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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