|
The
Economics of slavery
Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale
and trade for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought
to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the
"Middle Passage". African slaves were thenceforth
traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to
complete the "Triangular Trade".
Slavery
was involved in some of the most profitable industries in
history. 70% of the slaves brought to the New World were used
to produce sugar. The rest were employed harvesting coffee,
cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West
Indian colonies of the European powers were some of their
most important possessions, so they went to extremes to protect
and retain them. For example, at the end of the Seven Years'
War in 1763, France agreed to cede the vast territory of New
France to the victors in exchange for keeping the minute Antillian
island of Guadeloupe.
Slave
trade profits have been the object of many fantasies. Returns
for the investors were not actually absurdly high (around
6% in France in the 18th century), but they were higher than
domestic alternatives (in the same century, around 5%). Risks—maritime
and commercial—were important for individual voyages.
Investors mitigated it by buying small shares of many ships
at the same time. In that way, they were able to diversify
a large part of the risk away. Between voyages, ship shares
could be freely sold and bought. All these made slave trade
a very interesting investment (Daudin 2004). Historian Walter
Rodney estimates that by c.1770, the King of Dahomey was earning
an estimated £250,000 per year by selling captive African
soldiers and even his own people to the European slave-traders.
Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of
very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.
The
persecution of Africans has been traditionally minimized or
whitewashed in historiography. Conventional western historical
narratives have frequently been criticized as anti-African
or Eurocentric, for instance in regards to viewing centuries
of persecution and disenfranchisement as a side effect of
commercial enterprise. Prejudicial accounts of African societies,
cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars abound,
with African and African Diaspora voices often muted or relegated
to the periphery. Until the 1960s, black people suffered from
what one historian deemed "historical invisibility".
Owen
'Alik Shahadah - a historian - traces this pattern of scholarship
to the era of slavery and colonialism, when it first came
to serve as a means of removing any noble claim from the victims
of systemic persecution; this served to rationalize their
plight as "natural" and a continuation of a preexisting
historical status, in order to eschew moral responsibility
for destroying societies and undermining indigenous social
and political systems. The first expressions of this academic
trend appeared in the claim that "Slavery was a natural
feature of Africa, and that Africans sold each other everyday."
This contention sought to justify the commercial exploitation
of humanity while denying the moral question, a pattern Shahada
perceives to have continued beyond the eclipse of slavery
and colonialism.
The
slave trade - a summary
Who
were the slaves?
Millions of Africans, who were forcibly transported overseas
over a period of about 450 years from the middle of the 15th
Century.
The enslavement of people from west Africa by British, European
and African traders, and their mass transportation to the
Americas was known as the transatlantic Slave Trade.
A
similar slave trade, conducted by Arab and African traders
over roughly the same period, saw millions of others transported
from the continent's east coast and enslaved in the Arab world.
Slavery had existed for thousands of years, but this period
saw the most widespread and systematic form.
How
did it begin?
Advances
in ship design and navigation enabled European traders to
travel reliably to Africa. The Portuguese were the first to
begin capturing Africans and taking them back to Europe as
slaves. Spanish
traders took the first African slaves to America in 1503.
Over the next century the slave trade developed as a lucrative
commercial system.
Traders
would export manufactured goods to west Africa where they
would be exchanged for slaves from African merchants. The
slaves were then transported across the Atlantic and sold
for huge profits in the Americas. Traders used the money to
buy raw materials such as sugar, cotton, coffee, metals, and
tobacco, which were shipped back and sold in Europe. By
the end of the 18th century Britain had come to dominate the
trade, with around 150 slave ships leaving Liverpool, Bristol,
and London each year.
How
many people were enslaved?
A
database compiled in the late 1990s put the figure for the
transatlantic slave trade at more than 11 million people,
but numbers are still contested. The total number taken from
eastern Africa and enslaved in the Arab world is considered
to be between 9.4 and 14 million. The figures are uncertain
due to the lack of written records.
More
than a million people are thought to have died while in transit
across the so-called 'middle passage' of the Atlantic due
to the inhuman conditions aboard the slave ships and brutal
suppression of any resistance. Many slaves captured from the
African interior died on the long journey to the coast.
On
the plantations, life expectancy was short because of poor
diet and the back-breaking work. Slaves were branded with
hot irons and punishment for trying to run away was whipping
or execution.
What
was the effect on Africa?
The
forced removal of up to 25 million people made Africa's population
stagnate or even decline during the slave trade, historians
believe.
Some
have argued that some African kingdoms were more socially
and economically advanced than many European countries before
1500.
In
the 14th century, the West African empire of Mali was larger
than Western Europe, and reputed to be one of the richest
and most powerful states in the world.
Historians
continue to debate how and why African kingdoms and traders
became so actively involved the slave trade.
Some
suggest that the demand for free labour from Europe and the
lack of a wider concept of African "identity" at
the time allowed slavery to flourish.
Who
profited from slavery?
Merchants
in Britain, America, Europe and Africa became very rich from
the slave trade.
The
trade also created, sustained and relied on a large support
network of shipping services, ports, and finance and insurance
companies, employing thousands of people.
New
industries were created processing the raw materials harvested
or extracted by slaves in the Americas. Plantation owners
profited from the free labour provided by slaves.
The
slave trade contributed significantly to the commercial and
industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Cities
such as Liverpool and Amsterdam grew wealthy as a result of
the trade in humans.
How
did the slave trade end?
The
movement against slavery began in the late 18th Century.
Thomas
Clarkson worked against the trade for more than 50 years,
travelling Britain to organise meetings and distribute abolitionist
literature. He pioneered a string of tactics - including boycotts
of goods - which are still employed by campaign groups today.
The
publication of "slave narratives" from writers such
as Olaudah Equiano helped to change public perceptions of
slavery.
British
MP William Wilberforce campaigned vociferously against the
trade for 35 years and is often given much credit for the
parliamentary act banning it in 1807, and the legislation
which later freed and gave rights to slaves in British territories
in 1833.
While
the 1807 act made slave trading illegal on paper, it took
a further 60 years of dedicated Foreign Office diplomacy and
Royal Navy enforcement to finally eradicate it.
Are
there still slaves today?
Although
slavery is illegal in every country, it still exists in many
parts of the world.
In
A Persistent Evil: The Global Problem of Slavery, a report
published by the Harvard International Review in 2002, Richard
Re suggested: "Conservative estimates indicate that at
least 27 million people, in places as diverse as Nigeria,
Indonesia, and Brazil, live in conditions of forced bondage".
While this figure is far higher than the total transported
during the historical slave trade, it represents a far smaller
a proportion of the current global population.
Modern
slavery is often more complicated than "chattel slavery"
- where one person simply 'owns' another as their material
possession. Practices which amount to slavery include sex
trafficking and bonded labour, where a person's work is 'security'
for a debt which they can never repay.
|
