Jul 9, 2020

Article #2 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History


The Slave Trade and the Era of Slavery, 1500-1860

 
The Slave Trade
 
The slave trade developed as an extension of mercantilism, the doctrine that prevailed among the rising monarchies of Europe in the 15th century, whereby each nation-state sought to maximize its profits via domestic and international trade in competition with other nations.   Since raw materials, finished goods, and markets could all be powerfully augmented by expanding the national territory across the globe, imperialism and colonialism became conceptually associated with mercantilism:  Control of territories overseas increased national access to raw materials, goods, and markets beyond the confines of the borders for Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain.
 
Portugal was for a time in the very late 15th century the leader in voyages of exploration.  The immediate motivation was direct access to the Spice Islands (today’s Indonesia).  At the time, Arabs operating across West Asia and Italians plying the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding areas frequently acted as two layers of middlepersons with which the nations of Europe had to deal in securing the spices that came mostly via overland routes to the Mediterranean.  Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal navigated very little himself, but in 1488 he did send Bartholomew Dias down the western coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the continent;  and in 1498 his court trained and sponsored Vasco da Gama and his the crew aboard ships that went all the way around the Cape of Good Hope and on to the eastern coast of India in 1498. Subsequent trips took the Portuguese on through the seas of Southeast and East Asia, where they exerted a presence in today’s Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Japan;  and establishing territorial  control at Macau, to the west of Hong Kong in southern China.
 
Meanwhile, the monarchical duo Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sponsored four voyages of Columbus during 1492-1502.  That first voyage of 1492 landed on the island of Hispaniola, which in today’s world is split between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  This was close enough to the American mainland to be credited for the European discovery of the Americas.  Native Americans had long since come through the Bering Straits from Asia and expanded over the territory that today is identified with North America, Central America, and South America.  But For Europeans this was very big news that Columbus did not find the Spice Islands that he set out to find via and all-water westerly route---  but did discover what for them (and also Asians and Africans) was a whole New World.
 
Having sailed for Spain, other Spaniards soon came to the Americas after Columbus.  Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs in 1521.  Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas in 1536.  Vaso Nunez de Balboa looked out from the Isthmus of Panama to see that another ocean on the west---  the Pacific----  was looming close to the Atlantic that he could still see behind him to the east.
 
The Portuguese did establish a colony in today’s Brazil, but for a while, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese and Spain divided the previously imperialistically unclaimed world between them, with Spain presiding over the Western Hemisphere and Portugal roaming over the Eastern Hemisphere .  The Spaniards swept in with a vengeance to set up colonies in South American, Central America, islands of the Caribbean, Mexico, today’s Florida and the American Southwest from Texas to California.  In the Caribbean and South America especially, the Spaniards set up huge sugar plantations and mines that were enormously productive of silver and gold.
 
Both the mines and the plantations required heavy inputs of labor.  Great populations of Native American people had been wiped out with small pox and yellow fever;  those that remained knew the territory so well that they became adept escape artists when the Spaniards tried to put them to work on the plantations, whether as indentured servants or slaves.  But on the coast of African, the Portuguese and then the Spaniards discovered mighty the might nations the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others who were willing to trade their captives of war, prisoners, and criminals as slaves in exchange for weapons, metal goods, cloth, and alcoholic beverages.
 
The system that developed was lucrative for both African and European traders and devastating to the people traded and their families.  Europeans typically established what they called “factories” at coastal edge in West Africa or on nearby islands.  There they would set up large cages for the imprisonment of the human chattel for which they traded with the agents of the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others.  When enough slaves accumulated to fill a ship at an economically viable level, the human cargo was hustled aboard the ships and carried across the Atlantic Ocean through what was termed the Middle Passage to America.  The international commercial exchange was known as the Triangular Trade, whereby slaves were taken to work the sugar plantations and mines of South America, and the tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations of in the Old South of colonial North America;  the agricultural goods of the Americas were carried on to Europe for processing;  and goods from those European factories were then carried on to Africa, at which point the triangular process began again.
 
The trip across the Atlantic generally took four to five weeks.  There were three or more levels to the ships, just three feet or so apart, with slaves packed in horizontal position, scrunched into spots
five and one-half feet long and about sixteen inches wide.   There the slaves remained chained together, ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist as they lay in an accumulating filth of urine and excrement.  Once a week or so, the slaves were taken on deck to get a rinsing from pails of water, sometimes with requests from the crew to dance or skip or move in some frivolous fashion as the cleaning was taking place.
 
So horrid were ship conditions that about one in seven (approximately 15%) slaves died on the Middle Passage.  But this was part of the calculation.  The slave haul was so valuable in the aggregate that a few lives lost did not matter in crude terms of profit and loss.  Outlays for food and provisions on the ships were no more than necessary for the majority of the slaves to survive, with a few dead bodies carried on into port considered a rationally sustainable loss.
 
Slaves taken for work on the plantations and mines of South America were sold in such numbers that the purchaser just gave the hordes disembarking from the slave ships a quick look and packed them off to the plantation.  Slaves sold in places such as Charleston and New Orleans in the Old South were given more fastidious examination, in similar fashion to that of a horse trade.  Teeth and gums were examined to determine age.  Backs were examined for any sign of scars from cracking whips that might indicate a rebellious spirit.  A woman’s facial wrinkles and the condition of her legs and abdomen were assessed for child-bearing potential.  Prices for slaves ranged over time and place;  in Louisiana, the price of a field hand went up from about $500 in the early 19th century to approximately $1,500 at the advent of the Civil War.
 
The slave trade was big business.  The imperial and eventually the industrial might of European empires depended on the goods that resulted from unpaid labor.  Slave ship owners and speculators regularly realized three-fold returns on their investments.  Returns could be even greater when the goods for which slaves were in exceptionally high demand.   But the vagaries of weather and health could also wipe out an investment and bring economic ruin to a ship owner who had bet too heavily on the returns of single ship.  On balance, though, the slave trade was hugely profitable and a huge factor in the economic growth of the nascent capitalist economies of Europe, especially those of Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.
 
In the course of the late 17th century and the 18th century, Great Britain defeated Dutch and French rivals in wars and secured agreements that gave that nation preeminence in the slave trade.  Wealth gained from the slave trade played a vital role in the growth and maintenance of the British Empire.  Two-thirds of the African slaves sold by British traders went to non-British purchasers;  one-third went to fellow Britons.  Through the 17th century, ship owners from London still played an important role, but in the course of the 18th century the cities of Bristol and Liverpool came to overshadow London as locations for ship owners and investors.  By 1795, Liverpool dominated five-eighths of the British slave trade and three-sevenths of the entire European slave trade.
 

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