Transatlantic Slave Trade

C H A P T E R 4

The European Organization

of the Slave Trade

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the most complex economic enter- prises known to the preindustrial world. It was the largest transoceanic migration in history up to that time; it promoted the transportation of people and goods among three different continents; it involved an annual fleet of several hundred ships; and it absorbed a large amount of European capital invested in international commerce. The trade was closely associated with the development of commercial export agricul- ture in America, and Asian trading with Europe. It involved complex capital and credit arrangements in Europe, Africa, and America and was carried on by a very large number of competing merchants in an unusually free market. Finally, it was the largest movement of workers to the Americas before the mid-nineteenth century.

How did this extraordinary trade develop in Europe? What mecha- nisms were used to get this system into operation and what were the relative roles of the state and of private capital? How was the trade financed and what were the goods used to purchase the slaves? What types of ships and crews were involved in the transport of these slaves and how were they purchased in Africa and how were they sold in Amer- ica? What were the profits generated by the trade and what was their relative importance within the expanding European economy? These are some of the issues I will deal with in this and the following chapter on the African part of the trade.

Given the high entry costs to trading, and the initial lack of detailed knowledge of the various African and American markets, the earliest period of the slave trade was one in which the state played a major role. Though slaves were shipped off the African coast by private European traders from the 1440s onward as part of general exports of gold and

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76 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

ivory, the organization of an intensive slave trade took several hundred years to develop. Africa was a modest source of slaves for southern Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it was only the opening up of America to European colonization that slave trading finally turned into a major economic activity.

Although the Portuguese were rich enough to allow private con- tractors to develop some part of the early trade, both they and all the Europeans who followed used heavy state control in the form of taxa- tion, subsidization, or monopoly contracts to get the trade going and control its flow of forced workers to America. In almost every case, the state was needed to subsidize the trade in order to get it organized. The Spaniards even declared it a monopoly from the very beginning to the end of the eighteenth century. Though the Spanish contract holders subcontracted to private or foreign monopoly company firms, the trade was still heavily controlled by the state, and even the Portuguese finally resorted to state monopoly companies in the eighteenth century to get the trade going to colonies that were underdeveloped and lacked the capital to finance the trade.

The relative ability of the American importing colonies to pay for their slaves determined whether a slave trade could develop. In the case of Spain, the silver and gold mined by the Indians would pay for the forced migration of African slaves from the earliest days of the conquest. The trade was a very controlled one, but only for state taxing purposes, as private individuals from all over Europe were given exclusive contracts to carry slaves to the American colonies (the so-called asiento) in return for paying the Crown a fixed fee and taxes on each slave delivered. In the case of the Portuguese, their early dominant position in African trade gave them a decided advantage in the slave trade by lowering their costs of entry. In turn, the very rapid development of a sugar plantation economy based initially on American Indian slave labor in Brazil permitted them to generate the capital needed to import African slaves. But all other trades required some use of monopoly companies to provide slaves to those American colonies that did not have the capital or credit to pay for the imported slaves.

From the fifteenth century until the early sixteenth century the Portuguese held a monopoly position in Africa carrying on an exclusive trade in gold, ivory, and slaves. They were also able to establish an effective settlement in Angola and a major trading post at São Jorge da Mina (Elmina). To these continental positions were added several Atlantic African islands, of which the most important were São ToméC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 77

and Principé off the coast of the Bight of Biafra. By the early seven- teenth century, between their own American needs and their supply- ing the Spanish American colonies, they were probably shipping some 3,000 to 4,000 slaves per annum. But this monopoly situation was chal- lenged as early as the late sixteenth century by the French and then the British. French and then British free traders intermittently visited the African coast from the middle decades of the sixteenth century, but they and the Dutch did not become a major presence with forts and permanent trading links until the seventeenth century. For all of these early northern European traders, it was gold and ivory that were the primary products taken from the African coast, with slaves only a secondary concern. So long as the northern European powers had no major American colonies, their trade in slaves was confined to illegal smuggling to the Iberian colonies. In fact, until 1700, for all traders, gold and ivory were predominant exports over slaves. It is only after that date that slaves become Africa’s most valuable export.

It was the Dutch who first seriously challenged the Portuguese monopoly in African trading. As part of their grand rebellion against Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, they eventually challenged Spain’s dependent ally, the Portuguese. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company was established with designs on Portugal’s American and African possessions. Initially, it concentrated on destroying their oppo- nents and seizing their resources and spent their early efforts attacking Portuguese and Spanish shipping. It was reported by the company that in a fourteen-year period beginning in 1623 it had captured 2,336 slaves from Iberian ships and sold them in America. But it soon moved from piracy and haphazard trading in Africa to creating a systematic presence on the African coast. As early as 1624, it sent fleets to capture both the northeastern Brazilian sugar region of Bahia and the Gold Coast fort of São Jorge da Mina. Though both attempts failed, the Dutch were now committed to obtaining an American colony out of Portuguese America and of making themselves a presence in the slave trade. In 1629 a new fleet seized the Brazilian sugar province of Pernambuco and soon moved to gain direct access to slave supplies in Africa. This African cam- paign finally achieved its first success in 1637 when the Dutch seized Elmina on the Gold Coast and effectively eliminated the Portuguese from trading in this region. Then in the early 1640s they temporarily seized the coastal forts of the Portuguese in Angola. From the 1630s to the 1650s the Dutch West India monopoly trading company, the WIC, was unquestionably the dominant European slave trader in Africa.C

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78 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

The company had reduced the Portuguese presence everywhere and at the same time still faced no serious competition from other northern European nations in the African trade. In the late 1630s and early 1640s it was delivering some 2,500 slaves per annum to America, and in 1644 it peaked with a purchase of almost 6,900 slaves on the African coast. Half of these slaves came from the Lower Guinea Coast and half from the Loango-Angola region.

Once opened up by the Dutch, the French and the English were not far behind. Long-term trade links were established by the French in the Senegambia region of the African coast from the 1660s, while the English slowly staked out the Sierra Leone or Upper Guinea Coast in the middle decades of the century as their own area. The Dutch for their part concentrated on the Gold Coast. But however much a given European power tried to dominate a region, in the end, everyone traded almost everywhere. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, numerous European nations, including even the Danes, built forts on the Gold Coast east and west of Elmina. Though all Europeans tried to create a monopoly trade with their slowly developing system of fortified forts or unfortified trading factories, it was only the Portuguese who effectively settled any region of Africa. But even the Portuguese in Angola had to operate in the context of African state politics and were just one element in the total picture – often forced to join forces with various local states to preserve their position. In all other cases the forts and factories were more expressions of claims to exclusive trade against other European powers than statements of monopoly over local African suppliers.

Given the fierce European competition and the generalized African knowledge of this competition, African suppliers had little interest in accepting a trade monopolized by any one European nation. Constant trade created zones of influence, but no coast was the exclusive zone of any nation. Africans traded with whom they wished even in the Congo and Angola regions, and no fort or factory had influence more than a few miles inland. All such European outposts were maintained to keep trade links open to Africans and guarantee continuity of trade rather than creating national or colonial enclaves. Even when monopoly companies were established, the respective nations had difficulty in maintaining their control against challenges not only from other Europeans but even from interlopers from their own nations.

From all this experience, toleration became the norm after the seventeenth-century fratricidal wars among the monopoly companies.C

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 79

Most slavers traded on the coast with little fear of attack from other European nations in times of international peace, and even cooperated in trading. Moreover, there was room even for smaller trading nations to develop their activities. A Danish West India Company formed in 1625 and a Swedish African Company founded in 1647 all traded on the African coast and set up small establishments. Even the German state of Brandenburg built a fort on the Gold Coast.

But the costs of entry into the trade was so high that only some kind of government support and a corresponding monopoly arrange- ment seemed capable of opening up a continuous and successful trade. In this case, the Europeans had in view the extraordinary success of the Dutch and English East India models. It was thought that this was the way to develop the trade. Between 1620 and 1700 every slave-trading nation but Spain and Portugal experimented with joint-stock monopoly trading companies. All achieved some initial success, often opening up systematic trade for the first time, but all would eventually fail and be replaced by free traders from their respective nations. Though ultimately replaced, these companies bore the costs of opening the trade and cre- ating the contacts, credit, and shipping practices that would eventually be the norm for all free traders who followed them.

While French interlopers had involved themselves in the Atlantic slave trade from early in the sixteenth century, serious French partici- pation began only with the development of the monopoly trading com- panies in the second half of the seventeenth century. After many par- tial and incomplete attempts, the French finally organized a monopoly Compagnie des Indes Occidentales in 1664, which was granted trading rights in America and Africa. But this largely state-financed effort was already granting licenses to private traders by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, French state interest was strong, and a French fleet took many factories from the Dutch in Gorée and the Senegambia region in the 1670s. Then, in 1672, the French government offered a bounty of ten livres per slave transported to the French West Indies. This offer encouraged the establishment in 1673 of a new and separate African monopoly company to control the French trade to the northwestern African coast known as the Compagnie du Sénégal. By 1679 the Senegal Company had twenty-one ships operating in the trade. Although suc- cessful in establishing several trading factories on the African coast and even fighting wars with other Europeans, this and subsequent monopoly companies that followed eventually faltered. Even with active state par- ticipation and support, trade for the French company was still too riskyC

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80 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

an adventure, and it could not raise sufficient private capital to maintain its power. By the 1690s most of France’s African trade was in the hands of private entrepreneurs, though it was not until the 1720s that free traders finally succeeded in definitively breaking the company’s control over trading.

The use of both monopoly companies and later free traders was part of the French government’s efforts to promote viable plantation economies in the West Indies, and followed a pattern similar to the English. Colonizing the islands of the Lesser Antilles in the first half of the seventeenth century, the French, with the aid of Dutch technology, capital, credit, slaves, and markets, began to develop a thriving sugar export economy by the second half of the century. With the successful development of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the French sugar empire in the Caribbean received a major impetus and, from then on, never ceased its growth and expansion.

The Dutch West India Company was initially the most successful of these early monopoly companies, the one most involved in delivering slaves to colonies of the other European powers, and the one that shipped the most slaves to America. From its founding in 1621 it operated both as a commercial company and as a military institution with quasi-statelike powers. It seized major territories from the Portuguese, becoming in the process a sugar producer in Brazil and a major slave trader in the Gold Coast and Angola. It even made war on the Spaniards and succeeded in capturing one of the American silver fleets. But by the 1670s it was re- duced to a few American possessions and to its Gold Coast forts, with the Portuguese having retaken most of their lost possessions. At this time the company was reorganized and lost most of its trading monopolies, with complete free trade coming to the Dutch African regions in the 1730s. Nevertheless, from the 1620s to the 1730s, it moved some 286,000 slaves from Africa, whereas free traders moved just 256,000 slaves from the 1730s to 1803. In the period of its monopoly, the Dutch West India Company even competed for the Spanish asiento, and overall from the seventeenth century until 1729 some 97,000 of the slaves that it shipped to America were delivered to the Spanish colonies in America.

The last major company established in the seventeenth century was the English Royal African Company, which, like the Dutch company, was based primarily on private capital. It grew out of a series of earlier English monopoly companies and was put together in 1672. It was mod- eled along the lines of many such joint-stock incorporated companies in England and would enjoy monopoly control over the English slave tradeC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 81

and England’s trade with Africa in commodity goods. It also actively transported sugar and other products from the West Indies to England. Like all such African adventures, it was required to invest heavily in fixed costs, such as forts and armaments. The English probably started trading with Africa in the 1550s and tried some slave trading to the Spanish colonies in the 1560s. But without major American tropical colonies of its own, there was relatively little incentive to enter the trade. This of course changed with the expansion into the Lesser Antilles in the early 1600s and the taking of Jamaica in the 1650s. By the 1630s the British had their first fort in Africa, on the Gold Coast, and were regularly trad- ing in slaves. By the 1660s several companies had been established and forts settled, and open warfare with the Dutch on the Gold Coast had become the norm. Thus, even before the final company was established, an active trade had developed. With the Royal African Company in operation, the trade became brisk. From 1672 until 1713 the company transported over 350,000 slaves to the English colonies of the West Indies. Nevertheless, the pressure from the free traders was such that the company gave up its monopoly on slave trading in 1698, though it continued to maintain its forts and charged the free traders a fee for their services.

Thus, by the first decades of the eighteenth century free trade in slaves had come to most nations. In all cases the basic infrastructure had been well established largely by the respective monopoly companies, and free traders could now use these well-established routes with low risks. Although direct trade between Africa and Europe was often still a monopoly trade, by the eighteenth century individual entrepreneurs who organized one or several voyages had become the norm in the trade from Africa to America. Even the closed Spanish colonial market, which allowed only contract providers to participate, was largely supplied by free traders obtaining subcontracts from the original asiento holders. In turn, this system was eventually abandoned in 1789 when the Spaniards decided to turn their West Indian islands into sugar-producing colonies and opened up the slave trade to their American colonies to all nations.

The last experience with monopoly trading companies was the late eighteenth-century Portuguese use of such companies to develop the far northern regions of Brazil. Although the Crown retained a large part of the African commodities and mineral trade to Europe, the slave trade had been a free enterprise trade from the sixteenth century. It had been heavily taxed from the beginning but was open to all Portuguese or Brazilian merchants. But the marquis of Pombal in the second half ofC

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82 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

the eighteenth century wanted to develop new plantation and slave economies in Brazil’s northern Maranhão and Pernambuco colonies and decided that monopoly companies were the only solution. To get the capital needed, he agreed to give the Portuguese merchants who invested monopoly rights in the exports from these Brazilian provinces and even subsidized some of the African trade. The two companies were set up, in 1755 and 1759, respectively, and their object was to promote the development of the respective regions. Both companies were given the exclusive rights to import slaves into these two colonies. Of the two companies, the most important as far as Angola was concerned was the Pernambuco and Paraiba Company. Of the grand total of 49,344 slaves this company shipped to Brazil between 1761 and 1786, 85 percent came from the port of Luanda. For the Grão Pará and Maranhão Company, 68 percent of its 28,083 slaves came from the Upper Guinean ports of Cacheu and Bissau. These two companies accounted for a quarter or more of the slaves leaving the major trade port of Luanda, Angola, in this period, as well as the majority that the Portuguese took from the ports of Cacheu and Bissau. Given the infrastructure already in place in Luanda it is not surprising that the slaves were cheaper and the costs of shipping them to Brazil were less from Angola than from Cacheu- Bissau. With the disappearance of the Maranhão and Pará monopoly companies, the movement of slaves from Africa to the northern ports of Brazil temporarily declined, though eventually free traders picked up the flow again as these regions continued to grow with slave-produced cotton and sugar becoming important.

Although the monopoly companies varied as to organization and function, they all failed. This mostly had to do with their high fixed costs in forts and ships or their obligations to deliver a fixed number of slaves into a given region no matter what the demand or the costs – obligations that were often too expensive to maintain. They usually tied up too much capital for too long a period and found it increasingly difficult to raise new funds. In the free-trade era these companies were universally replaced in all trades by temporary associations of merchants who joined together to finance individual voyages. Thus, merchants in the sending port committed their capital to relatively short periods or spread it over many different slaving voyages. Moreover, they delivered slaves only in the quantities demanded in the New World and to zones that were capable of paying for them with cash or exportable products that could be sold for a profit in Europe.

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 83

Although some formal joint-stock companies were established, it was more common to form a trading company as a partnership of from two to five merchants. If it was two partners, both usually worked actively in the enterprise, but if it was more than this number, there was usually an active partner who organized the expedition and a group of more or less passive partners. Interestingly, most of these associations engaged in other trades as well as that of slaves, indicating the diversification of risk of the entire transaction. The contract that the partners signed, or which founded the joint-stock company, was usually for seven years’ duration, which was the time needed to completely close the books on a slaving expedition. Kinship and friendships were among the major ties that brought partners together.

But given the high costs of entry into the trade, many of the partner- ships or joint-stock companies offered stock or shares in the individual voyages they financed. Thus, while one of these slave-trading compa- nies might undertake several voyages, each voyage attracted a different set of investors. The owner and outfitter of the ship (called an armateur in French) sold parts of the expedition or the ship to outside investors. In so doing he thus formed a minicompany that handled just that one expedition. In the premier French slaving port of Nantes in the late eighteenth century, for example, an armateur typically sold slightly over 60 percent of the ship and its cargo to outside investors. Often these investors were other outfitters, and it was common for the prin- cipal company or association itself to invest as a temporary shareholder in ships outfitted by other companies. Some 20 percent of such tempo- rary shareholders in Nantes were in fact other armateurs, and another 25 percent were local merchants, many of whom were in colonial trade. Some 10 percent of the shares came from investors from all over France and the colonies. To attract investors, many of the outfitters published brochures promising returns of 30 to 50 percent. The remaining shares in an expedition came from the captain and the crew who often were allowed to invest on their own account. In over half of the expeditions mounted from late eighteenth-century Nantes, captains invested and typically held 10 percent of the shares in the expedition. On rarer occa- sions, the crew was also given rights to invest and subsequently to trade in slaves. Finally, outfitters sometimes paid for part of their cargoes in shares in the expedition rather than in cash. Often these shares were sold to third parties, especially on ships mounted by the largest and most successful companies.

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84 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

The actual purchase of the ship, collection of the cargo, and the arrangement of final papers and insurance typically took some four to six months to arrange. After the owners, the second most important participant was the captain. Whether he bought shares or not, most captains were given 2 to 5 percent of the sale of all slaves he delivered in the Americas. Successful captains could obtain a respectable fortune in just two to three voyages. They could well earn 20,000 livres per voyage, representing 10 percent of the total value of the outbound cargo taken to purchase slaves. It was the captain who had the most responsibility, being in charge of both sailing the ship and doing all the trading in Africa. Many captains and crew carried out repeat voyages, although there were great risks involved. Among the 186 Dutch captains employed by the Dutch West India Company in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the average was for 1.4 voyages per captain – but this was highly concentrated since two-thirds of the captains made only one voyage. Moreover, captain, crew, and slave mortality was high, with the latter averaging 11 percent per voyage. Clearly, these mortality rates were related to lack of knowledge of local disease environments and other hazards of the trade, for by the eighteenth century these mortality rates had dropped. Thus, in the case of the 310 free-trader Dutch captains making the slaving voyage in the late eighteenth century, the mortality on the entire trip was just 7 percent and the average was 2 trips per captain, with only 49 percent making just one trip.

A large complement of subofficers and skilled persons was needed aboard the ship, including a ship’s doctor, a carpenter, and a cooper or barrel maker. The doctor cared for the slaves and crew but had really few skills with which to combat disease except the basic rudiments of hygiene. The carpenter was the highest paid nonofficer on the ship and the person who designed the holds for the slaves when they were collected. Just below him in status and wages was the cooper, who was in charge of the crucial water casks. The average French and Dutch slaver in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took from 30 to 40 sailors for its crew, the majority of whom were poorly paid common seamen. In the eighteenth-century French trade, three months of the crew’s wages were paid before the voyage and the rest when they landed. For a variety of reasons, slave ships were unusual in the number of sailors they carried. Between the needs of coastal trading in Africa and the potential for violence and the need for tight security on the African coast and in the Atlantic crossing, all slave traders carried double the number of crew that a normal merchant ship of their tonnage would carry.C

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 85

Slave ships clearing for Africa were a third to a half the tonnage of regular ships clearing directly for the West Indies from Liverpool in the 1780s, and in those engaged in the similar droitue or direct West Indian trade from Nantes in the same decade. But despite the size advantage of West Indian trade ships, they carried much less crew than the typical slaver. Thus, the crew per ton ratio of some 252 ships that left Liverpool outbound for Africa between 1785 and 1787 was 0.17 crewmen per ton, whereas the 249 ships leaving for the West Indies from this same port carried half that number, or 0.09 crewmen per ton. Nor was this much different from the French slave trade. In Nantes, between 1749 and 1792 on the 870 slave ships outfitted for trade with Africa the average slave ship carried 0.18 sailors per ton, compared with 0.10 crew per ton on the 3,140 cargo ships engaged in overseas trade. From a larger sample of slave ships in the period from 1750 to 1799 in which the tonnage has been converted to a modern uniform standard, these same patterns hold as well, with the average crew per ton ratio for over 4,000 English slavers leaving Europe being 0.19 sailors per ton, and for the close to 1,000 French slavers that left Europe for Africa in the same period the ratio was 0.16. Except for fishermen (which averaged 0.30 crewmen per ton) and privateers and warships (which averaged 0.77 crewmen per ton in Nantes), the slave trade used the largest crew of any trade in the merchant marine. This high usage of sailors was, of course, related to both the demands of sailing, and the need to trade for and guard the cap- tured slavers. Given the length of time on the coast to purchase slaves, and the necessity for the captain and other officers often to trade from small cutters and other boats sent out from the main ship, a large demand for sailors existed even to purchase and oversee the slaves on land. Whatever the pattern of slave purchases on the African coast, however, there was always a need for a large number of sailors to control the slaves once aboard the ship. In the second half of the eighteenth century, French ships on average carried a crew of 36 and the British one of 30 – the difference being that the French ships were a third larger than the English ships – but in fact they both had about the same high ratio of 6 tons for every sailor.

Given the fact that fewer sailors would have been needed to man these ships had no slaves been carried, it is no accident that problems arose with the crew once the slaves had been sold. One of the major findings of the late eighteenth-century English Parliamentary Commis- sions examining the slave trade was that slaver captains with regularity discharged a large number of their crewmen in the Caribbean and paidC

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86 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

them off in devalued colonial sterling. This ill-treatment of sailors, in fact, was one of the most important issues used by the abolitionists to discredit the slave trade. Even as the number of slaves per ton declined in some of the early nineteenth-century trades, the number of sailors still remained quite high and usually did not decline. It is clear captains considered a minimum number of crew absolutely essential for survival and safety when handling slaves.

Nor were these needs unique to the British trade. In all slave trades where the data are available on crews, tons, and slaves, there is the same high correlation between the numbers of slaves carried and the number of sailors manning the ships. Even where tonnage cannot be made comparable, there is the same difference seen between slavers and regular merchant ships. Thus, for some 12 ships engaged in the slave trade to the Spanish Indies in 1637, the average of 7.7 slaves per sailor for these seventeenth-century Spanish American ships was quite similar to a sample of 525 French slavers from the first half of the eighteenth century, which carried 7.5 slaves per crewman. Moreover, as was to be expected, in all the slave trades the number of slaves per crewman kept rising over time, reflecting an increasing efficiency of the slave ships, reaching the 9.5 range for almost 1,500 slavers in the second half of the eighteenth century. But however efficient these ships became, all slave ships on average needed twice the crew size to man their vessels as the West Indian cargo ships of their period.

Clearly, ships of the same tonnage or larger than the slavers did not need one crewman for every 6 tons simply to man the ships. Half that number was sufficient. Equally, crew-per-ton ratios on slavers behave exactly like slave-per-ton ratios, both diminishing sharply as the tonnage of ships increases – further proof of the lack of ship’s size, as expressed in tonnage, from being the primary factor influencing the number of sailors needed to man the slave ships.

Unique to the Brazilian trade was the large number of American slaves who made up the crews of the slave ships. As was indicated in the standard registers, the use of Brazilian-purchased slaves to make up crew complements was always justified by the lack of free sailors. This crisis in sailors must have been considerable since 42 percent of the 350 slave ships arriving in Rio de Janeiro from Africa between 1795 and 1811 indicate slaves in their crew. The average number of Brazilian-owned slave sailors in the crew for the 148 vessels that had them on arrival was 14. This meant that the slave crewmen probably made up between one- third to one-half of the crew in these slave ships if the total number ofC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 87

sailors the Portuguese were carrying was approximately the same number of crewmen as the French slavers at the peak of the eighteenth-century trade. This would have meant an average of 35 sailors per vessel. Clearly, these slaves were used to man the ship, while the free sailors of whatever color must have been employed to guard the slaves.

Despite these crew sizes, and the special nature of these slave ships, the biggest outfitting expense was always the cargo, which averaged between 55 and 65 percent of total costs. This made the slavers unique in almost all the major commodity trades. In France, which has the best data on costs, the cargo accounted for two-thirds of the total costs, and the ship and its crew a mere one-third. There was some variation depending on whether or not the ship was newly built, but, in general, most ships were bought used for operation in the trade, and the cargo costs were between 55 and 65 percent of the total outfitting expenses. The relatively cheap costs of the small cargoes being taken to the West Indies by regular cargo ships explains why the average value of the outfitted slaver per ton was six times the average value per ton of the much larger direct trade ships. This comparative difference in cost was not due primarily to the ships themselves, which were quite comparable in price between the West Indian and African slave trades, but to the cargo. In an evaluation of French ships captured by the English in the Seven Years’ War, 8 ships in the droiture or West Indian commodity trade were worth 144 livres per ton, compared with 137 livres per ton for the 9 slave ships captured during this same period of 1755–66.

It was African demand for sophisticated imported goods for their slaves that made these cargoes so costly. One estimate has put the average value of the cargo at 200,000 livres. But this may be on the low end. The Nantes slave ship Reine de France, weighing 150 tons and with a 47-man crew, transported 404 slaves from Guinea to Saint Domingue in 1744. For this trip it purchased some 247,000 livres of trading goods. The African consumer market was unusual in that the Portuguese, the French, and even the English had to import foreign goods to make up their cargoes. Top on the list were East Indian textiles, which were made up of cotton cloths of white, solid blue, and/or printed design. Also from Asia came cowry shells produced in the Maldive archipelago just off the south coast of India and purchased there and at transit ports in Ceylon and India. Important as well were armaments, which were sometimes produced at home, but often purchased abroad, and Swedish-produced bar iron used by African blacksmiths to make local agricultural instruments. Knives, axes, swords, jewelry, gunpowder,C

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88 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

and various nationally and colonially produced rums, brandies, and other liquors were also consumed along with Brazilian-grown tobacco. No one nation could produce all these goods and over time purchases shifted from nation to nation. Early on the French tended to buy English arms, the English preferred cheaper Dutch produced arms, and everyone bought their cloths from the Dutch, French, and British traders on their return from Asia.

There is little question that textiles were the primary product used to purchase slaves. In five selected years (1767, 1769, 1771, 1774, and 1776) slave ships from the port of Rouen shipped a total of 3.9 million livres tournois worth of goods to Africa. Of this figure, 1.4 million livres consisted of Indian textiles. Not only were the Indian cloths the single most valuable commodity being shipped, representing 36 percent of the total value of all trade goods, but they also represented 63 percent of the value of all cloths, European and East Indian combined (with the total textile value coming to 56 percent of the 3.9 million figure). The reason for this great demand for East Indian textiles had to do not only with the brilliance and quality of the colors, but also with the durability of these colored cloths and their ability to hold their color through numerous washings and in hot climates, at least according to a French commercial analysis in the eighteenth century. But Africans also purchased large quantities of cloths produced in Europe and North Africa. The Portuguese had discovered in their Gold Coast trade in the sixteenth century that the Africans often took the simple white cloths and linens they imported from Europe and used their own dyes to color them to local taste. But both colored and white cloths from Europe and North Africa were a standard part of African textile imports through the end of the trade, always complementing the Asian imports.

In a major study of African trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it has been estimated that textiles made up 50 percent of the total value of imports into Africa in both periods. Next in importance after textiles came alcohol at 12 and 10 percent, respectively; manufac- tured goods at 12 and 10 percent; guns and gunpowder between 7 and 9 percent; tobacco between 2 and 8 percent; and bar iron between 2 and 5 percent. Even in the nineteenth century when textiles, though still dominant, dropped to a little over a third of the value of all imports, their volume was impressive. It was estimated that in the 1860s, sub- Saharan western Africa imported 57 million yards of cloth, or enough to provide at least 2 yards for every person in the region.

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 89

Even when Europeans used African products to purchase slaves, these in turn were bought with European or Asian or even American man- ufactured goods. All these goods were purchased by traders for hard currencies. Not only did Europeans purchase African produced beads, textiles, special food, or other products wanted by their African cus- tomers, but they imported Pacific Ocean products from textiles to such items as cowry shells, which were an important medium of exchange in many African societies. Unlike most of Europe’s colonial trades, the African trade required the purchase of a large quantity of nonnation- ally produced goods – everything from Brazilian tobacco and Silesian textiles to Swedish bar iron and Dutch furniture. Thus, the trade was often the most costly of overseas trades for all European nations since a very large share of the goods used to purchase slaves in Africa had to be purchased outside their own metropolitan economies with hard currencies.

So important was the East Indian textile component of the trade, that it explains the rise of the chief African slave-trading ports in the French and English trades. Whereas La Rochelle and Le Havre had been major slaving ports in the seventeenth century, by the beginning of the eighteenth century Nantes rose to be the primary port, much as Liverpool would be later in the eighteenth century. Like Liverpool, this dominant position was due to the close ties of the two premier ports in Europe’s East Indian trade. Unlike Liverpool, however, Nantes also enjoyed several other advantages that encouraged its very early and active involvement in the slave trade. It was already one of France’s lead- ing ports in the seventeenth century, and had developed close ties with the Dutch and other northern European capital markets. This promoted its general interest in Asia as well as the New World trade, even before Africa was opened to its merchants. Finally, Nantes enjoyed special tar- iff arrangements that gave the Nantes merchants further advantage over their competitor ports. Because of all these factors, Nantes established majority control over the French slave trade as soon as that trade was first opened up to free traders in 1716, and while competition grew in the latter part of the century, it remained the primary slave trade port into the nineteenth century. It is estimated that of the 3,709 slaving voyages outfitted by the French during the course of the trade, half came from Nantes with no other port organizing even a third of its slave-trading voyages. In contrast, Liverpool, though England’s largest slave-trading port, accounted for only 39 percent of the 7,642 known

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British voyages and was closely followed by London and Bristol, which together outfitted 61 percent of these slaving expeditions.

The trip out from Europe to Africa took anywhere from three to four months. Many ships stopped at other European ports for more cargo on the outward leg, or temporarily stopped to provision in the southern European ports or the Canary Islands. Moreover, the length of the trip also depended on which area of Africa was to be the prime trading zone. Reaching Gorée, a major trading zone in the Senegambia region, for example, left another trip as long again to reach Angola.

The region selected for trade by each European national depended on local and international developments. By the eighteenth century, rough spheres of influence had been established, with the English, Dutch, and the Portuguese most dominant as residents on the African coast with their permanent forts or factories. But no African area was totally closed to any European trader, and there was an extensive published contem- porary literature and general European knowledge on the possibilities of local trade everywhere in western Africa. The local forts main- tained by some European powers were not military centers, but were commercial stations that facilitated local commerce with the Africans and had little inland activity. Many of these forts would allow foreign traders access to their resources. Even the Portuguese, who were the Europeans most likely to concentrate on a limited set of regions in southern Africa, would conduct trade in other quite open and com- petitive regions. In the eighteenth century, for example, Portuguese and Brazilian shippers took over half a million slaves from the Bight of Benin where Portugal had no permanent settlers or outposts, at the same time as they took 1.3 million slaves from their controlled ports of Angola.

Of all the major European traders, the French were the most catholic in their selections. They established the fewest permanent establish- ments on the African coast, with those at the Senegal River and Whydah on the Gold Coast being the most important. Otherwise, the French Atlantic port free traders essentially operated out of seasonal or quite temporary locations all along the coast from Senegal to the Congo, and were even extraordinarily active along the East African coast. The French even became serious competitors to the Portuguese in the Mozambique region and carried on a thriving slave trade from East Africa throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Unlike the Portuguese, however, the French East African traders did not carry their slaves to America but rather to a series of Indian OceanC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 91

islands off the African coast where they developed thriving sugar and slave plantation colonies.

Even in the areas where these forts existed and which therefore served as well-known local markets for slaves, there was no major “bulking” or warehousing of slaves. The costs to the Europeans of maintaining slaves was prohibitive, and would have made final costs quite high. For example, the fort that the French maintained at Fort Saint Joseph in the 1750s had a capacity of only 250 slaves. But there was little agricultural activity around the fort, and it was virtually impossible for them to maintain slaves in storage once the majority of the slave ships had left for America. On the other hand, hinterland traders could easily absorb slaves into their own agricultural or industrial production as they waited for the return of the slave ships. It is estimated that feeding a slave on the coast for a year would have increased his or her price by 50 percent.

In the overwhelming majority of cases it was the Africans who con- trolled the slaves until the moment of sale to the captain. Only occa- sionally in the era of free trade did a local European purchase slaves on his own account for resale to the slaver captains. This had been more common in the earlier age of the monopoly companies, but even then had accounted for only a small volume of sales. Given the lack of arrangements for holding slaves on the coast until late in the nineteenth century, there were few cases when a captain could buy a large number of slaves from any one African buyer even where the local state or its officials controlled the trade. In all the accounts of the trade, as will be seen in the next chapter, it was the norm for slaves to be purchased in relatively small lots directly from the African sellers. Finally, though the African purchase origins were the same, some captains in the eighteenth century were able to buy slaves from each other. Especially if a slave ship had been on the coast a very long time and was trading near recently arrived vessels, it was common to pay a premium and make quick trades among the captains so that the long-trading ship could finally leave the coast.

In almost all cases, African slave traders came down to the coast or the riverbanks in a relatively steady and predictable stream to well-known trading places. The cost of moving the slaves in caravans to the coast was relatively cheap – only the costs for food for the slaves and the salaries of the guards, and the costs of purchase for any slaves lost in transit because of death or escape (a loss for which we have no systematic data for any African interior trade route). The slaves also could be used to move goods at no cost, with each male slave carrying up to twenty-fiveC

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92 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

kilograms of goods and women up to fifteen. It has been estimated that the total ivory exported from Gambia in 1741 could easily have been moved free of charge by the slaves who were shipped to the coast for sale in the Atlantic slave trade. This low cost of transport and free “ballast” of goods that could be carried reduced the costs of delivery of slaves from the interior to the coast. It also promoted an ever deeper penetration of the interior for ivory husks as the coastal elephant population became depleted. Also, given alternative local uses of slaves, inland traders arriving by caravan could respond to low European prices by holding these slaves off the market and using them as workers in agriculture or industry for any time period needed until prices rose again. Equally, they could be sold to local consumers at any time on the trip, and, from the few eyewitness accounts, this seems to have been a common experience. Eventually, many of these slaves would then be resold into the Atlantic trade if demand was strong.

The lack of bulking facilities for slaves on the coast meant that all European traders tended to spend months on the coast or traveling upriver gathering their slaves a few at a time. Even the ports of Luanda and Benguela, the only African centers that maintained a large resident white population, still required a stay of several months for ships going to Brazil to complete their complement of slaves. In a study of 84 Brazilian slave ships coming from the port of Rio de Janeiro between 1827 and 1830, the average stay in the Central African ports was 5 months. It was typical in almost all trading areas for the captain to leave the ship in one spot and take small craft to trade inland, leaving another officer in charge of the ship. He usually was accompanied by the ship’s doctor, who then examined each slave for disease before allowing the purchase. On average, it would take several months to fill the ship. In most cases, the slaves were held ashore as long as possible to prevent the outbreak of disease on the ship, but even so death rates were relatively high for this “coasting” period. The best records for this mortality experience come from some 58 Dutch free-trader slave ships in the 1730–1803 period. On average, they spent six months trading on the coast and lost close to 5 percent of the slaves they purchased before sailing to America. Typical of the free-trade eighteenth-century experience was the Dutch vessel the Vergenoegen, which reached the Loando coast on 5 September 1794. After the usual gift giving to local African officials, trading began, with the captain remaining on shore during the whole period and sending between 2 to 7 slaves across to the ship every day. The purchase of 390 slaves took a relatively rapid four months to accomplish, but seriousC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 93

illness occurred with an outbreak of smallpox. A rather high percentage, some 26 slaves, died on the coast along with the captain, even before the ship finally sailed for America.

But there were some very well-organized trading zones where local African factors or merchants purchased slaves from the arriving inland traders and then arranged their sale to the ship’s captain. This allowed the vessel to stay at one place instead of wandering along the coast and rivers. This pattern was typical in Luanda, Benguela, Elmina, and other well-established trading centers with a powerful local merchant center. But even in these fixed-position trading places, the average time on the coast was measured in months because most purchases were still in relatively small lots.

Good data are available on the “coasting” experience from the Dutch, French, and English trades. The seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company ships averaged 100 days on the coast picking up slaves, which was comparable to 34 British vessels in this period who averaged 95 days on the coast. Time trading on the coast seems to have increased in the course of the eighteenth century. Thus, Dutch free traders in the early eighteenth century averaged 200 days trading in Africa, some 230 French traders needed on average 143 days to complete their purchases in the 1726–58 period, and some 587 independent British traders aver- aged 173 days at midcentury (1751–75). In the 1763–77 period, another group of 224 French slave ships averaged 168 days of trading, with the Loango coast as usual being above the average, at 173 days for the 55 ships which took on slaves on this West Central African coast. The in- creasing time needed to purchase slaves is partly explained by the reliance on the forts and local company men to do purchases prior to the arrival of the slaver in the earlier period, which helped reduce the time to an average of just over three months. Equally, the fact that several ships were coming from the same European company meant that often ships traded among themselves to move the earliest ship out faster. Thus, an arriving captain might sell some of his first slave purchases to a departing captain so as to more rapidly complete the latter’s loading. But the free traders usually worked for companies or associations that sent out few ships and could not rely on the cooperation of fellow captains.

While accumulating their slaves, the Europeans also took on fresh- water supplies if they could from the local coast. During the dry season in many areas and in some African coastal regions at all times, water supplies were simply not available. This led some of the traders to stop at the Portuguese African islands of São Tomé or Principé to obtain theC

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94 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

large quantity of water that was needed. Others stopped earlier on the African coast in regions known to have abundant water supplies. They also purchased food supplies for the voyage at this point or before the trading had begun in other parts of the coast.

In provisioning for the voyage, all traders used common African foods and condiments along with dried foods and biscuits brought from Europe. They also brought with them lime juice for combating scurvy. The Europeans all tried to supply standard foods that local Africans could consume, though this varied from region to region. Most used European- or American-produced wheat flour or rice to produce a basic gruel, which would then be seasoned with local condiments and supple- mented with fresh fish and meats as well as dried versions of these foods. Regional taste differences also showed up in food supplied for slaves taken from different regions. In the Sahel region, African-produced millet was preferred to rice, whereas slaves from the delta of the Niger and Mayombe preferred yams. In all trades, whatever the base used for making the gruel, almost all the condiments used came from Africa including the palm oil and the peppers, and all trades provided biscuits for both crew and slaves.

Even in the earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trade when much more European dried foods were used, Dutch slave captains pur- chased fresh vegetables and small livestock on the African coast, along with the ever necessary supply of fresh water. To the earlier Portuguese provisioning acts of the late seventeenth century, which most con- cerned water rations, the governor and captain general of Luanda in 1770 decreed a more complete law on provisioning for the slave ships. He demanded that all slave ships be thoroughly cleaned and aired out before they took on slaves. He also demanded that shippers buy the more expensive dried fish as well as the cheaper fresh fish, and that any fresh fish purchased for the slave diet be consumed in the first days of the voyage before it rotted. Beans were to be cleaned before storage. Palm oil, vinegar, salt, and other seasonings were to be provided in their daily rations of flour (most probably Brazilian imported wheat flour) along with a small quantity of rum. Also, along with the fish and occasional vegetables, the slaves were to get some dried beef and be given tobacco on a steady basis. In the French trade, a freshly prepared quart of soup composed of rice and beans was provided at the two meals per day. Corn meal, peppers, and salt were also occasionally given with the soup and here as well some rum or brandy was occasionally supplied. The British in the eighteenth century also provided two meals a day with the firstC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 95

made up of African foods, mostly rice and yams, and the second a gruel made of barley, corn, and biscuits, with meat sometimes added. Fish stock and garnishings of palm oil and pepper could be added to either meal.

The British slave ship the Brothers in a fifty-day Atlantic crossing in 1789 provided the slaves with a per diem ration of three pounds and ten ounces of yam, two ounces of flour, three and a half ounces of beans, and ten ounces of biscuits, along with salted beef. On three out of five days the slaves also got a plantain and an ear of corn. Finally, a mouthwash of lime juice or vinegar was provided to each slave in the morning to prevent scurvy. A typical French slaver of 280 tons that carried some 600 slaves for a two-month voyage to America needed some 200 kilograms per slave for their food supplies, which consisted of 40 kilograms of biscuits, beans, and rice, along with other rations. This was calculated to mean a consumption of a little over 2,000 calories per day for each slave during the crossing – a figure lower than that provided for contemporary sick sailors aboard French royal naval vessels (2,385 calories).

As important as food was the water. The French estimated that they needed one cask or barrel of water for every person aboard ship and all traders gave drinking water three times per day, even when meals might only occur twice a day. The ship carrying the 600 slaves for a two-month voyage would thus need one water cask per slave (weighing between 65 and 66 kilograms per cask), which meant that some 40 tons of water casks were loaded for the slaves alone. On some coasts, water was not readily available and often had to be obtained in regions far from where the slaves were obtained. Finally, the maintenance of the casks and the guarantee of their quality was an important part of the responsibility of the captain and the carpenters. The governor of Angola in 1770 formally ordered the checking and cleaning of the water casks and copper caldrons of all slavers leaving his region, and demanded that drinking water not only be stocked in the abundance already ordered by royal decree, but that it not be put in the rum casks. For their part, the French traders, before crossing the Atlantic customarily took their final water supplies from the Portuguese African islands of São Tomé and Principé rather than from the African coast on which they traded because of the excellent quality and abundance of the local waters.

Aside from maintaining a steady and clean water supply, almost all slave traders housed and organized daily life of the slaves in the same manner. The decks usually were divided into three separate living quar- ters, one for males, one for grown boys, and one for women and children.C

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96 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Sick slaves were usually isolated in their own compartment. Depending on the number taken, and the number ill, these compartments could be expanded or reduced. Slaves were usually shackled together at night to prevent rebellion and movement, but were then brought up to the deck during the day. On deck they were forced to exercise, often accompa- nied by African musical instruments. In the Dutch trade, for example, all captains purchased African drums so as to force the slaves to dance as a form of exercise. Usually, the Africans stayed the entire day on deck and had their meals there if the weather permitted. At this time the crew went into their quarters and cleaned them out, often using vinegar and other cleansing agents. While all females were given simple cloths to wear, in some trades the males were left naked if the weather permitted. All slaves were washed every day with seawater.

As is obvious from these details, it was the aim of all traders to keep the slaves and their quarters as clean as possible since there was a generalized awareness of the correlation between cleanliness and disease. Beyond this, all slave trades carried a ship’s doctor to care for the slaves and crew and their illnesses. Nevertheless, the details given of the medical cabinets of these “doctors” show little of value for fighting the standard diseases that struck both crew and the slaves. Mortality and morbidity were high among the slaves and little beyond maintaining clean food and water supplies provided any effective remedy for these diseases.

Once arriving in America the slaver had to clear local customs and health registrations and then the slaves were immediately sold to local planters. Among the French it was the custom for the captain to sell his slaves directly, using a local agent who took a commission on all sales. The local agent announced the arrival of the ship via posters and by mail and the sale usually began immediately upon docking, or within a week of landing. Slaves were either sold directly from the ship or brought to a special market on land. Usually the slaves were sold one at a time, with occasional sales of several to one buyer. Thus the French Duc de Laval that arrived in the West Indies in 1775 sold its 365 slaves to 72 different purchasers from all walks of life, going from royal officials and leading merchants to artisans buying 1 or 2 slaves.

In the eighteenth-century French West Indies, all able-bodied slaves were usually sold within two or three weeks of arrival. In Barbados in the late seventeenth century, sales from Royal African Company ships appeared to be much more rapid. Thus the James that arrived in May 1676 sold 351 of its 373 slaves within the first three days of beginning its sales, but did not sell the rest for another two weeks because of theC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 97

poor health of those not sold immediately. What is evident from this experience is that if the American demand was strong, most of the healthy slaves could be sold in just a few days, with sales going longer to include those recovering from disease. There is even the practice of some free colored women in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue buying the sickest slaves at bargain prices at the end of several weeks in order to nurse them back to health and then sell them to local buyers at healthy slave prices. All sales were deemed final and it was the responsibility of the new American owner or his agent to move the slave to his new place of residence.

The great problem for the ship’s captain and the original outfitter and owner of the expedition was the terms of sale. Once agreeing on the price, usually only about 25 percent down payment was made and the rest was to be paid for in eighteen to twenty-four months. Moreover, even when payment was made it was often in colonial goods and not in cash, which was always scarce in all American colonies. Also, collect- ing on these promissory notes was very difficult and involved endless conflict between the merchants and the purchasers. The agent deter- mined the creditworthiness of the local purchaser and was required to collect the final payments. He was also required to obtain a return cargo for the slave ship if this were possible. More often than not, the ship was sent off with only a limited cargo and finally would return to Europe some fifteen to eighteen months after having left Europe.

Thus, despite the myth of the so-called triangle trade, the leg of the slaving voyage between America and Europe was the least important part of the slaving voyage and slave ships were not a significant element in the transportation of slave-produced American goods to the European market. This myth assumed a tight relationship between the shipping of European goods to Africa for slaves, of slaves to America, and slave- produced American products being shipped to Europe all on the same ship. In fact, most of the West Indies goods were shipped to Europe in boats specifically designed for that purpose and were both larger than the typical slaver and were exclusively engaged in this bilateral trade. Since many among the crew were supernumeraries after the slaves were sold in America, and the ship’s cost was a relatively minor part of the original expenditures of outfitting the slaving voyage, it often happened that slavers ended their voyage in the New World and the captain and a few crewmen returned to Europe on their own. Even when they did return to Europe, they waited only a short time to return and made no effort to wait for the availability of American goods. If a cargo was available,C

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98 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

then it would be taken, but more often than not such ships returned in ballast. Thus, of the 195 Dutch free-trader slave ships that arrived in America in the eighteenth century, 65 returned to Europe in ballast – carrying just sand and water – and another 52 carried a small or token cargo. Only 69, or just over a third, came with a full cargo of American products for sale in Europe. There is little question that this trade can be considered to have had a triangle-style relationship, but the slave ships, for all intents and purposes, really made a significant impact only on the outbound to Africa and the Africa to American legs of the trip.

Once in Europe, the captain made his report, and the crew was given its back wages in cash – often necessitating the immediate outlay of 100,000 to 200,000 livres in cash. The armateur then immediately sold the imported sugar or other goods to local shipping merchants who handled such trade and then proceeded to concentrate on obtaining all the remaining funds due him for the credit sales of the slaves. This sale of the goods brought back on his slave ship brought the outfitter usually no more than one-third of his original outlay. For the rest of his return on slave sales, it usually took three full years to complete, with the merchant constantly needing to sell the constantly arriving colonial goods (by which most of the slaves were paid for) to local importers. The bulk of the credit sales were completed by the end of six years, though outstanding bills sometimes were never paid. It was the last three of the six years when the profit of the trade was made. Apparently, the period in which the debts were paid off was shorter in the British trade, with one study estimating that at the end of the eighteenth century it was completed in about two years.

The size and amount of the profit generated by the slave trade has been an issue of intense debate for some time. There is little question that the thousands of ships that sailed for Africa to engage in the slave trade did so because it was profitable to European merchants to invest in such a commerce. Thus, despite the very long-term nature of these investments, there was always a large number of European and American merchants and others willing to invest their capital in this enterprise. The trade was also profitable to most of the coastal African states exporting slaves. There was always a supply of slaves brought to the coast by African slave trades who found it profitable to do so, and most African nations resisted attempts by the British after 1808 to close their trades. Even when the more valuable palm oil trade became a major export after the 1820s, these same African palm-oil-exporting regions were still willing to trade in slaves.C

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 99

But the question remains how profitable was the trade to the Euro- peans and to the Africans who controlled it and what were its larger social and economic costs? The traditional literature saw the trade as a European monopoly from which the Africans received little compen- sation and in which slaves were bought for worthless goods at illusory prices and shipped at modest cost across the Atlantic. Profits were there- fore assumed to be extraordinary by the standards of the time, and it was then suggested that they were so large that this slave trade profit com- bined with the profit generated out of slave-produced goods traded from America generated the capital to finance the Industrial Revolution.

But just how profitable was it for the Europeans? The polemics have been intense about the overall economic benefits of the slave trade to the Europeans themselves. These debates began with Eric Williams and have continued on into the most current journal articles. The discussion can be divided into three general questions: was the slave trade profitable at the firm level and were these profits excessive; what impact did the slave trade have on the economic growth of Europe; and, finally, what impact did the slave trade and slave labor have on American economic growth?

From the work of the European economic historians, it is now evident that slave trade profits were not extraordinary by European standards. The average 6 to 10 percent rate obtained was considered a very good profit rate at the time, but not out of the range of other contemporary investments. But if profits were not “astronomic,” was the trade an open one, or a restricted one that created concentrated oligopolistic profits that could then possibly serve as a fundamental source for capital invest- ments in the European economy? It has been suggested that high initial costs of entrance, plus the long time period needed to fully recover prof- its (up to five years or more on a typical slaving voyage), meant that only highly capitalized firms could enter the trade. Most merchants spread their costs around by offering stock in slaving voyages and otherwise trying to insure themselves against catastrophic loss on one or more lost voyages. But the costs of entrance, the experience of contacts, and the international nature of the complex negotiations suggest that there were limits on the number of merchants who could enter the trade. While this specialization seems to have taken place (and there are cases of quite major houses operating in both England and France), it is also impressive just how many independent merchants participated in the trade and how many ships were outfitted for the trade in any given year. At the height of the trade in the 1780s, for example, some 260 or soC

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100 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

ships, almost all with different owners, were needed to move the 79,000 slaves per annum who were sent to America.

There have been numerous studies on profitability of the trade at the level of the individual firm. Earlier English research by Anstey and oth- ers estimated a gross profit of 10 percent per voyage. In a recent analysis of the eighteenth century French trade, Gullerme Daubin, using modern economic accounting found the internal rate of return to be 6 percent. This, he estimated was also the average for most overseas commercial trades, and in fact the French slave traders were much less specialized than the British, with most of the biggest slave traders also actively engaged in other more normal trading ventures. In turn he asked if there were better rates of return to local capitalists in land rents, private credit arrangements or public bonds, and found that both the slave trade and all overseas trades produced higher average returns of between 2 and 5 percent. Surprisingly the slave trade and general commercial voyage investments were less risky and more liquid (that is capital could be extracted) and needed less time to garner returns than all other forms of possible investment in the eighteenth century. But given the high risks of all overseas voyages risk itself was controlled by buying shares in multiple voyages. This need to control for high market wide risk meant that there were barriers to entrance into the trade. To be profitable an investor had to have committed a large volume of capital. Information barriers also existed because of the need to have good contacts and knowledge about the quality and experience of individual voyage organizers. The result was that most of the investors were in fact wealthy merchants and were local to the port where the ship voyages began.

It has also been argued that the credit mechanisms used to finance the trade were among the most sophisticated employed in long-distance trading. Though this is correct, it turns out that most of the credit mech- anisms implemented by the traders and their suppliers and customers were in place before the trade fully developed. Thus, while the slave trade was unusual in its very high use of credit, of which the British made the most use, such credit sales were not unique to this trade nor did their use alone foster the evolution of English or continental credit institutions considered so crucial to the evolution of modern economic society. It is interesting to note, however, that English credit facilities would be intimately involved in the slave trade even long after British direct participation ended in 1807.

This debate on the relative rates of merchant participation and con- trol and of the sophisticated use of instruments of credit has generatedC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 101

a lively analytical literature. In this debate, however, no current schol- ars have been able to show that the gains from the trade were directly invested in the earliest industrial enterprises of Great Britain. All the studies of the sources of industrial capital in England suggest local origins from agriculture and/or European commerce. Nevertheless, the thesis first developed by the historian and former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, which had suggested such a linkage between slave trade profits, profits from slave-produced sugar, and the capital used to promote the Industrial Revolution in England, has come in for some support. Thus, French scholars have suggested the important role played by Africa as a market for European manufactures, especially of the more basic sort. It has been suggested that the French armaments industry was completely dependent on the African trade (which was paid for by slave exports) during times of European peace. Several other industries on the continent and in England can also be shown to have been highly dependent on the African market. Since much of early industrial activ- ity involved production of cruder and popularly consumed products, it can be argued that the African market played a vital part in sustaining the growth of some of Europe’s newest infant industries. Thus, while the more extreme position that Williams suggested has not been supported, scholars have suggested various linkages between European industrial production and the African market.

Another area that has yet to be explored is that of the use of the capital generated from the slave trade within America itself. In many trades, American owners and investors participated along with Europeans in the Atlantic slave trade. The West Indians, the North Americans – Virginians and, above all, the New Englanders – and the Brazilians clearly were an important group of owners within the trade. In terms of volume and capital generated, there is little question that few American regions compare with those of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. The number of ships provisioned for the African trade in these areas suggests a major involvement of local capital. The capital dedicated to the Brazilian slave trade came from many sources. Merchants in Angola outfitted and paid for numerous voyages, and capital was invested from Portugal itself. But a large share of the financing came from merchants in the port cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia. Given the unusual importance of Brazilian produced goods in African importations – above all, tobacco, alcohol, and arms and ammunition – and the complex wind and current conditions of the South Atlantic that made any potential triangular trade extremely difficult, Brazilian resident merchants had aC

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102 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

higher participation ratio in the slave trade than any other American merchant class. For example, of some 42 slave ships which were involved in legal issues before the Junta do Comércio (commercial court) in Rio de Janeiro, 10 were owned by Portuguese African-based merchants, one by an English merchant and the rest pertained to Rio merchants. Moreover, even European or African owned vessels probably had shares sold to Brazilian capitalists. And the slave trade merchants of Rio de Janeiro had extensive contact with Luanda merchants who operated as either co-owners of their slave expeditions or as their agents. Although Brazilian-produced goods were to be found in every outbound slave ship going to Africa, only an estimated 14 percent of early-nineteenth- century slavers carried only Brazilian produced goods for purchase of slaves. The most valuable part of the trade, even in Brazil, was Asian- produced textiles, which had to be imported from Goa, either via Lisbon or delivered directly to Luanda from India. Thus, the Brazilian trade, like all others, involved a complex amalgam of metropolitan, African, Indian, and American capital. But equally it is clear from studies of merchant records that Rio de Janeiro merchants either as organizers of voyages, owners of the slavers, or even as insurers of the ships and their cargos had a major capital investment in the Atlantic slave trade, and were probably the single largest American investors in the slave trade. What happened to this Brazilian capital tied to the slave trade after 1850 is difficult to assess. Thus, the end of the slave trade to Brazil in 1850 involved a major reallocation of local capital. It has been suggested that all this capital went into consumption of imported goods or financial speculation, but that is doubtful. It is most likely that most of the capital went into coffee, the internal slave trade, the construction of new steam mills for sugar and the beginnings of infrastructural investments in railroads and tramways, all of which experienced major growth in the next three decades. A similar process of alternative deployment of slave trade capital may have occurred in other American importing zones after the abolition of the trade.

Whatever the revisions that can be expected in our knowledge of the economics of the trade, there is little question that the basic outlines are well established. The older popular literature that stressed the cheapness of slaves, the passivity of the Africans, and the extraordinary profitability of the trade has been thoroughly challenged by the available documen- tation. It is evident from all the studies of provisioning costs in the trade and of the organization of the African market that slaves purchased in Africa were not a low-cost item. The goods exported to Africa to payC

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THE EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION OF THE SLAVE TRADE 103

for the slaves were costly manufactured products or high-priced imports from other countries or even other continents, and were the single most expensive factor in the outfitting of the voyage, being more valuable than the ship, the wages for the crew, and food supplies combined. An officer in the Royal Navy presented a typical cost estimate to Parliament in the late 1780s, which noted that the cargo taken on board a typical slaver leaving Liverpool was close to double the combined costs of the ship, its insurance, and the wages of the crew for twenty months. Even when all the final commissions to the captain, other officers, and agents from the final slave sales, the interest on loans, and the port fees were included, the costs of the outbound cargo used to purchase the slaves still represented the single largest expense incurred by the owners and over half of total costs for the entire enterprise. Two-thirds of the out- fitting costs of the French slavers in the eighteenth century were also made up of the goods used to purchase the slaves.

Along with the myths about the cheap cost of slaves, the popular literature stressed the dependent position of the African merchants in the trade. It was thought that prices demanded for slaves were low and invariant, that the trading was all dominated by the Europeans, and that the Africans were passive observers to the whole process. These issues will be examined in more detail in the following chapter, but at this point it is worth noting that all studies show that the mix of goods that went to make up the price in each zone tended to vary over time and reflected changing conditions of demand and supply. Thus, African merchants adjusted their demands for goods in response to market conditions. Africans were also astute and persistent in preventing the Europeans from creating monopoly conditions. The European forts in West Africa and even the Portuguese coastal and interior towns in Southwest Africa were ineffective in excluding competing buyers from entering the local market. The forts exercised dominion for only a few miles inland and were more designed to fend off competitors than to threaten suppliers. As for the unique Portuguese settlements, these were unable to prevent the French and English from obtaining Congo and Angolan slaves on a massive scale. Yet these were supposedly domains totally monopolized by the Portuguese.

Finally, even if the “triangle trade” idea is essentially incorrect, the Atlantic slave trade was one of the more complex of international trades that existed in the modern period. It intimately tied cowry and textile exports from Asia to African imports and involved massive movements of people across large land masses and great oceans. It tied up EuropeanC

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104 THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

capital, ships, and crews for long periods of time and involved very com- plex credit arrangements for the sale of American crops in European markets. Thus, while an actual “triangle trade” may not have existed as a significant development for ships in the trade, the economic ties between Asia, Europe, Africa, and America clearly involved a web of relationships that spanned the globe. At the heart of this system was a Europe committed to consuming American plantation crops at an ever expanding rate, crops that ranged from luxuries to basic necessities within the European population. Until European immigrants replaced them in the late nineteenth century, it was African slaves who enabled this consumption revolution to occur. Without that labor most of Amer- ica would never have developed at the pace it did.

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