Carson, Chapters 1-3

Study Guide 1

Carson, chapters 1-3

1. Ancient Egypt

2. The Great Pyramids

3. Women in ancient Egypt

4. Hatshepsut: Hatshepsut was the longest reigning female pharaoh in Egypt, ruling for 20 years in the 15th century B.C. She is considered one of Egypt's most successful pharaohs. Synopsis: Born circa 1508 B.C., Queen Hatshepsut reigned over Egypt for more than 20 years. She served as queen alongside her husband, Thutmose II, but after his death, claimed the role of pharaoh while acting as regent to her step-son, Thutmose III. She reigned peaceably, building temples and monuments, resulting in the flourish of Egypt. After her death, Thutmose III erased her inscriptions and tried to eradicate her memory.

5. Nubia/Kush and King Shabaka -- Shabaka (reigned ca. 712-ca. 696 B.C.) was a Nubian king who established the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in Lower Egypt and thus became the first of the "Ethiopian" pharaohs.

6. Black Athena 7. The Nok people of the Congo Basin, around 450 BCE -- Humans are certainly no newcomers in the Congo River Basin. Evidence of pygmy culture dates back 20,000 years, while Bantu farmers are known to have migrated into the Congo River Basin forests some 5,000 years ago.

8. Cultural diffusion

9. West Africa – the Sudan

10. Iron, surplus production and complex divisions of labor: king; military leaders & priests; bureaucrats; traders, artisans & teachers; the masses (peasants), slaves

11. Major Sudanese West African kingdoms

a. Ghana

 Effective political and bureaucratic structure

 Feudal power structure

 Urban settlements

 Sophisticated architecture

 Military prowess

 Trade (especially gold and salt)

 Weakened by Berber invasions beginning in 1200 CE

 Islam introduced b. Mali

 Mandingo people

 Leader Sundiata defeats Ghanaian army at Kirina 1235

 Effective political and bureaucratic structure

 Feudal power structure

 Urban settlements

 Sophisticated architecture

 Military prowess

 Trade (especially gold and salt)

 Timbuktu

 Islam

 Mansa Musa (r. 1307-1332 CE)

c. Songhai

 Songhai people break for Mali in 1435

 Military expansion and spread of Islam

 Timbuktu

 Trade (gold, salt, slaves)

 Trans-Saharan slave trade

 Peak under Askia Muhammad Toure (r. 1493-1528)  Key cities of Timbuktu and Gao falls to Arabs 1591

 Decline

12. Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) Moroccan Muslim scholar and traveler. He is known for his traveling and going on excursions called the Rihla. His journeys lasted for a period of almost thirty years. This covered nearly the whole of the known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance readily surpassing that of his predecessors.

13. Smaller kingdoms (about the size of Switzerland) at time of European contact

a. Ife

b. Benin

 Large, sophisticated capital

 Slave trade

 Artisan skills, especially in bronze

 Complex division of labor – peasant based

14. Youruba Culture (example of West Africa in general)

a. Matrilineal kinship

b. Community c. Religion (how different from Europe? What was in common?)

d. Music and dance

e. Storytelling and griots

15. Trade

16. Slavery in West Africa

17. Kongo and the Portuguese

Slavery in West Africa

 Household slavery

 “Africa”?

 Ethnic identity The Islamic Slave Trade

 The Islamic slave trade was not based primarily on race.

 Under Islam, once Africans were freed they merged into Arab society.

 Muslims typically purchased more female than male slaves.

 Muslims owners freed their slaves more often than slave owners in the Americas.

The Portuguese

 Prince Henry the Navigator -- Henry the Navigator was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1394. Although he was neither a sailor nor a navigator, he sponsored a great deal of exploration along the west coast of Africa. Under his patronage, Portuguese crews founded the country's first colonies and visited regions previously unknown to Europeans. Henry is regarded as an originator of the Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade.

 The Portuguese accomplished sailing around Africa to reach India and the East, and rounding the Cape of Good Hope o Bartolomeu Dias

o Vasco da Gama

 Portuguese contacts with West Africa

 Until the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese used captured African slaves for domestic servants.

 Prior to African slavery, Europeans had relied on slaves from Russia.

 On the Madeiras, enslaved Africans worked alongside slaves from Russia and the Balkans. The Portuguese eventually began using only African slaves because they were cheaper to import.

 The cultivation of sugar by the Portuguese helped create the plantation system of slavery.

 The plantation system was comprised of a cash crop, forced labor of enslaved people, and large land holdings.

The Spanish  Reconquista and Crusader militancy

 Until the early 1500s, the European demand for slaves was relatively low but this changed with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Columbus initiated the slave trade by creating a demand for labor on the agricultural plantations.

 The conquest of the Caribbean

 Columbus and the Portuguese planation slave system in the Madieras

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

 The most important invention to affect the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade during the 1400's was the three cornered sail.

 Triangular trading system  Europeans needed labor from Africa because the Native Americans quickly began to die in huge numbers from diseases imported by the Europeans.

 Between 1500-1800 the largest number of enslaved Africans were in Portuguese colonies.

 The early Europeans obtained there slaves by trading with native African tribes.  Africans enslaved other Africans because of warfare and interethnic rivalries among African tribes – the selling members of defeated tribes proved a way to get rid of opponents; Africans at the time also did not have a sense of themselves as "Africans," and had not really developed a concept of racial solidarity.

 Africans became slaves as their towns or villages were conquered by other African armies.

 Nearly two hundred African societies participated in the slave trade.

 The period from the time a slave was captured until they reached their final destination was usually 6 months.

 It has been estimated that as many as 40 million Africans were taken from the continent or died after capture.

 By the middle of the 18th century approximately 9 out of every 10 West Africans captured for export eventually worked in sugarcane fields in the New World.

 Most enslaved Africans were transported to Brazilian sugar plantations.

 Njinga, (Nzinga) the queen of Ndonga was known for leading the resistance to European imperialism in Africa. Nzinga found an ally in the Netherlands, which seized Luanda for its own mercantile purposes in 1641. Their combined forces were insufficient to drive the Portuguese out of Angola, however, and after Luanda was reclaimed by the Portuguese, Nzinga was again forced to retreat to Matamba. From this point on, Nzinga focused on developing Matamba as a trading power by capitalizing on its position as the gateway to the Central African interior. By the time of her death in 1661, Matamba was a formidable commercial state that dealt with the Portuguese colony on an equal footing.

 The Royal Africa Company was a joint stock company created by the English. The British successfully took over the slave trade in the 17th century because they needed labor for the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia and Maryland. By the late 1700's England had become the foremost slave trading nation in all of Europe.

 The life of John Newton, a British slave ship captain, indicates that Christians could be cruel, harsh slavers, that often never saw a contradiction between trading in human cargo and their religious beliefs.

The Middle Passage

 Elmina castle

 Seasoning

 Many of the African captives believed that they were going to be eaten by savage whites.  "tight packers" -- The typical slave ship captain packed their ships as tightly as possible to maximize profit even though the mortality rates among slaves were very high.

 Europeans reduced the risk of rebellion at the African slave factories by keeping families and ethnic groups separated. On slave ships slaves were separated by gender to prevent rebellion.  African captives were often separated by gender on the ships. Women slaves were frequently raped by their white male captors. The experience of African slave women differed from slave men aboard the slave ships as women suffered sexual violence by the ships' crews. This high level of violence, and its psychological effects, may have led to their lessened sex drives once the women arrived in the Caribbean and Latin America.

 Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, wrote that the middle passage was an incredibly difficult experience for Africans, who were torn from their home and families and forced into horrifying conditions.

 Disease spread rapidly on slave ships because of inadequate and highly unsanitary ways of disposing of human waste, the fact that the slavers forced their captives to eat using common spoons and bowls. Physicians at the time had not developed the theories relating the spread of germs to disease, but thought that illnesses were spread by imbalances in bodily fluids.

 To squelch rebellion onboard ships all of the following tactics were used except ample food and water were provided.

 Slave rebellions were a not uncommon experience on slave ships. Slaves resisted their imprisonment by drowning themselves, refusing to eat and by organizing and carrying out bloody, violent rebellions.

 It has been estimated that roughly 10 million Africans survived the Middle Passage.  It is estimated that most slaves died just 7 years after surviving the Middle Passage.

Plantation Slavery in the Americas

 South American and Caribbean slavery

 In North America slaves were used primarily as field laborers.

 Slavery was different in Africa than in the Americans because in the Americas, most slaves were used as agricultural laborers, rather than fighters or domestic servants; slaves were mostly male and slavery was based on race.

 Slavery in South Carolina

o Rice

o Gullah dialect

o Slave Christianity

 Tobacco  Sugar production in North America

1. “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here”

2. 1619

3. Anthony Johnson

a. Blacks could own fairly substantial amounts of property, and have their own servants and slaves.

b. Blacks could gain their freedom.

c. Blacks could have legal rights in the courts. 4. Anthony and Mary Johnson’s son

a. Married a white woman

b. ______farm

c. By the end of the 17th century the children and grandchildren of the Johnsons were forced to become tenant farmers and servants.

d. What happened?

5. First, the Native peoples

6. Native peoples and first Europeans and Africans

7. Slavery in New England

a. New England patterns of settlement b. The ______did not support year-round farming.

c. Most farmers relied on the labor of ______instead of slaves.

d. The merchant elite and slave domestics

e. New Englanders supplied grain, wood products and flour to the slave trade.

8. Slave rights in New England

a. ______in court.

b. ______the legislature for freedom.

c. Bear arms with their master's consent.

9. Slavery in the mid-Atlantic colonies

a. 1/10th of New York enslaved peoples of African descent

b. Within two years of its founding, ______became a slave trading and slaveholding hub. c. The location of the first documented anti-slavery protest was ______Why?

10. English plantation agriculture – in late on the kill

a. The English people were going through a lot of religious turmoil with the Protestant Reformation.

b. The English monarchy was not as wealthy as the Spanish monarchy.

c. English ______companies

11. First permanent British settlement in North America at ______

a. How did colony survive initial settlement?

b. The production of ______proved to be the economic salvation of the colony.

c. How was land acquired?

d. How was the labor force acquired? e. British needed labor, initially turned to their "undesirables" as a source.

e.i. Terms of ______servitude

e.i.1. Masters were often very brutal and controlling over their servants.

e.i.2. Indentured servants could become free once their term of service to their master was complete.

e.i.3. Black people were often considered and treated as indentured servants.

e.ii. Lash of the marketplace

e.iii. “Criminality”

e.iv. Kidnapping

f. “Freedom dues” 12. Race and class

a. Indentured servants and slaves

b. The case of John Punch

c. The ambiguity over the legal status of slaves ended in 1662 when the Virginia House of Burgesses ruled that "all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother."

d. Laws against interracial sex and marriage (Virginia – not South Carolina)

d.i. It must have been happening!

d.ii. The penalty for a white man or woman who married an African or Indian was banishment

13. Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)

a. The land base and “freedom dues”

b. Native peoples and the “frontier” c. Nathaniel Bacon

d. Open war

e. The settlement

14. The “Terrible Transformation”

a. ______Rebellion in 1676 --- Former indentured servants demanded political change, pushed concerned wealthy white men in Virginia to use slavery over the older form of labor.

a.i. Fewer indentured servants were willing to go to the Chesapeake.

a.ii. The British could look to their established precedent of slavery in the ______as an example.

a.iii. The British had gained control of the slave trade in Africa, and this caused the price of slaves to go down.

b. Slaves a permanent labor force

c. Myth of “white solidarity” d. Creation of a “watchdog class”

15. Slavery in the “low country”

a. South Carolina and ______

b. ______production

b.i. By the early ______South Carolina's planters relied primarily on the labor of enslaved Africans.

b.ii. In South Carolina approximately 2/3 of all field hands were males.

b.iii. Blacks on the plantations worked on daily tasks in the fields, without much white supervision.

b.iv. Carolina adopted the harshest set of laws for slaves, since they were very fearful of slave revolts.

b.v. A distinct class system arose among blacks, with some creoles enjoying more privileges.

c. African slaves outnumbered European whites, most of whom arrived from Barbados. d. Most severe racial code

d.i. In South Carolina a white servant who ran away with a slave was put to death.

d.ii. Any white woman who delivered a child fathered by a black man was sentenced to seven years in prison.

d.iii. Despite its harsh racial code, South Carolinians were tolerant of interracial sex between white men and black women.

16. Sugar production

a. By 1721 approximately 20% of ______population was comprised of slaves.

b. Sugar production patterned after production the ______

17. Florida

a. A slave ______b. Native peoples

18. Slave culture

a. Religion

b. Kinship

c. Folk tales

d. The North and Mid-Atlantic

e. The Chesapeake

f. South Carolina and Georgia