence, of non-European
events and processes on European history. -
http://www.uic.edu/depts/paff/uicnews/uic_archives/Archive/2001/20010110123049.html
January 10, 2001
By Jim La Velle
GEOGRAPHY, ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR JAMES BLAUT
James M. Blaut, 73, professor of geography and anthropology, died Nov. 13 in Chicago of complications due to cancer.
Born in New York City, he was a graduate of the University of Chicago and earned a master's and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University.
An internationally recognized scholar, he made influential contributions to studies of cultural ecology, spatial diffusion, political geography and environmental cognition and map learning in children.
Widely traveled, he conducted extensive field research in peasant agriculture in many countries and had advisory roles with a variety of governments and international agencies.
Before coming to UIC in 1972, he held appointments at the University of Malaya, Yale University, Cornell University, the Caribbean Research Institute, the College of the Virgin Islands, University of Chicago, the University of Puerto Rico and Clark University.
He was named distinguished scholar of the year in 1997 by the Association of American Geographers. His publications include five books and more than 80 papers in scholarly journals. At the time of his death he was working on three books.
- H-NET List for
African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
- In the New African, George
Pavlu writes on The First Slavers
- http://www.africasia.com/icpubs/na/nov99/nacs1102.htm
New African
November 1999
The First Slavers
At last, our major series on slavery and reparations can begin. And we are
going chronologically. Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern
times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves, and
this is where our series begin. In this piece, George Pavlu and our
correspondents examine why the Arab slavers preferred more African women
to men, a situation reversed by the European slavers who shipped out more
African men than women. Thus, the Arabs too owe a huge debt to Africa and
people of African descent in reparations.
In his book, Slaves and Slavery, published in 1998, the British writer
Duncan Clarke defines slavery as "the reduction of fellow human beings to
the legal status of chattels, allowing them to be bought and sold as
goods".
This, in essence, is what both the Arabs and Europeans did to Africans, to
justify the shipping of millions of Africans as slaves to far-away lands
in Asia (in particular, the Middle East) and the Americas.
"The African slave trade, surely one of the most tragic and disturbing
episodes in the history of mankind," Clarke writes, "had its origins in
the intervention of forces from the civilisations that developed in the
regions of the Mediterranean sea - today's Europe and the Middle East -
into the arena of the more fragmented civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa.
"Africa became a source of slaves for the cultures of the Mediterranean
world many centuries before the discovery of the Americas, but it was that
discovery and the resulting shift in focus towards the Atlantic that
prompted the culminating explosive growth in slavery with such tragic
effect."
Slavery, in fact, was a central feature of life in the Mediterranean
world, especially in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece, Imperial Rome and
the Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa.
"The most important source of slaves in medieval Europe," Clarke's
research shows, "was the coast of Bosnia on the eastern shores of the
Adriatic Sea. The word 'slave' and its cognates in most modern European
languages is itself derived from 'sclavus' meaning 'slav', the ethnic name
for the inhabitants of this region...
"For various reasons, including the harshness of the terrain and endemic
warfare among local clans, Bosnia proved the most convenient and
long-lasting of these slave-supplying regions. Whichever clan gained a
temporary upper hand was always willing to sell its captured rivals in
exchange for the goods of the Mediterranean world in the markets of the
ancient Romanised city of Ragusa (present day Dubrovnik). From there,
Slavs were shipped as slaves by Venetian merchants, to supply new markets
in the Islamic world."
Thus, "for the Islamic world," Clarke continues, "Slavs provided the major
source of slaves in the 250 or so years between the defeat at the battle
of Poitiers in AD 732 that forced the consolidation of their dramatic
conquests across North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, cutting back the
flow of war captives, and the expansion of the import of black Africans
across the Sahara from around AD 1000."
The trade in slaves ended when the Ottoman Turks conquered the region in
1463. "The effective closure of the last major source of slaves on the
European continent," says Clarke, "thus co-incidentally took place at the
same time as the Portuguese explorations of the West African coast which
were to open up the second and most devastating route for the exploitation
of Africans as slaves."
Figures on the Arab slave trade in Africa are hard to come by, but the
historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Africans were
shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian
sub-continent.
Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows: Between AD 650 and 1600, an
average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a
rough total of 7.25 million.
Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans were shipped out
by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the
Arabian trade where 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total
figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.
Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia's 9.85 million is not far behind the
conservative estimate of nearly 12 million African victims of the Atlantic
slave trade. Some African historians, though, reject these figures on the
grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Africans were
shipped out during the Atlantic trade alone.
According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the
Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. "This trade also, with the notable
exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of
18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the
Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims," adds Duncan Clarke.
Throughout the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped
hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on
the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much
satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to
highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave
Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this
day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and
selling black Africans.
David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset
by the way the Arabs treated their African slaves that he wrote back home
in 1870:
"In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures - 84 of
them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the
eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from
18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7
years to 14 or 15 years of age.
"A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think
I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an
idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances.
"Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weighing from 30 to 40
pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where
the branches of a tree spread out.
"The women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the
most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first
striped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard
as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by
thongs to their mothers.
"As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown
a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on
the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of
these slave drivers.
"We went on further and were shown a place where a child lay. It had been
recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and
exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet
and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in
there."
Such was the brutality meted out to the Africans by the Arabs. Like the
Atlantic trade, the Arabian trade's "middle passage" was equally as
horrible and terrifying. The "middle passage" describes the harrowing
journey lasting several months from Africa's west coast to the Americas
during which millions of Africans, packed like sardines in the slave
ships, died of thirst, hunger, rough seas, and sometimes from the sheer
brutality inflicted by the European slavers.
In the Arabian trade, the trudge across the Sahara, in leg and neck
chains, and as Livingstone describes above, necks in large forked sticks
and hands tied with bark thongs, was particularly harsh on the African
slaves.
Says Duncan Clarke: "The hardships of these long marches across the desert
were considerable, and much later travellers reported that the routes were
lined with the parched skeletons of those who succumbed to exhaustion and
thirst along the way."
The Arab slavers did not only march their African captives to Arabia, they
also sometimes sold them to European slavers.
In modern times, the popular image of African slavery springs from the
vision of a tormented male suffering under the lash of unceasing labour on
some "New World" sugar plantation. Yet the real face of servitude finds
its focus in the forced migration of millions of girls and young women
across the Sahara and the Horn of Africa into the institutions of Islamic
concubinage.
While in the European "New World", the measure of a man's stature was
mapped out and calibrated on the physical dimensions of empire built upon
the sinews of forced masculine labour, in the Islamic Orient wealth was a
reflection of prestige, young girls the vessel of male hubris, the mats of
male pleasure-ground, the malleable material to be shaped to the master's
will.
Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines
living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A
large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into
eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly
brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.
"The combined effect of all these factors," says Duncan Clarke, "was a
steady demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, which had to be met
from wars, raids or purchases along the borders with non-Islamic regions.
Although some of these slaves came from Russia, the Balkans and central
Asia, the continuing expansion of Islamic regimes in sub-Saharan Africa
made black Africans, the major source."
So invasive was the practice of slavery into the economic, political,
demographic, cultural, social and religious life of Africa and persisted
for so many centuries, that while its effects varied both geographically
and temporally in intensity, slavery out-distances in scale and scope any
single or combination of disasters - natural or man-made - which descended
upon the continent.
Slavery unquestionably checked population growth in Africa and
consequentially placed tremendous pressure upon gender and marital
relationships during the three critical centuries of European expansion to
global domination.
In this sense, the feminine-oriented Arab slave trade, though neither
motivated nor executed with economic benefits as prime objective, caused
far greater demographic damage and consequently greater economic decline,
with its excessive poaching of the reproductive potential of the harvested
areas.
No people are blank slates upon which can be inscribed untold miseries and
expect no account thereof. The Arab slave trade began long before the
Islamic conquest of Africa, remained at relatively low level compared to
the Atlantic slave trade and did not become illegal or abolished, and was
maintained till well after the colonisation of Africa. The Arabian trade
was outlawed in Ethiopia only in 1935 in order to gain international
support against the Italian invasion.
In the Atlantic trade, the slaves came predominantly from Africa's west
coast with a male/female ratio of two-to-one. In the Arabian trade, the
slaves were exclusively from the Savannah and the Horn of Africa, and
favoured females over males at a ratio nearing three-to-one.
When slavery in the Black Sea area (the traditional source of the best
grade female slaves for the Arab market) dried up, it triggered an even
greater demand for Ethiopian "red" slaves, in particular the Galla and
Oromo on account of their unquestioned beauty and willing sexual
temperament.
And while the Europeans paid a higher price for male slaves than females,
the reverse was the case with the Arabs. Moreover, while the European/New
World slavers profited mainly from male labour, the Arabs saw profit in
sexual satisfaction/reproductive potential. (Offspring of the union
between Islamic master and female slave was born free, out of respect of
the child's Islamic paternity. Any offspring of the Atlantic trade were
born into slavery).
"The laws of Islam," as the historian Hugh Thomas attests, "were in some
ways more benign in respect of slavery than were those of Rome. Slaves
were not to be treated as if they were animals. Slaves and freemen were
equal from the point of view of God. The master did not have power of life
and death over his slave property."
But to the Africans shipped across the Red Sea, the "benign" Islamic laws
provided little comfort - they were still slaves of Islamic masters who
had unfettered sexual access to them (if they were female) or castrated
and turned into eunuchs (if they were men).
The upshot of this gender profile of the respective slave-classes in the
Atlantic/New World and the Arab/Oriental world explains the large and
visible population of African origin in the New World where sexual
relations between white and black was the exception while in the Arab
world where miscegenation was the practice, the slave trade has left few
visible traces.
So where are the descendants of the African slaves sent to Arabia/Orient?
There are no large concentrations of them, anywhere in the Middle East or
Asia.
Five years ago, a British TV documentary showed how poorly the descendants
of African slaves in Pakistan are treated by the authorities. The racial
discrimination was so bad that one of the African descendants recounted on
camera how, even in sport, they were not picked to represent Pakistan at
national and international levels no matter how good they were.
The demographic effects of Arabian slavery on the source population (those
left behind) cannot be overlooked, and specifically when considering the
palpable effects on African fertility as a consequence of the grossly
reduced female numbers.
To ensure survival, the Africans in the harvested areas adopted a variety
of social measures, which were in practice as extreme as the circumstances
called for. These revolved principally around the sexual purity of the
population's remaining female reproductive stock, as well as accelerating
the female's reproductive capacity.
Though the number of female slaves exported per annum from the Savannah
and the Horn was far smaller than the numbers taken from the west coast in
the Atlantic trade, the proportionate impact on the remaining at-brink
Savanna/Horn populations was far more severe.
The Arabian trade reached a total of perhaps 5-8% of the source
populations - and as mentioned earlier - as the proportion of females
harvested was exceptionally high, this resulted in a massive surplus of
males in the non-harvested population. Consequently the area experienced
demographic stagnation bordering decline.
In 1600, the black African population was some 50 million - about 30% of
the combined population of the New World, Europe, Middle East and North
Africa. By 1800, the population had fallen to 20% of the total. In 1900,
at the end of the slave trade, Africa's population had fallen yet further
to just over 10% of the total - the population now so collapsed as to
negatively affect the continent's labour-intensive agricultural output.
In effect, while the populations of Europe and Asia increased year on
year, Africa's population declined dramatically due to the excessive
poaching by the slavers, both Arab and European.
In Arabia, the slave class (principally female), unlike the New World
slave class, could never maintain itself as a distinct social entity -
principally because of miscegenation. This created an even greater demand
for more and more new female slaves, and coupled with the frequent natural
disasters of drought and famine in the Savannah/Horn, led many African
families to offer their young girls into slavery as a last hope of
survival. There are many stories of long lines of hundreds of girls,
mainly Oromos from Ethiopia, trudging across the Horn towards the Red Sea
seeking enslavement.
Deprived of ideology, ritual, and the African rite of passage to adulthood
and social membership, female slaves were uncommonly vulnerable to
conversion to Islam (the benefits of manumission aside). Manumission
describes a child born of a female slave and a free Islamic father and is
thus born free.
For the population remaining in Africa, it is in order to embark on some
speculation as to what changes the trauma of slavery may have wrought on
African thought. The experience of sudden turn of fate (a common
experience when confronted by the ever-present threat of slavers) tended
to systematically undermine any efforts at long-term planning beyond the
constant need to replace lost members.
It is a mistake to equate the bare survival of Africa with cultural or
social or economic stagnation, for the slave trade visited such a panoply
of tragically interconnected disasters into the lives of every African for
centuries, that they have worked their way into the very "racial memory"
of the continent and its people, particularly females, that only with time
and kindness can it be expunged from the psyche of Africa.
As one commentator puts it: "Could it be true that the corrosive effects
of four centuries of commerce in humans, with its temptation, its in-built
opportunism, its reduction of humans to a cash value, its cycles of
revenge and its inevitable physical brutality, have built lasting flaws
into African pattern of thought and action?"
Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.
- http://www.africasia.com/icpubs/na/nov99/nacs1102.htm
- Robert Whaples reviews A Historical Guide to
World Slavery by Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. (short
extract)
-
Published by EH.NET (July, 1999)
Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. A Historical Guide to World Slavery New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bibliographical references and index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-512091-4.
Seymour Drescher (University of Pittsburgh) and Stanley Engerman (University of Rochester) have assembled a stellar cast which has written an exceptionally useful reference book. The goal of the nearly one hundred contributors to _A Historical Guide to World Slavery_ is to bring slavery into a "worldwide and cross-cultural focus." The entries in this volume do this very well. They will be useful to students and scholars alike, as they provide both an accessible overview of the complexities of the subject and a starting point for further research. The authors' collective ability to be simultaneously concise and informative is striking. . . (continues)
Full review: http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0174.shtml
-
- Sue Peabody's slavery
website.
-
Prof. Sue Peabody (Washington State University Vancouver) maintains a website of links to various internet resources dealing with slavery. It is organized geographically with a U.S. bias (North America and the World) and by genre (Academic Centers; Documents, Narratives, Texts; Public History: Media, Museums and Sites): http://directory.vancouver.wsu.edu/people/sue-peabody
-
- AfricaBib website description and link
-
[Davis Bullwinkle] AfricaBib website description and link.
H-NET List for African History and Culture
[H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
27-04-99
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999
From: Davis Bullwinkle
<dabullwinkle@ualr.edu>
WWW.AfricaBib.Org
AfricaBib was created in 1999 as a way to freely disseminate
information from two African studies databases as well as
information on Africa from other sources.
The databases have been created and are maintained by
Davis Bullwinkle who is the director of the IEA Research Library,
at the Institute for Economic Advancement (IEA) at the
University of Arkansas-Little Rock, in Little Rock, Arkansas
in the United States.
The web site presently contains the following:
Africana Periodical Literature Bibliographic Database
This work was originally begun in September of 1974 as
an effort to index all the issues of each periodical/journal
title and place them all in one source.
This English language database indexes over 36,000
articles from over 310 English language and multi-lingual journals
and periodicals that specialize in African Studies or
consistently cover the African continent. The titles were
originally chosen from the library at California State
University-Chico and that number were later expanded by
using materials from Northwestern University and other
major university libraries as well as the Library of Congress.
Each title is indexed from its first day of publication to
the present or, either its date of ceasing or a date where
the journal or periodical no longer covered Africa on a
regular basis. In only in a few cases were titles dropped
due to the difficulty in obtaining copies or irregularities
in the journal's publishing schedule.
Of the over 310 journals and periodicals indexed, more
than half have ceased being published. Until the mid-1960's few
Africana journals were indexed in major indexing tools.
This work hopes to fill the gap by indexing Africana materials
from the mid-nineteenth century to today all in one index.
A title list of all journals and periodicals indexed,
including the years the journals or periodicals were
published and indexed is included by a link from the front
page of this database.
The titles indexed in this database represent Africana
materials published in from over 22 nations within North
America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Africana Women's Database
This English language database contains over 23,000
citations from 1986 to current. The database indexes six
types of materials: books and government documents;
articles appearing in edited books; periodical and journal articles;
Masters theses and Ph.D. dissertations as well as a few
B.A.theses and honors papers; conference papers; and
videocassettes.
This database is the outgrowth of a three volume work
published in 1989 by Greenwood Press that indexed
materials on African Women published during the International
Women's Decade, 1975-1985.
The database indexes everything the compiler can find
published in English about African women. If you know of
any materials that are not in this index and deserve to be
included you can contact Davis Bullwinkle at
dabullwinkle@ualr.edu or at either 501 569-8521 or 501
666-9048.
The database indexes conference papers from the
following conferences:
African Literature Association
African Studies Association
American Anthropological Association
Cairo Demographic Centre
Canadian Association of African Studies
International AIDS Conference
Middle East Studies Association
Population Association of America
-
- Chap Kusimba reflects on Africa's Meaning
to Non-Africans
H-NET List for African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999
From: Chap Kusimba <kusimba@fmppr.fmnh.org>
Africa's Meaning to Non-Africans
By Chapurukha M. Kusimba
Bennet Bronson Anthropology Department, The Field Museum
Striking contradictions exist in the way we see Africa's
role in the past and present world. Few people still
question that eastern and southern Africa were the
birthplace of the modern human lineage, and were indeed the
only home known to our ancestors until about a million years
ago. Most specialists accept that when modern humans first
left Africa for other continents, they carried a good deal
of culture with them when . But in spite of this,
non-Africans tend to devalue both ancient and recent African
contributions to the world.
Down through about 10,000 BC, the greatest of known African
contributions was its advanced stone tool technologies.
Most innovations in the making of stone knives and spears
either first occurred in Africa and spread to Eurasia or
occurred at more or less the same time in Africa as in the
rest of the Old World.
After 10,000 BC, when humans began to experiment with
raising food plants and animals, and hence with settled
village life and everything that followed from that, the
technological links between Africa and Eurasia continued to
be close. This was especially true in the realm of
agriculture. While the Egyptians and other north Africans
were taming a wide range of animals and borrowing food
plants from West Asia, Africans further south were
domesticating numerous crops, including sorghum, one kind of
rice, two kinds of millet, several legumes, several kinds of
yams, coffee, oil palm and possibly watermelon. They sent
several of these, including sorghum and both Eleusine and
Pennisetum millet, to Eurasia, and in turn received
domesticated animals, wheat, barley, bananas and more kinds
of yams. The movement of food species into and out of
Africa, even before the development of cities or metal
technology, testifies to the great antiquity of economic
links between Africa and the rest of the world.
Peoples too continued to move into and out of Africa.
Genetic and linguistic evidence shows that there was a
constant flow of population between East and Northeast
Africa on the one hand, and the Middle East, India, and
southern Europe on the other hand. Historical linguists
maintain that the Semitic languages - the ancestors of
Arabic, Hebrew, Assyrian, etc.- originated in central
Africa. So did the language of ancient Egypt.
Egypt, of course, was centrally involved with many famous
achievements of the ancient world. Most of us are aware
that ancient Egyptian civilization is now thought to be as
old as Middle Eastern civilization with regard to such key
"inventions" as writing, monumental architecture, kings,
written laws, and bureaucrats. We may be less aware,
however, that ancient Egypt was in close and almost constant
contact with regions farther south. Extremists on both
sides of the "Black Cleopatra" controversy have tended to
ignore the fact that throughout Egyptian history, the vast
southern watershed of the Nile routinely supplied Egypt not
only with fertility-bringing floods but also with manpower -
workers, entertainers, soldiers and ruling dynasties. Much
of what went south from Egypt in return has vanished. One
important export to the south, however, survives: Coptic
Christianity with its Egyptian/Middle Eastern-inspired art,
writing, and architecture. The rock churches of Lalibela in
Ethiopia bear witness to the intensity of early cultural
interchange between the northern Nile Valley and parts of
Sub-Saharan Africa.
Trade relationships between the Sub-Saharan region and the
rest of the world became routine at least two thousand years
ago. The Egyptians and Carthaginians conducted overland
trade in the early and middle first millennium B.C. As early
as the first century A.D., Africa's trade relationships with
Eurasia began to be controlled by growing state societies
and significantly contributed to bi-directional biological
and technical transfers in the Old World. Improvements in
ships and the introduction of the camel make it possible to
trade across the Indian ocean with East Africa and across
the Sahara with West Africa. Gold, salt, ivory, hides, and
spices were typical commodities in this commerce between
North and South.
In Northeast Africa, important urban centers including the
kingdoms of Kush and Axum came into being at this period,
which culminated during the fifth century AD with Ethiopia's
colonization of South Arabia. In eastern and southern
Africa, long-distance trade stimulated the growth of cities
along the East African coast and in the interior, centered
around the Shona kingdoms of Dzimbahwe. In West Africa, the
trans-Saharan caravan trade led to the rise of a series of
large, highly centralized kingdoms, including Ghana, Mali,
and Songhai. One sub-Saharan African group, the Almoravids
of the upper Niger area, expanded their power northward
beyond the desert in the twelfth century. Conquering first
Morocco and then Spain, they established one of the most
brilliant dynasties of the Islamic Middle Ages.
Turning to modern times, many important cultural impacts of
Africa have been made by Africans in the Diaspora.
Innovations made by New World Africans in music, the
sciences, medicine, and architecture are now recognized as
major elements in our present world cultural heritage. Non-
Diaspora Africans continue making contributions in music,
literature, and sculpture.
But then why did a negative image of African culture emerge
and persist even in parts of the world where there has been
little or no direct contact with African peoples?
We think there are several reasons.
First, slavery. Because some parts of Africa were populous,
poor, and militarily weak, they became major suppliers of
slaves to other continents. In Christian Europe and the
Americas, though not necessarily in Islamic countries,
slaves were low in status and some of this low status rubbed
off on Africans who were by no means slaves.
A second reason for negative images of Africa: its enforced
role as a supplier only of raw materials. As European
imperialism developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, Africa
shifted from being an equal trading partner to being a
continent of mines and exploitable forests and plains,
yielding much of the world's ivory, gold, platinum,
diamonds, chromium, manganese, bauxite, uranium, and so
forth. With these being exported in raw, unprocessed form,
the profits and prestige of manufacturing went to peoples of
other continents. In the eyes of Europeans, North Americans
and East Asians for whom factories were close to the essence
of civilization, Africa lost prestige because it was seen as
manufacturing nothing from its own resources. Few of those
observers took into account the fact that neither the
colonial nor post-colonial systems allowed Africans to set
up plants for converting raw materials into consumer
products.
A third reason: climatological chauvinism on the part of
East Asians and Westerners. Both groups lived in chilly
places, had light-colored skins, and wore lots of clothes.
So it was quite natural for them to conclude that partial
nudity was immoral, that dark-skinned people were inferior,
and that warm climates encouraged laziness, messiness, and
generally undisciplined attitudes. In the opinion of
Europeans, Africa and other tropical regions shared another
"uncivilized" trait: their peoples took too many baths.
Europeans, by contrast, bathed infrequently and tended to
regard this along with their heavy clothes as symbols of
their more civilized status.
A fourth reason: ignorance. Outsiders of the colonial
period consistently failed to recognize the remarkable
qualities of traditional African technologies and to
appreciate their suitability for sustainable development.
Western agricultural specialists, for instance, tried hard
to introduce European-style methods, crops and breeds in
spite of the fact that traditional African farming methods
were often as productive as those of Europe and far better
suited to tropical environments. None of these reasons --
former slavery, persisting colonial production patterns,
climatological prejudice, or simple ignorance -- fully
account for Africa's negative image, especially in regions
like the Far East which had little historical contact with
Africa. And yet that negativism persists, and has serious
consequences. One such consequence has been an irrational
disinterest in traditional African agriculture and
stockbreeding. Western agricultural experts have spent more
than a century trying to persuade Africans to raise European
and American breeds of cattle, even though these tend to do
poorly under African conditions. It is only quite recently
that modern breeders have begun looking at African cattle
not as primitive but as the products of hundreds of
generations of carefully controlled, patient and intelligent
selection for desirable qualities. One of the first results
of this new attitude has been the introduction of the Tuli
breed, originally from Zimbabwe, into the United States.
With meat quality as good as Angus steers, an exceptionally
docile nature, and the ability to thrive in spite of extreme
heat and drought, the Tuli may replace many of the breeds
that are currently popular with American cattle ranchers.
Another consequence is the disappearance of much of the
well-adapted material culture of traditional Africa. For
instance, African communities had for several millennia
excellent earthenware industries that were well adapted to
the functional and symbolic requirements of those
communities, and most of which are still relevant to present
day populations. Yet, today many African nations import, at
great expense, ceramics of a far less relevant range of
shapes at far higher expenses while the indigenous industry
has collapsed. The negative effects are not only economic
but cultural, leading to a dilution of tradition and a loss
of design skills on the level of the individual
craftsperson.
Yet another consequence is the loss of what has been learned
over the centuries about environmentally adapted
architecture and settlement planning. Beautiful and elegant
old houses constructed of indigenous materials are being
allowed to decay and collapse centuries before their working
life is over. Some are converted to new uses, but their
fabric is remolded with an insensitivity to the ecological
and climatic setting. On the other hand, modern structures
constructed with imported materials are problematic. Filthy
walls, poor designs, bad sewage systems, overgrown grounds,
leaking roofs, and other appalling facilities contribute to
the overall impression that mega-slums are indeed in the
making in Africa.
We could cite many more unfortunate effects of negative
attitudes toward Africa and African achievement. But the
point is made. While many communities around the world may
be aware of Africa's important contributions to their
cultural and historical heritage in the distant past, they
ignore the potential of those contributions in the present
and future. The solution, we think, is education, and that
has to be done not only by non-Africans and Americans and
Europeans of African ancestry but by Africans themselves.
When Africans can confidently and knowledgeably offer their
heritage as solutions to the problems of other continents,
Africa's historical place in the modern world community will
become a reality.
"Friendship is a sentiment that cultivates itself."
- Eddie Becker's Chronology on the History of
Slavery and Racism (extracts)
- Compiled from
Archive, library and Internet source documentation, this timeline on
Slavery and in part the History of Racism, has been used to guide the
direction of independent research into the history of enslaved Americans
of African descent at historic sites located at the National Zoo, in
Washington, DC. Hopefully, this compilation of American history will
help others who undertake similar tasks.
This project has been conducted totally independently from research conducted by the Office of Architectural History and Preservation at the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. Visit the Holt House Web Site for periodic updates. Be sure to go to the bottom of the page and hit "Contents" to enter. This research was compiled by Eddie Becker who will be happy to give advice on similar undertakings.
Citation information and credit: (Chronology on the History of Slavery, Compiled by Eddie Becker 1999, see on line at http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html)
The Chronology is broken up into three parts:
For pre-17th century timeline see Cora Agatucci's African Timeline.
Chronology Of The History Of Slavery: 1619-1789
The transatlantic slave trade produced one of the largest forced migrations in history. From the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries, between 10 million and 11 million Africans were taken from their homes, herded onto ships where they were sometimes so tightly packed that they could barely move, and sent to a strange new land. Since others died before boarding the ships, Africa's loss of population was even greater. ("Slavery in the United States," Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corporation.)
Projected Exports Of That Portion Of The French And English Slave Trade Having Identifiable Region Of Coast Origin In Africa, 1711-1810
- Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia)* 5.8%
- Sierra Leone 3.4%
- Windward Coast (Ivory Coast)* 12.1%
- Gold Coast (Ghana)* 14.4%
- Bight of Benin (Nigeria)* 14.5
- Bight of Biafra (Nigeria)* 25.1%
- Central and Southeast
Africa (Cameroon- N.Angola)* 24.7%
- * The countries in
parentheses are rough approximations to help you find the location on a
modern map.
- "Were these people
called by that name during that time in that place?" Excluding some
nomadic and semi-nomadic groups
- Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia): Wolof, Mandingo, Malinke, Bambara, Papel, Limba, Bola, Balante, Serer, Fula, Tucolor
- Sierra Leone: Temne, Mende, Kisi, Goree, Kru.
- Windward Coast (Ivory Coast) (incl. Liberia): Baoule, Vai, De, Gola (Gullah), Bassa, Grebo.
- Gold Coast (Ghana): Ewe, Ga, Fante, Ashante, Twi, Brong
- Bight Of Benin & Bight Of Biafra Combined (sorry): Yoruba, Nupe, Benin, Dahomean (Fon), Edo-Bini, Allada, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Ibani,Igbo(Calabar)
- Central & Southeast
Africa: BaKongo, MaLimbo, Ndungo, BaMbo, BaLimbe, BaDongo, Luba, Loanga,
Ovimbundu, Cabinda, Pembe, Imbangala, Mbundu, BaNdulunda
- Please send comments
(see web page below) on whether the following groups should be included
as a "Ancestral group" of African Americans, and in what
region: Fulani, Tuareg, Dialonke, Massina, Dogon, Songhay, Jekri, Jukun,
Domaa, Tallensi, Mossi, Nzima, Akwamu, Egba, Fang, and Ge. (Compiled
by Kwame Bandele from information in P.D. Curtin's book, "Atlantic
Slave Trade" p. 221).
In the 1700s the coasts of West Africa had three main divisions controlled by Europeans in their effort to monopolize the slave trade. The three divisions were Senegambia, Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea.
Senegambia's two navigable rivers, the Senegal and the Gambia, were controlled by the French and the English, respectively. The West Africans who became slaves from the Senegambia included the Fula, Wolof, Serer, Felup, and the Mandingo.
Upper Guinea had a two thousand miles coastline from the Gambia south and east to the Bight of Biafra. This coastline was also designated the Windward Coast because of the heavy winds on the shore. The West Africans who became slaves from the Upper Gambia included the Baga and Susu from French Guinea, the Chamba from Sierra Leone, the Krumen from the Grain Coast, and the Fanti and the Ashanti from the Gold Coast, commonly referred to today as Ghana. East of the Volta River was the Slave Coast which was so named because the slave trade was at its height there since the African kings (Slattees) permitted Europeans to compete equally for Africans to become slaves. Those West Africans who became slaves from this region included Yoruban, Ewe, Dahoman, Ibo, Ibibio, and the Efik.
Lower Guinea had fifteen hundred miles of coastline from Calabar to the southern desert. The West Africans who became slaves from this region were all Bantus. The trading of Africans from the West Coast provided an economic boon for the Europeans. The trading of Africans from the West Coast produced the heinous Middle passage. The trading of Africans from the West Coast produced the African American! (Connections: A Culturally Historical Prospective of West African to African American, by Kelvin Tarrance, Revised: May 3, 1996)
The slave trade from Africa is said to have uprooted as many as 20 million people from their homes and brought them to the Americas. Slavery had existed as a human institution for centuries, but the slaves were usually captives taken in war or members of the lowest class in a society. The black African slave trade, by contrast, was a major economic enterprise. It made the traders rich and brought an abundant labor supply to the islands of the Caribbean and to the American Colonies. (Compton's Encyclopedia Online )
The mortality rate among these new slaves ran very high. It is estimated that some five percent died in Africa on the way to the coast, another thirteen percent in transit to the West Indies, and still another thirty percent during the three-month seasoning period in the West Indies. This meant that about fifty percent of those originally captured in Africa died either in transit or while being prepared for servitude. Even this statistic, harsh as it is, does not tell the whole story of the human cost involved in the slave trade. Most slaves were captured in the course of warfare, and many more Africans were killed in the course of this combat. The total number of deaths, then, ran much higher than those killed en route. Many Africans became casualty statistics, directly or indirectly, because of the slave trade. Beyond this, there was the untold human sorrow and misery borne by the friends and relatives of those Africans who were torn away from home and loved ones and were never seen again. (Norman Coombs, The Immigrant Heritage of America, Twayne Press, 1972. Chapter 2 The Human Market, The Slave Trade)
It was obvious, however, that the victims of the modern slave trade could not be said to have been acquired directly in war. They had been purchased from African rulers who had seized them in raids whose only purpose had been to acquire this valuable human commodity for the insatiable European market. To this, the advocates of the trade replied by claiming that the Africans purchased by the traders had originally been taken prisoner in "just" wars between Africans. The speciousness of this argument was evident from the beginning. But most slavers accepted what they claimed were African assurances that their human merchandise had indeed been "saved" in a just war, on the principle that it is not up to the purchaser to discover if the goods he is buying have been acquired legitimately or not. In this way slavery remained linked, throughout its 300-year history, to internecine African warfare. Thomas seems to imply that Africans, since they were involved in the trade, must take some measure of the blame for it. This can hardly be denied. What Thomas overlooks, though, is the degree to which the European slave trade contributed to the situation from which it benefited. The abolitionists had always been fully aware of the possible impact of the trade upon Africa. "The slave trade," bewailed Granville Sharp, one of the earliest of the English abolitionists, in 1776, "preyed upon the ignorance and brutality of unenlightened nations, who are encouraged to war with each other for this very purpose." The consequences of this for the continent have only just begun to be examined, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that at least some of the horrors that modern African rulers continue to inflict upon their peoples, and that African states continue to inflict upon one another, can be linked not only to the disastrous process of de-colonization, but also to the long experience of the European slave trade. Modern slavers were faced with a further problem: religion. (Anthony Pagden http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/ The Slave Trade, Review of Hugh Thomas' Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The New Republic; 12-22-1997)
Africans cooperated with Europeans in the slave trade, and some slaves transported to America were already of the slave class. But most slaves were simply hostages of the trade, and very few were slaves before. A set of political and military circumstances that the Portuguese, the Dutch, and other Europeans imposed on the West Africans forced many African kingdoms to cooperate with the slave trade. Stronger nations had driven many coastal kingdoms from the interior before the arrival of the Europeans. Yet with the coming of European tools and weaponry as payment for African slaves, these coastal kingdoms found themselves in power positions and began slave-raiding expeditions against their former enemies. European slave traders used these rivalries to increase tensions among the African kingdoms for their own mercenary purposes. By fomenting war between kingdoms and by introducing superior arms to those cooperating with the trade, the Europeans obligated many unwilling kingdoms to collaborate with them or face enslavement themselves--raid or be raided. The "most abominable aspect of the slave trade, was fueled by the idea that Africans, even children, were better off Christianized under a system of European slavery than left in Africa amid tribal wars, famines and paganism" (p. 218). (Willie F. Page. _The Dutch Triangle: The Netherlands and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1621-1664_. Studies in African American History and Culture. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. xxxv + 262 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $66.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8153-2881-8. Reviewed for H-Review by Dennis R. Hidalgo, Central Michigan University)
Essay argues that slavery existed and sometimes flourished in Africa before the transatlantic slave trade, but neither the African continent nor persons of African origin were as prominent in the world of slaveholding as they would later become. Second, the capture and sale of slaves across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1850 encouraged expansion and repeated transformation of slavery within Africa, to the point that systems of slavery became central to societies all across the continent. Third, even after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (largely accomplished by 1850) and the European conquest of Africa (mostly by 1900), millions of persons remained in slavery in Africa as late as 1930. (For full reading see Slavery in Africa, Microsoft, Encarta, Africana content, 1999 Microsoft Corporation)
Height of Atlantic Slave Trade:
Between the years 1650 and 1900, historians estimate that at least 28 million Africans were forcibly removed from central and western Africa as slaves (but the numbers involved are controversial). A human catastrophe for Africa, the world African Slave Trade was truly a "Holocaust."
THE HOLOCAUST: - Muslim traders exported as
many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, to the
Middle East, and to North Africa. African slave exports via the Red Sea,
trans-Sahara, and East Africa/Indian Ocean to other parts of the world
between 1500-1900 totaled at least 5 million Africans sent into bondage.
Between 1450 and 1850, at least 12 million Africans were shipped from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean--the notorious Middle Passage"-- primarily to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies.. 80% of these kidnapped Africans (or at least 7 million) were exported during the 18th century, with a mortality rate of probably 10-20% on the ships en route for the Americas.
Unknown numbers (probably at least 4 million) of Africans died in slave wars and forced marches before being shipped. Within central Africa itself, the slave trade precipitated migrations: coastal tribes fled slave-raiding parties and captured slaves were redistributed to different regions in Africa.
African slave trade and slave labor transformed the world. In Africa, slave trade stimulated the expansion of powerful West African kingdoms. In the Islamic world, African slave labor on plantations, in seaports, and within families expanded the commerce and trade of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. In the Americas, slave labor became the key component in trans-Atlantic agriculture and commerce supporting the booming capitalist economy of the 17th and 18th centuries, with the greatest demand in the Americas coming from Brazil and the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
(Cora Agatucci's African Timeline, Central Oregon Community College, )
Throughout the first half of 18th century, France and England battled for control of the Guinea Coast. In Lower Guinea, the British`s main adversary was the Dutch. But when the Dutch Company was liquidated, the British soon gained control of the entire Ivory, Grain, and Gold Coasts. France, Britain's main adversary in Upper Guinea, soon lost interest because of lack of profits. The sparsely populated Upper Guinea coast did not provide enough slaves. In addition, interior ethnic groups were very hostile to European influence. By the mid-18th century, Britain had full control of West African trade. In addition, the British won the Assiento, the sole license to ship black slaves from Africa to Spanish controlled territories in America, in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. British dominance in the slave trade began a new period of change in the European/African relationship. The English would begin to explore, conquer and rule African peoples. The Age of Trade shifted into the Age of Colonization. (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade 1450-1750 ThinkQuest )
Slavery
By Clavin Gee, Kristin Lundbom, Thomas Stickler
Where Slaves Were Found
Slaves of the 18th century were found predominantly in the Western Atlantic side of Africa and were a continuance of the transatlantic slave trade that began in the 15th century, following the discovery of the New World. The majority of the more than 9 million Africans were enslaved though primitive kidnapping raids. These slave raids involved regions covering the basins of the Nile and Congo and areas within the great African Lakes. Beginning with the Dutch and Portuguese, then by British, French and less extensively the Danes and Swedes, slaves were continually shipped to the New World. The population of slaves imported during 1680 to 1780 for the British colonies and West Indies amounted to over 2 million. Another staggering figure indicates that for the single year of 1790, there was an estimated 75,000 slaves imported to the New World: 38,000 in British ships, 20,000 in French, 4,000 in Dutch, 2,000 in Polish, and 10,000 in Portuguese.
Who the Slaves Were
Most widely known slave societies were those of the circum-Caribbean world. When sugar plantations moved from the West Indies English took the African slaves with them. Initially the English did really on indentured servants from England, but because of change of laws African slaves replaced English indentured servants (Encyclopedia Britannica vol 27, 288).
African rulers themselves were responsible for the slave deportation to Europe and often times even "encouraged sea captains to come to their port" (EB vol 27, 289). Slavery in England was officially abolished in 1772, with the Sommerset case which stated "Any slave by the act of walking on English soil became free" (EB vol 27, 290). Furthermore, by the 1810's the British anti-slavery movement had virtually put an end to slavery as a whole.
The Slave Trade
"Broadly speaking, the British slave trade began with private enterprise, survived its emergent years with the aid of state granted monopolies and during the eighteenth-century heyday, gradually reverted to completely free trade. In this process the history of the British slave trade between 1600 and 1800 accurately prefigured the commercial history of the British Empire as a whole over a far longer period" (Craton 55). Joseph Inikori argues that the slave trade's importance in helping develop the credit market in England before the Industrial Revolution should not be ignored (Explorations in Economic History 219).
1640-- English sugar plantations created in the West Indies. Transatlantic slave trading rapidly increased.
1660 and 1663--Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa was chartered. This company challenged the Dutch supremacy in West African trade. Shareholders included the King and Queen.
1672-- The Royal African Company (RAC) given charter due to the previous charter holder's "serious organizational flaws" (Craton 58). This company drew upon shareholders outside of nobility. Two-thirds of the stocks were owned by businessmen. Demand of slaves estimated to be 25,000 a year, but in only one year (1686-87) did they carry at least 10,000. During the height of the RAC's operations the goods used to purchase the West African slaves were 60% textiles, 19% metals, 14% "cowries, beads, and coral," and 7% "chiefly cutlery, firearms, and gunpowder" (Craton 78). During the eighteenth century, liquor, especially rum made from the sugar plantations' molasses, was increasingly used to trade for Africans.
1680-- Pamphlet war erupted between the RAC and those wanting the monopoly broken. Free-trade, chartered companies, protections, and laissez faire were all issues. Both sides agreed that slavery was good for the "general prosperity of England" (Craton 63).
1698-- "Act to Settle the Trade to Africa" comes from Parliament. Any merchant could now trade in slaves provided a 10% duty on all trade goods carried was paid to the RAC. Strangely "quite a few" shareholders of the RAC acted in a private capacity as well with the passage of this Act.
1706-- the Lord Chief Justice ruled "There is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England. (Walvin 34).
1712-- "Ten Per Cent" Act runs out. Any merchant may now enter the slave trade.
1729-- the Attorney- and Solicitor-Generals ruled against the Lord Chief Justice's decision.
1730-- After this year the RAC's sole function was to maintain and administer the West African forts, but with the subsidy withdrawn in 1746, the RAC rapidly slid to extinction.
1750-1788-- Trade operated under principles of nearly free trade and laissez faire. Perversely, this time is usually termed the "golden age" of the slave trade (Tattersfield 357). By mid-eighteenth century "demand had far outstripped supply" (Craton 75) though not for lack of trying on the slavers part. The eighteenth century transported as many slaves as the previous and subsequent centuries combined. Death rates for English captains and crew were at least as high as the Africans' on the Middle Passage--the term describing the voyage across the Atlantic. Of Liverpool's ships, less than half of the crew returned alive in 1787. Controversy surrounds the profitablity of the slave trade. Richardson argues it was 8.1%. Others, such as Darity and Inikori, say it is 17% or even greater than 20%. (Exploration in Economic History 382, 498).
1762-- Lord Chancellor declared "As soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free" (Walvin 34).
1772-- Slavery abolished by judicial fiat though laws still protected the slave-owners and indeed gave them more power over the years. 20,000 blacks in England. Most living in London.
1783-- English Quakers gave Parliament the first important anti-slavery petition.
1787-1833-- Height of the British Abolitionist movement. Slavery became viewed as an alien (colonial) institution. Hence it did not belong in England.
1807-- Slave trade abolished with British colonies.
1834-- Slavery abolished in Caribbean by Parliament.
Bibliography:
"Slavery." Encyclopedia Britannica. 15 ed. 1991.
Craton, Michael. Sinews of Empire. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974.
Darity, William, Jr. "Profitability of the British Trade in Slaves Once Again." Explorations in Economic History (26.3):380-384.
Inikori, Joseph E. "The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of the Credit Economy in England." Explorations in Economic History (27.2):197-231.
Richardson, David. "Accounting for Profits in the British Trade in Slaves: Reply to William Darity." Explorations in Economic History (26.4):492-499.
Walvin, James. England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776-1838. Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1986.
- Compiled from
Archive, library and Internet source documentation, this timeline on
Slavery and in part the History of Racism, has been used to guide the
direction of independent research into the history of enslaved Americans
of African descent at historic sites located at the National Zoo, in
Washington, DC. Hopefully, this compilation of American history will
help others who undertake similar tasks.
- Mark Ridley reviews Jared Diamond's GUNS,
GERMS, AND STEEL. (short extract)
- The uselessness of
zebras
Mark Ridley
TLS
Friday November 14 1997
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL. The fates of human societies. By Jared Diamond. 480pp. Cape. Pounds 18.99. - 0 224 03809 5.
During the European "age of expansion", from roughly the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a wave of colonists sailed out, conquered, and culturally controlled large regions of the globe. The means by which they were able to do so are the "Guns, Germs, and Steel", of Jared Diamond's title, but his book is about a deeper question. Why was it the Europeans who had the instruments of power, rather than the Native Americans, Australian aboriginals, or Khoisan (called Hottentots by a politically less correct age) whom they conquered? (continues)
- The uselessness of
zebras
- The BBC's Story of Africa
-
The Story of Africa -- BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index.shtml
Subtitled African History from the Dawn of Time, this extensive and
well-designed Website boasts more than 120,000 words, over 120
images, and over 40 audio files about Africa. Its fourteen sections
cover the topics of Africa's early history, the Nile Valley, West
African kingdoms, the Swahili, traditional religions, Islam,
Christianity, slavery, Central African kingdoms, Africa and Europe
(1800 - 1914), Southern Africa, history between the two World Wars,
and Independence. In addition to text and supplemental images, each
section offers a timeline, a bibliography of further reading, and a
list of annotated links. A forum for featuring visitor's comments,
criticisms, and suggestions will also shortly be launched. This is
certainly a Website to spend some time on and could serve as a fine
basis for junior and high school curriculum on the continent. [DC]
From The Scout Report for Social Sciences & Humanities, Copyright
Internet Scout Project 1994-2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
-
-
OTHER REFERENCESfamily:"Times New Roman";
-
family:"Times New Roman";
Black History Resource Working Group, Slavery: An Introduction To The African Holocaust, 1995
Edwards, Paul (ed.), Equiano's Travels, His Autobiography: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, first published 1789, Heinemann, 1967
Equiano, Olaudah: [excerpt from: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789). An Ibo from Nigeria remembers his kidnapping http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/3.htm
Everett, Susan, History of Slavery, Bison, 1978
Hair, P. E. H., The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa
Harms, Robert W., The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, 2001, ISBN: 0465028713
family:"Times New Roman";
Reynolds, Edward, Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Allison & Busby, 1985
Tibbles, Anthony (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, HMSO, 1994
Walvin, James The Slave Trade, Sutton, 1999 family:"Times New Roman";
Walvin, James, An African Life, The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797, Continuum, 1998
Walvin, James, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery, Harper Collins, 1992
LINKS
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C-18L Resources for 18th-century studies across the disciplines. http://www.personal.psu.edu/special/C18/c18-l.htm
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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
http://www.gliah.org and http://www.gilderlehrman.org
bidi-language: AR-SA">The Institute, which hosts summer institutes for teachers, awards research fellowships and book prizes to scholars, and sponsors a center for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition at Yale, has made a remarkable array of instructional materials available online. Created by Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil of the University of Houston, these include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a searchable database of 1,500 annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images. The site's Ask the HyperHistorian feature allows users to pose questions to professional historians. -
An A-Z of African Studies on the Internet http://www.lib.msu.edu/limb/a- z/az.html
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