Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade - Research Paper Example

SLAVERY AND THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE Introduction Beginning in the 15th century, Europeans established a transatlantic slave trade. For over four centuries, they transported several million captured and enslaved Africans to the North and South American continents, to the Caribbean Islands and to Brazil. A commercial revolution in Europe promoted the rise of powerful nation states such as “Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and Holland”1. Simultaneously new concepts emerged pertaining to competition, commodity exploitation and the accumulation of wealth. The importing of African slaves became an essential, acceptable and profitable part of European commerce. Taking advantage of the internecine warring amidst African nations, Europeans forcefully removed Africans from their homeland, with the largest numbers from the Gold, Ivory and West Coasts. The cruel system of African slavery was uniquely different from other forms of slavery due to the brutal manner in which it was conducted, the treatment of African slaves as goods or personal property, and the great numbers of people who were captured as slaves, believed to be over 50 million. The one-way trip to the Americas was known as the “Middle-Passage”. One of the major debates among historians about the transatlantic slave trade argues the specific reasons for Europeans to enslave Africans during an extensive period spanning the 15th to the early 19th century. Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to determine whether European motivation for the slave trade was related to profits, racism, or had another explanation. The Significance and Long-Term Effects of the Slave Trade Historian Marcus Rediker has explored not only the transatlantic slave trade, but also the slave ships by which the trade was carried out for centuries. The transportation of enslaved Africans and business transactions of slaves towards their use as forced labor, forms history’s greatest imposed migration. The slave ships were the mechanism instrumental in facilitating Europe’s commercial revolution through the development of plantations, capitalism, and industrialization eventually leading to the formation of global empires. Thus, the transatlantic slave trade through slave ships has shaped the modern world, and therefore form a significant era in European and American history2. Contrastingly, the loss of large numbers of its people led to extensive decline in Africa’s economy and political situation. Despite rich natural resources, the continent’s inability to overcome its low levels of development towards progress is attributed fully to its past of enslavement and depletion of its population3. However, other reasons such as the siphoning away of world financial aids meant for Africa’s development, by politicians in the weak political system, further undermines the continent’s future. Racism and the Brutality of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Significantly, racism is defined as white supremacy4, because no other race in the world has asserted itself to be the superior race; and used political or economic resources to impose oppression on others on the basis of race. The Europeans considered themselves as the superior race on the basis of their light skin color, and believed that dark skin genetically predetermined Africans as inferior, and suitable only for the status of slave. Thus, the Europeans developed deeply ingrained discrimination against the dark coloured Africans as “others” belonging to a lower class of humanity. This approach is also evident in the fact that Europeans did not enslave other Europeans because of an underlying commitment to individual rights. They considered other whites as similar to themselves, and consequently their equals. Since Africans were considered as different both physically and culturally, this “otherness” was the rationalization for enslaving, ill-treating and enforcing hard labor on them. Carl Degler5 and Winthrop Jordan6 supported this view of racism being key to Africans’ enslavement by the white Europeans. There is an extensive body of literature emphasizing the biological inferiority of the Negro. For example, “blackness” was replete with particular negative meanings for Europeans, who “used racial differences to justify slavery in their possessions”7 thereby reinforcing racist perceptions. Various scholars such as David Eltis8 support the view that slavery though rooted in acquiring economic gains, was based on fundamental, socially constructed values related to racism. This created “the Atlantic slave system and the slave trade that sustained it”9. During the one to three month duration of the Middle Passage, millions of Africans died from starvation, disease, suicide, and infanticide. Women and children formed a large percentage of the enslaved Africans. Families, married couples, parent and child were separated from one another, to isolate and alienate them from personal bonds and relationships. The inhuman African slave trade undertaken by Europeans for four to five centuries was the longest recorded in history10. The primary documents written by Olaudah Equiano, an important African in abolition history, provide a first-hand account of the sufferings of enslaved Africans. Equiano’s misery and horror at being kidnapped at age 11 and being transported away from his homeland with several hundred other kidnapped Africans, the illtreatment meted out by the whites, and his dread of the fate that awaited him and his countrymen at the destination of the slave ships’ journey, are brought out. He was renamed as Gustavus Vassa by his white master. In 1766 he bought his freedom for £40, and later in 1789 wrote about his experiences as a slave, and his coming to faith in Jesus Christ. In his testimony as a middle passage survivor, he narrates the extremely horrifying conditions under which the Europeans transported them in slave ships which were packed densely with their captives. Vassa has poignantly described the brutal punishments for refusing to eat, or to obey orders, and many of the slaves’ experiencing a desire to die which they were prevented from accomplishing11. Slave owners who purchased the captive Africans examined them for physical deficiencies, and upon purchase, branded the slaves with their own insignia. For slaves who “survived the cramped and dangerous confinement on the coast” of Africa “the nightmare was only beginning”12. During the Middle Passage, the slaves were chained together in twos, with hands and feet bound. They were closely stacked together in the ship’s hull, in order to carry the maximum number of slaves, since higher profits could be accrued from a bigger cargo of slaves. The voyage lasted from six to sixteen weeks, during which there were dangerous outbreaks of small pox, dysentery and infections that spread quickly in the crowded hold of the ship, resulting in mortality rates of 25 to 40 percent of the enslaved people, during the early years of the slave trade. To prevent slave rebellions and suicide attempts, they were kept tightly chained. These modes of horrifying treatment meted out to the captives indicate the inhuman and discriminatory approach of the Europeans towards their African slaves. Capitalism and Economic Profits of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Historians such as Eric Williams13 argue that slavery was for economic profits rather than related to racism. The Europeans achieved increasing capitalism by using Africans as free labor in plantations, in farms, in industry, in construction, in the most lowly jobs, and as domestic workers. In the first half of the fifteenth century, African slaves brought directly to the previously unpopulated Atlantic Islands formed the new model of slave labor in the plantations14. Slaves were used predominantly as servants and laborers in the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. “African slave labor was vital to the economic life of British North America”15. The most important feature about the Atlantic slave trade was that it was completely motivated by commercial interests. The Europeans turned slavery into an industry, since slave trading was highly profitable. The African slave trade was a capitalist invention. “It was the large-scale capitalist mode of production which required cheap laborers that induced the slave trade”16. It was the Industrial Revolution in Europe that necessitated the transportion of humans on a colossal scale. During the 17th century, slavery spread into each of the four main regions colonized by England: the Caribbean, the southern, the middle, and the New England colonies. It became more entrenched in the Caribbean, the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, and the Carolinas; since these colonies produced more labor intensive commodities such as “sugar, rum, rice, indigo, tobacco, pitch, and turpentine”17. It is evident that slavery contributed directly to the increasing prosperity of slave owners, to the development of the colonies and to the economic progress of America as a whole. In building the wealth of their powerful nation, the British merchants of the 18th century recognized the important role played by slavery. Thus, the wealth and prosperity acquired through slavery were ill-gotten profits. The reason for the great demand for black slaves regarding both the extensive numbers of Africans transported across the Atlantic, and the number of centuries that it was undertaken, was based on the relationship between the development of capitalism in Europe and slavery in the New World. Each promoted the other’s growth. Eric Williams18 in his influential book Capitalism and Slavery, 1944, stated that the wealth produced by the slave trade and the labor of black slaves in colonies provided the capital that supported the British industrial revolution. However, historians19 such as David Davis, M.I. Finley, and J. Morgan Kousser as well as economists have proved this thesis incorrect by showing that the combined income from the slave trade and West Indian plantations would have been less than 5 percent of the British national income, when planters were prospering and the industrial revolution was beginning. Conclusion This paper has highlighted the transatlantic slave trade. It is evident that Europe’s motivation for the slave trade was fuelled both by economic aspects as well as racism. The racist approach to the dark skinned people of Africa, and development of stereotypical conceptualizations about them contributed to the Europeans enslaving and subjugating them to fulfill their demands for intensive labor. The predominant reason for slavery was the goal to achieve increasing capitalism, accrue ill-gotten wealth, and gain prosperity through the brutal use of free labor from millions of African slaves. References Afro Media. Africa Today, Volume 13. The United States of America: Afro Media Publications, 2007. Cashmore, Ernest & James Jennings. Racism: Essential Readings. New York: Sage, 2001. Degler, Carl N. Neither Black nor white: Slavery and race relations in Brazil and the United States. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Drescher, Seymour. “Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British Slavery”. History and Theory 26, no.2 (1987): 180-196. Earle, Jonathan H. The Routledge Atlas of African American History. The United States of America: Routledge, 2000. Joe R. Feagin. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future. Edition 2. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2009. Jordan, Winthrop D. Slavery and the American South. New York: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Edition 2. London: The Cambridge University Press, 2010. Meltzer, Milton. In their own words: A history of the American Negro, Volume 1. Michigan: Crowell, 1967. Mentan, Tatah. The State in Africa: An Analysis of Impacts of Historical Trajectories of Global Capitalist Expansion and Domination in the Continent. The United States of America: African Books Collective, 2010. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. The United States: UNC Press, 1999. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Robinson, Cedric J. “Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography”, Oxford Journals, http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/1/122.full.pdf (accessed February 2nd, 2011) Williams, Eric E. Capitalism and Slavery. The United States of America: UNC Press Books, 1944. Read More