How Unique Was the Atlantic Slave Trade?

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Slave trade workshop 18 mei 2006 Afrika Studiecentrum Piet Emmer: How unique was the Atlantic Slave Trade? In my contribution to the workshop I plan to discuss those aspects of the Atlantic slave trade that made this trade differ from the internal slave trade in Africa and the Arab slave trade. In many ways, the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade was unique. With the exception of the Iberian peninsula Europe did not trade in slaves nor did the Europeans enslave one another. The slave trade and slavery under dominance of the Europeans was exclusively directed towards the colonial world. Attempts to introduce slavery in Western Europe failed. Elsewhere, such a geographical difference did not exist and nowhere outside Europe were all people of the same continent considered as insiders who could not be enslaved. Not only the origins of the European trade in slaves were unique, the same was true of the use of slaves. In the European colonies the use of slaves was based on economic motives and not on tradition. Nowhere else was slavery so directly linked to economic growth. In Africa, Arabia and in Asia, slaves were used either as conspicuous consumption or to fill certain occupations traditionally reserved for slaves such as porterage, army service, and cleaning. In the European colonies, however, the transition from non- slave to slave labour was based on a cost-benefit analysis. Last, but not least, the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery by the Europeans was unique. Nowhere else were this institutions abolished and in parts of Africa and Asia they still exist. In contrast to the introduction of slavery in the European colonial world, its abolition was not based on economic, but on humanitarian motives. Furthermore, the Europeans were unique in wanting to abolish the slave trade of the Africans and Asians once they themselves had done way with these institutions. In conclusion the point will be stressed that the Atlantic slave trade and slavery was unique in that it contributed to economic growth and their abolition was indeed a case of “econocide”, while the reverse was true in Asia, the Middle East and Asia. .

Copy Link

Recommended publications

Piracy, Illicit Trade, and the Construction of Commercial
Navigating the Atlantic World: Piracy, Illicit Trade, and the Construction of Commercial Networks, 1650-1791 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Jamie LeAnne Goodall, M.A. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2016 Dissertation Committee: Margaret Newell, Advisor John Brooke David Staley Copyright by Jamie LeAnne Goodall 2016 Abstract This dissertation seeks to move pirates and their economic relationships from the social and legal margins of the Atlantic world to the center of it and integrate them into the broader history of early modern colonization and commerce. In doing so, I examine piracy and illicit activities such as smuggling and shipwrecking through a new lens. They act as a form of economic engagement that could not only be used by empires and colonies as tools of competitive international trade, but also as activities that served to fuel the developing Caribbean-Atlantic economy, in many ways allowing the plantation economy of several Caribbean-Atlantic islands to flourish. Ultimately, in places like Jamaica and Barbados, the success of the plantation economy would eventually displace the opportunistic market of piracy and related activities. Plantations rarely eradicated these economies of opportunity, though, as these islands still served as important commercial hubs: ports loaded, unloaded, and repaired ships, taverns attracted a variety of visitors, and shipwrecking became a regulated form of employment. In places like Tortuga and the Bahamas where agricultural production was not as successful, illicit activities managed to maintain a foothold much longer.
[Show full text]
1 1. Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Leeds Beckett Repository 1. Suppression of the Atlantic slave trade: Abolition from ship to shore Robert Burroughs This study provides fresh perspectives on criticalaspects of the British Royal Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. It is divided into three sections. The first, Policies, presents a new interpretation of the political framework underwhich slave-trade suppression was executed. Section II, Practices, examines details of the work of the navy’s West African Squadronwhich have been passed over in earlier narrativeaccounts. Section III, Representations, provides the first sustained discussion of the squadron’s wider, cultural significance, and its role in the shaping of geographical knowledge of West Africa.One of our objectives in looking across these three areas—a view from shore to ship and back again--is to understand better how they overlap. Our authors study the interconnections between political and legal decision-making, practical implementation, and cultural production and reception in an anti-slavery pursuit undertaken far from the metropolitan centres in which it was first conceived.Such an approachpromises new insights into what the anti-slave-trade patrols meant to Britain and what the campaign of ‘liberation’ meant for those enslaved Africans andnavalpersonnel, including black sailors, whose lives were most closely entangled in it. The following chapters reassess the policies, practices, and representations of slave- trade suppression by building upon developments in research in political, legal and humanitarian history, naval, imperial and maritime history, medical history, race relations and migration, abolitionist literature and art, nineteenth-century geography, nautical literature and art, and representations of Africa.
[Show full text]
A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
History in the Making Volume 1 Article 7 2008 A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Adam D. Wilsey CSUSB Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making Part of the African History Commons Recommended Citation Wilsey, Adam D. (2008) "A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries," History in the Making: Vol. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making/vol1/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arthur E. Nelson University Archives at CSUSB ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in History in the Making by an authorized editor of CSUSB ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 78 CSUSB Journal of History A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Adam D. Wiltsey Linschoten, South and West Africa, Copper engraving (Amsterdam, 1596.) Accompanying the dawn of the twenty‐first century, there has emerged a new era of historical thinking that has created the need to reexamine the history of slavery and slave resistance. Slavery has become a controversial topic that historians and scholars throughout the world are reevaluating. In this modern period, which is finally beginning to honor the ideas and ideals of equality, slavery is the black mark of our past; and the task now lies History in the Making 79 before the world to derive a better understanding of slavery. In order to better understand slavery, it is crucial to have a more acute awareness of those that endured it.
[Show full text]
Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 22
T HE WENNER-GREN SYMPOSIUM SERIES CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY A TLANTIC SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD I BRAHIMA THIAW AND DEBORAH L. MACK, GUEST EDITORS A tlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 22 Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies An Introduction to Supplement 22 Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy V The Slavery Business and the Making of “Race” in Britain OLUME 61 and the Caribbean Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race OCTOBER 2020 VOLUME SUPPLEMENT 61 22 From Country Marks to DNA Markers: The Genomic Turn S UPPLEMENT 22 in the Reconstruction of African Identities Diasporic Citizenship under Debate: Law, Body, and Soul Slavery, Anthropological Knowledge, and the Racialization of Africans Sovereignty after Slavery: Universal Liberty and the Practice of Authority in Postrevolutionary Haiti O CTOBER 2020 From the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Ethnoracial Law in Multicultural Ecuador: The “Changing Same” of Anti-Black Racism as Revealed by Two Lawsuits Filed by Afrodescendants Serving Status on the Gambia River Before and After Abolition The Problem: Religion within the World of Slaves The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons A “tone of voice peculiar to New-England”: Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Heterogeneity of Enslaved People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century Quebec Valongo: An Uncomfortable Legacy Raising
[Show full text]
The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES* NATHAN NUNN Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and histori- cal documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I ﬁnd a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use in- strumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades had an adverse effect on economic development. I. INTRODUCTION Africa’s economic performance in the second half of the twen- tieth century has been poor. One, often informal, explanation for Africa’s underdevelopment is its history of extraction, character- ized by two events: the slave trades and colonialism. Bairoch (1993, p. 8) writes that “there is no doubt that a large number of negative structural features of the process of economic under- development have historical roots going back to European col- onization.” Manning (1990, p. 124) echoes Bairoch but focuses on the slave trades, writing, “Slavery was corruption: it involved theft, bribery, and exercise of brute force as well as ruses. Slavery thus may be seen as one source of precolonial origins for modern corruption.” Recent empirical studies suggest that Africa’s history can explain part of its current underdevelopment. These studies fo- cus on the link between countries’ colonial experience and cur- rent economic development (Grier 1999; Englebert 2000a, 2000b; * A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title “Slavery, Insti- tutional Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa.” I am grateful to the editor, Edward Glaeser, and three anonymous referees for comments that substantially improved this paper.
[Show full text]
The Abolition of the British Slave Trade Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso (Málaga, Spain)
The Abolition of the British Slave Trade Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso (Málaga, Spain) 2007 marks the bicentenary of the Abolition of individual protagonists of the abolitionist cause, the Slave Trade in the British Empire. On 25 the most visible in the 2007 commemorations March 1807 Parliament passed an Act that put will probably be the Yorkshire MP William an end to the legal transportation of Africans Wilberforce, whose heroic fight for abolition in across the Atlantic, and although the institution Parliament is depicted in the film production of of slavery was not abolished until 1834, the 1807 Amazing Grace, appropriately released in Act itself was indeed a historic landmark. Britain on Friday, 23 March, the weekend of Conferences, exhibitions and educational the bicentenary. The film reflects the traditional projects are taking place in 2007 to view that places Wilberforce at the centre of commemorate the anniversary, and many the antislavery process as the man who came different British institutions are getting involved to personify the abolition campaign (Walvin in an array of events that bring to public view 157), to the detriment of other less visible but two hundred years later not only the equally crucial figures in the abolitionist parliamentary process whereby the trading in movement, such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville human flesh was made illegal (and the Sharp and many others, including the black antislavery campaign that made it possible), but voices who in their first-person accounts also what the Victoria and Albert Museum revealed to British readers the cruelty of the exhibition calls the Uncomfortable Truths of slave system.
[Show full text]
The Case for Reparations” ©Rev Jonathan Rogers WTVL UUC
8/18/19 Sermon “The Case For Reparations” ©Rev Jonathan Rogers WTVL UUC Several years ago, I had my big interview with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. This is the last major hurdle you need to clear to become an ordained UU minister. The question I remember most from my interview was “Name one influential African-American Unitarian Universalist since the 1961 merger, other than Bill Sinkford.” Bill Sinkford is a two-time former President of our UUA, serving from 2001-2009, and again as an Interim in 2017. I had a very difficult time thinking of another influential African-American UU. After a very long and uncomfortable silence, I said “Mark Morrison-Reed,” who is an author, historian, and minister in our movement. It has stuck with me ever since, that although we have had a public and explicit commitment to anti-racism in our movement for over 20 years, our leadership doesn’t necessarily reflect that. Mark Morrison- Reed was honored with the Distinguished Service Award this June at General Assembly. When speaking at the Award reception, Rev. Reed noted that Bill Sinkford was the first African-American male who was raised UU and became a minister. Rev. Reed himself was the second Black male minister raised as a UU. There has not been a third. It may seem odd to harp on anti-racism and the lack of Black leadership in our movement during a visit to Maine, a state that is 95% white. My point is simply that although UUs think of ourselves as a diverse and inclusive group, we have a long way to go to truly live into our values in this area.
[Show full text]
African Slaves Arrived in Iberia and the Atlantic Islands
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race November 7-8, 2003 Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Spanish and Portuguese Influences on Racial Slavery in British North America, 1492-1619 James H. Sweet, Florida International University Several years ago, I considered medieval and early-modern Iberian racial ideology as the subject of an article for William and Mary Quarterly, but almost immediately I left the topic behind in order to conduct research on the cultures of Africans in the early Portuguese colonial world. As I pondered how I could make a new contribution to the subject of racial degradation, I realized that I was well situated to write a “sequel” to my earlier work, one that would link Columbian-era racial discourse with English and North American ideas about race and slavery. In my earlier work, I suggested ways that Islamic ideas were passed on to the Spanish and Portuguese, concluding that many of the ideas that informed fifteenth-century Iberian society were already well formulated in the Islamic world. Here, I hope to show how Iberians completed the cycle, exchanging similar ideas about race and slavery with their English counterparts in the Atlantic world, ultimately creating broadly conceived “European” or 1 even “white” identities. By highlighting some of the Atlantic connections that forged racial slavery and degradation, I will try to steer the discussion away from English/North American exceptionalism toward what I feel is more accurately a European problem, writ large.1 Having said that, I should be clear from the outset that my paper is largely a response to the scholarship on slavery and race in British North America.
[Show full text]
"EWJ AFRICA" ERICA" HI CURRICU UM GUIDE Grades 9 T
THE "EWJ AFRICA" ERICA" HI CURRICU UM GUIDE Grades 9 t Larry fl. Greene Lenworth Gunther Trenton new Jersey Historical Commission. Department of State CONTENTS Foreword 5 About the Authors 7 Preface 9 How to Use This Guide 11 Acknowledgments 13 Unit 1 African Beginnings 15 Unit 2 Africa, Europe, and the Rise of Afro-America, 1441-1619 31 Unit 3 African American Slavery in the Colonial Era, 1619-1775 50 Unit 4 Blacks in the Revolutionary Era, 1776-1789 61 Unit 5 Slavery and Abolition in Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum America, 1790-1860 72 Unit 6 African Americans and the Civil War, 1861-1865 88 Unit 7 The Reconstruction Era, 1865-1877 97 Unit 8 The Rise ofJim Crow and The Nadir, 1878-1915 106 Unit 9 World War I and the Great Migration, 1915-1920 121 Unit 10 The Decade of the Twenties: From the Great Migration to the Great Depression 132 Unit 11 The 1930s: The Great Depression 142 Unit 12 World War II: The Struggle for Democracy at Home and Abroad, 1940-1945 151 Unit 13 The Immediate Postwar Years, 1945-1953 163 Unit 14 The Civil Rights and Black Power Era: Gains and Losses, 1954-1970 173 Unit 15 Beyond Civil Rights, 1970-1994 186 3 DEDICATED TO Vallie and Rolph Greene and Freddy FOREWORD Because the New Jersey African American History along with the decade's considerable social agitation Curriculum Guide: Grades 9 to 12 is a unique educa and the consciousness-raising experiences that it en tional resource, most persons interested in teaching gendered, encouraged other groups to decry their African American history to New Jersey high school marginal place in American history and to clamor, students will welcome its appearance.
[Show full text]
African American Inequality in the United States
N9-620-046 REV: MAY 5, 2020 JANICE H. HAMMOND A. KAMAU MASSEY MAYRA A. GARZA African American Inequality in the United States We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. — The Declaration of Independence, 1776 Slavery Transatlantic Slave Trade 1500s – 1800s The Transatlantic slave trade was tHe largest deportation of Human beings in History. Connecting the economies of Africa, the Americas, and Europe, tHe trade resulted in tHe forced migration of an estimated 12.5 million Africans to the Americas. (Exhibit 1) For nearly four centuries, European slavers traveled to Africa to capture or buy African slaves in excHange for textiles, arms, and other goods.a,1 Once obtained, tHe enslaved Africans were tHen transported by sHip to tHe Americas where tHey would provide tHe intensive plantation labor needed to create HigH-value commodities sucH as tobacco, coffee, and most notably, sugar and cotton. THe commodities were tHen sHipped to Europe to be sold. THe profits from tHe slave trade Helped develop tHe economies of Denmark, France, Great Britain, the NetHerlands, Portugal, Spain and tHe United States. The journey from Africa across tHe Atlantic Ocean, known as tHe Middle Passage, became infamous for its brutality. Enslaved Africans were chained to one another by the dozens and transported across the ocean in the damp cargo Holds of wooden sHips. (Exhibit 2) The shackled prisoners sat or lay for weeks at a time surrounded by deatH, illness, and human waste.
[Show full text]
Pugh-Sellers 1 Seeing Humans, Making Commodities: Slave Ship
Pugh-Sellers 1 Seeing Humans, Making Commodities: Slave Ship Rebellions on Film Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in African and African-American Studies and History Chad Williams, Adviser In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts By Lucia Pugh-Sellers April 2020 Committee members: Name: Chad Williams Signature:___________________________________ Name: Alice Kelikian Signature:___________________________________ Name: Faith Smith Signature:___________________________________ Pugh-Sellers 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, who have inspired and helped me enormously during my time at Brandeis. I am grateful to know Professors Faith Smith and Alice Kelikian, who each influenced me so much, and ultimately changed my life. Professor Chad Williams, my thesis advisor, was a model of patience, offering step-by-step guidance and sage advice. His dedication to teaching was evident from the first day I stepped into his class, when he showed himself willing to engage with an intimidated first-year student. I could not have finished this thesis without these profoundly important academic mentors. I also want to thank everyone else who helped me through this thesis process, particularly: Kavita, for being my thesis-writing buddy and commiserator; Yael, for her empathy; Allison, for advice and laughter; Tamar; my thesis cohort (Dannie, Victoria, and Jake). Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family, especially my parents and sisters, for their wholehearted support, which keeps me going. I recognize and wrestle with my positionality as white woman, and one who has largely benefited from the systems of racism I describe here.
[Show full text]
How Did Forced Migration and Forced Displacement Change Igbo Women’S and Their African American Daughters’ Environmental Identity?
How Did Forced Migration and Forced Displacement Change Igbo Women’s and Their African American Daughters’ Environmental Identity? A THESIS Presented to the Urban Sustainability Department Antioch University, Los Angeles In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Urban Sustainability Capstone Committee Members: Susan Gentile, MS. Jane Paul, MA. Susan Clayton, Ph.D. Submitted by Jamila K. Gaskins April 2018 Abstract Environmental identity and forced migration are well-researched subjects, yet, the intergenerational effects of forced migration on environmental identity lack substantive examination. This paper explores and adds to that research by asking the question, how did forced migration and forced displacement change Igbo women’s and their African American daughter's environmental identity? The Igbo women were kidnapped from Igboland (modern-day Nigeria) for sale in the transatlantic slave trade. A significant percentage of the Igbo women shipped to colonial America were taken to the Chesapeake colonies. Historians indicate that Igbo women were important in the birth of a new generation of African Americans due to the high number of their children surviving childbirth. One facet of environmental identity is place identity, which can be an indicator of belonging. This paper investigates the creation of belonging in the midst of continued, generational disruption in the relationship to the land, or environmental identity. Historical research and an extensive literature review were the research methods. It was concluded that stating a historical environmental identity with any scientific validity is not possible. Instead, there is a reason to suggest a high level of connection between cultural identity and the environmental identity of the Igbo before colonization and enslavement by colonial Americans.
[Show full text]