AFRS 1501 Discussion Post

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Module 2: The African Slave Trade And The Atlantic World

According to W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the preeminent black intellectuals and activists of the late 19th and 20th

centuries, the African slave trade, which transported between 10 and 15 million Africans across the Atlantic to

work as slaves in the Americas, was the most important “drama in the last thousand years of human history.”

The trade tore Africans away from “the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of

the West. They descended into Hell.” Module 2 examines the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade that

occurred between European and African traders along the west coast of Africa from the late fifteenth through

the nineteenth century. It addresses why Europeans came to Africa to acquire slave labor, why powerful African

kingdoms who controlled trade along the coast of Africa sold human beings to European traders in exchange for

foreign commodities, how the trade generated early ideas of racial difference and systems of racism, and how

the trade transformed Africa and the lives of the Africans who found themselves ensnared in a slave system

sustained by cold, calculating economic rationality and human brutality.

Rather than a primitive, archaic system, the transatlantic slave trade, and the labor performed by African and

African-American slaves, created the modern Western world – one characterized by a global, interconnected

system of capitalist expansion. The trade regarded human beings as commodities who themselves labored to

produce commodities – gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, cotton – that generated profits for plantation owners,

manufacturers, and merchants. African and African-American slaves resisted enslavement at every stage and

found ways to create new communities, new kinship networks, and new cultures in defiance of an inherently

dehumanizing system of racial slavery that survived for more than four hundred years. (1)

Learning Outcomes

This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this course:

• To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the context

of American History.

• To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing current

events with historical information.(1)

Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:

• The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.

• The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how that

culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)

Module Objectives

Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:

Use primary historical resources to analyze a topic relevant to Europeans, Africans, and the Transatlantic Slave

Trade. (1)

Readings and Resources

• Learning Unit: Exchanging People for Trade Goods (see below) (1)

• Primary Source Documents (see below)

o Olaudah Equiano excerpt

o Thomas Phillips excerpt

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Exchanging People For Trade Goods

Introduction

Figure 2-1: Ottoman Empire by André Koehne is in the Public Domain . Map of the Ottoman Empire’s

geographical reach in the Mediterranean world from 1481 to 1683.

Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors landed in

West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims and the Ottoman Empire who dominated

Mediterranean trade. (2) ( See Figure 2-1 )

When the Portugese landed on the coasts of Africa they found societies engaged in a network of trade routes

that carried a variety of goods back and forth across sub-Saharan

Africa. Some of those goods included kola nuts, shea butter, salt,

indigenous textiles, copper, iron and iron tools, and people for

sale as slaves within West Africa. The arrival of European slave

traders in Africa also followed Muslim traders by some eight

centuries. As early as the seventh century, Muslims from North

African and other areas of the Mediterranean world established

trade routes into Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa and acquired

gold, pepper, ivory, dried meat and hides, and slaves, which they

transported to North Africa, the Middle East and beyond (Curtin

1990:40–41, Collins and Burns, A HISTORY OF SUB-

SAHARAN AFRICA (2014), 202).

As a result of the early West African slave trade by the

Portuguese, a sizeable number of Africans ended up in Portugal

and Spain. By the middle of the 16th century, 10,000 black people made up 10 percent of the population of

Lisbon. Some had been freed while others purchased their freedom. Some were the offspring of African and

Portuguese marriages and liaisons. Seville, Spain had an African population of 6,000. Some of these Africans

accompanied Spanish explorers to the North American mainland. (Curtin 1990:40–11).

All of the sub-Saharan African societies discussed in Module 1 participated in the slave trade as the enslaved or

as slavers or brokers. While Europeans created the demand side for slaves, African political and economic elites

did the primary work of capturing, transporting and selling Africans to European slave traders on the African

coast (Thornton 2002:36). Since European traders were vastly outnumbered by West Africans who controlled

trade along the coast, they first had to negotiate with powerful African chiefs who often demanded tribute and

fair trading terms. Only then could European traders acquire African slaves.

The reason why Africans participated in the slave trade, given its drain on the most productive adults from

Africa’s populations, is complex.

The violence and war sown by the slave trade greatly disrupted African societies. One answer is that the

institution of slavery already existed in African societies. Slavery in Africa, however, was different from the

kind of slavery that evolved in the New World, particularly the English colonies, a topic discussed in Module 3.

(Curtin 1990:40–41).

Most legal systems in Africa recognized slavery as a social condition. Slaves constituted a class of people,

captives or their descendants, over whom private citizens exercised the rights of the state to make laws, punish,

and control. Although these rights could be sold, in practice people of the slave class who had been settled in

one location for a sufficient time came to possess a number of rights, including immunity from resale or

arbitrary transfer from one owner or location (Thornton 2002:43). In Kongo in west central Africa, there was no

such thing as a class of slaves but many people belonged to a transitory group of servile subjects. “These were

people of foreign origin, people who had been outlawed for criminal acts, people who had lost the protection of

their kinfolk, or become irredeemably indebted to others,” argues one historian. “They differed from those

enslaved by Europeans in that under normal conditions they were likely to be reabsorbed into society

(Birmingham 1981:32).”

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Many of those enslaved and brought to the New World were people who had participated in local and long-

distance trade. Depending upon their resources, they were skilled agriculturists; artisans of textiles, bronze,

gold, ivory sculpture, jewelry and sacred objects; craftsmen of wooden tools, furniture, and architectural

elements; as well as potters and blacksmiths. Others were skilled linguists in more than one African language

and often one or more European languages as well. In some cases, they had developed trade languages that

facilitated inter-group communication even among African people whose language they did not know.

Even though those who were enslaved became part of one of the most heinous of historical tragedies, Africans

enslaved in North American also became part of one of the greatest triumphs of human history. African people

and their descendants helped to develop the modern Western world and create a new nation in the process. (3)

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Figure 2-2: Map of the Atlantic to illustrate

colonization in America (1888) by Charles P.

Lucas is in the Public Domain . Map showing the

Atlantic world, including the places in African

where European traders acquired slaves and the

regions in the Americans where Europeans used

them for labor.

The ninth through the fifteenth centuries were times

of great struggle in Europe. The European powers

struggled with one another for territorial and

commercial dominance. Western and Eastern

Christendom struggled with one another and with

Islam for religious and cultural dominance.

The struggle for religious dominance resulted in

North African Berbers, Mid-Eastern Arabs and other Muslim peoples from Morocco occupying the Iberian

Peninsula for 700 years from 712 A.D. to 1492 A.D. During this time, while the Iberian powers sought to free

themselves of Moorish occupation, England and France embarked on the Crusades to retake the Holy Land

from Muslims, whom Christians called the “infidels.”

The periods of the ninth to fifteenth centuries were also times of external warfare among European powers over

trade, the decline of chiefdoms, and of internal consolidation, all leading to the emergence of new European

states. This era was marked by the loss of agricultural productivity, famine, disease, and epidemics. Peasants

rebelled against increased demands by nobility for tribute to pay for the wars. To resolve the emerging crisis,

European nations increased the scale and intensity of Old World wars for commercial dominance. These

circumstances combined to deplete the wealth of European nobility and the Church (Wolf 1982:108–125). (3)

Economic Factors Leading to the Enslavement of Africans

As the fifteenth century came to a close, Europeans embarked upon exploration of the New World and Africa in

search of expanded territory, new goods, precious metals, and new markets. All of these enterprises required

manpower to explore, clear land, build colonies, mine precious metals, and provide the settlers with subsistence.

In the New World, Europeans first tried to meet these needs by enslaving American Indians and relying on

European indentured laborers. Nevertheless, war, disease and famine among Native Americans and European

settlers depleted the colonies’ already limited labor supply. When both of these sources proved inadequate to

meet the needs for labor, Europe turned to Africa (Wolf 1982:108–125).

The development of economies based on production of sugar, tobacco and eventually rice were contingent upon

workers with particular attributes of material cultural knowledge, agricultural skills and the physical capability

to acclimate to the New World environment. Africans first enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese

demonstrated that they were people who fulfilled these requirements (Wolfe 1982:108–125).

In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadores sailed to the Americas lured by the prospects of finding gold.

They brought a few Africans as slaves with them. Early Spanish settlers soon were reporting that in mining

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operations the work of one African was equal to that of four to eight Indians. They promoted the idea that

Africans as slaves would be essential to production of goods needed for European colonization.

Several factors combined to give impetus to the Spanish demand for an African work force. Native Americans

died in large numbers from European diseases for which they had no immunity. At the same time, the Spanish

clergy interceded to the Spanish Crown to protect exploitation of Indians in mining operations.

The introduction of sugarcane as a cash crop was another factor motivating the Spanish to enslave Africans. In

order to turn a profit, Spanish planters needed a large, controllable work force, they turned to Africa for laborers

(Reynolds 2002:14).

Once Portugal and Spain established the profitability of the African slave trade, other European nations entered

the field. The English made an initial foray into the African slave trade in 1530 when William Hawkins, a

merchant of Plymouth, visited the Guinea Coast and left with a few slaves. Three decades later Hawkins’ son,

John, set sail in 1564 for the Guinea Coast. Supported by Queen Elizabeth I, he commanded four armed ships

and a force of one hundred and seventy men. Hawkins lost many of these men in fights with “Negroes” on the

Guinea coast in his attempts to secure Africans to enslave. Later through piracy he took 300 Africans from a

Spanish vessel, making it profitable for him to head for the West Indies where he could sell them for money and

trade them for provisions. Queen Elizabeth I rewarded him for opening the slave trade for the English by

knighting him and giving him a crest that showed a Negro’s head and bust with arms bound secure (Hale [1884]

1967 Vol. 3:60).

For more than a century after Columbus’s voyages, only Spain and Portugal established New World

settlements. England did not establish its first enduring settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, until 1607. France

founded a settlement in Quebec in 1608. Henry Hudson brought Africans with him in his Dutch sponsored

exploration of the river that came to bear his name. Africans also accompanied the Dutch in 1621 when they

established a trading post in the area of present day Albany. (3)

Race as a Factor

European participation in African enslavement can only be partially explained by economics. At the end of the

medieval period, slavery was not widespread in Europe. It was mostly isolated in the southern fringes of the

Mediterranean. Iberian Christians mostly enslaved Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs who were “white” non-

Christian eastern Europeans from whose name the word “slave” derives. When the transatlantic slave trade in

Africans began in 1441, Europeans placed Africans in a new category. They deemed them natural slaves — a

primitive, heathen people whose dark skin confirmed their God-ordained inferiority and subservience to

Christian Europeans. (Gomes 1936 in Sweet 2003:5). Europeans thus created an emergent understanding of

“race” and racial difference from their participation in the transatlantic slave trade and a system of racism

codified in law and policy and driven by a desire for wealth and profit. The first transnational, institutional

endorsement of African slavery occurred in 1452 when the Pope granted King Alphonso V of Portugal the right

to reduce all the non-Christians in West Africa to perpetual slavery (Saunders 1982:37–38 in Sweet 2003:6).

By the second half of the fifteenth century, the term “Negro” had become essentially synonymous with “slave”

across the Iberian Peninsula and had literally come to represent a race of people, most often associated with

black Africans and considered to be inferior (Sweet 2003:7). In the seventeenth century, Spanish colonizers

created a sistema de castas, or caste system, that ranked the status, and power, of peoples based on their “purity

of blood.” Spanish elites born in Spain sat the top of this racial classificatory system while African slaves

occupied the bottom. Skin color thus correlated with status and power. Race-based ideas of European

superiority and religious beliefs in the need to Christianize “heathen” peoples contributed to a culture in which

enslavement of Africans could be rationalized and justified. These explanations, however, do not answer the

question of why some Africans participated in the enslavement of other Africans in the transatlantic slave

trade. (3)

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Figure 2- 3: Las castas mexicanas by Ignacio María Barreda is

in the Public Domain .

Internal African Conflicts and Complexities

Western and African historians agree that war captives,

condemned criminals, debtors, aliens, famine victims, and

political dissidents were subject to enslavement within West

African societies. They also agree that during the period of the

transatlantic slave trade, internal wars, crop failure, drought,

famine, political instability, small-scale raiding, taxation, and

judicial or religious punishment produced a large number of

enslaved people within African states, nations and

principalities. There is general agreement among scholars that

the capture and sale of Africans for enslavement was primarily

carried out by the Africans themselves, especially the coastal

kings and the elders, and that few Europeans ever actually

marched inland and captured slaves themselves (Boahen, 1966;

Birmingham 1981; Wolf 1985; Mintz 2003). African wars

were the most important source of enslavement. (3) It is

important to recognize, however, that there did not exist a

common shared “African” identity among African peoples

during the early stages of the transatlantic slave trade along the

coast of West Africa. Consequently, when traders from West

African kingdoms sold men, women, and children to

Europeans slave traders most would have thought they were

selling outsiders, rather than fellow Africans, from their

societies and kingdoms — people who spoke different

languages, people who were prisoners of war or criminals, debtors and dissidents. (1)

Just as there were wars between Europeans over the right to slave catchment areas and points of

disembarkation, there were increasing numbers of wars between African principalities as the slave trade

progressed. Whatever the ostensible causes for these wars, they resulted in prisoners of war that supplied slave

factories at Goree and Bance Islands, Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, and James Forts and at Fernando Po along the

West and West Central African coast.

The fighting between African societies followed a pattern. Wars weakened the centralized African governments

and undermined the authority of associations, societies, and the elders who exercised social control in societies

with decentralized political forms. The winners and losers in wars both experienced the loss of people from

niches in lineages, secret societies, associations, guilds and other networks that maintained social order. Conflict

brought about loss of population and seriously compromised indigenous production of material goods, cash

crops and subsistence crops.

Winners and losers in the African wars came to rely upon European trade goods more and more. Eventually the

European monetized system replaced cowrie shells as a medium of exchange. European trade goods supplanted

former African reliance on indigenous material goods, natural resources and products as the economic basis of

their society. At the same time Europeans increasingly required people in exchange for trade goods. Once this

stage was reached an African society had little choice but to trade human lives for European goods and guns;

guns that had become necessary to wage wars for further captives in order to trade for goods upon which an

African society was now dependent (Birmingham 1981: 38).

While the slave trade often enriched the West African kingdoms that controlled the trade along the coast, it had

a devastating impact on the societies as a whole. African societies lost kinship networks, agricultural laborers

and production. The loss of people meant the loss of indigenous artisans and craftsmen, along with the

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knowledge of textile production, weaving and dying, metallurgy and metalwork, carving, basket making,

potting skills, architectural, and agricultural techniques upon which their societies depended. Africa’s loss was

the New World’s gain. These were the same material cultural expertise and skills that Africans brought to the

New World along with their physical labor and ability to acclimate to environmental conditions that made them

indispensable in the development of the Western Hemisphere. (3)

Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves?

Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves?

The Portuguese dominated the first 130 years of the transatlantic African slave trade. After 1651 they fell into

second position behind the British who became the primary carriers of Africans to the New World, a position

they continued to maintain until the end of the trade in the early nineteenth century.

Based on data concerning 86% of all slaving vessels leaving for the New World, historians estimate that the

British, including British colonials, and the Portuguese account for seven out of ten transatlantic slaving

voyages and carried nearly three quarters of all people embarking from Africa destined for slavery (Eltis et al

2001).

France joined the traffic of slaves in 1624, Holland and Denmark soon followed. The Dutch wrested control of

the transatlantic slave trade from the Portuguese in the 1630s, but by the 1640s they faced increasing

competition from French and British traders. England fought two wars with the Dutch in the 17 th century to

gain supremacy in the transatlantic slave trade.

Three special English companies were formed, including the Royal African Company, to operate in the sale of

slaves. They were given the exclusive rights to trade between the Gold Coast and the British colonies in

America. As the 17 th century came to a close in 1698, English merchants’ protests led to the English crown

extending the right to trade in slaves more generally. Colonists in New England immediately began to engage in

slave trafficking. Vessels left Boston, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island laden with hogsheads of rum

that were exchanged for people in Africa consequently enslaved in North American and Caribbean colonies.

Beginning with the Spanish demand for slave labor, a demand that continued and expanded in the other colonies

and the United States even after abolition of the trade in 1807, the Transatlantic Slave Trade brought between

9.6 to 11 million Africans to the New World (Curtin 1969; Donnan [1930]2002; Eltis et. al 2001; Hall 1992).

Greater numbers of people were sold into slavery from some regions as compared to other regions. Some

European nations transported more Africans than others and some regions in the New World received more

Africans from certain regions than others. The British and Portuguese account for seven out of every ten

transatlantic slaving voyages and carried nearly three quarters of all people embarking from Africa destined for

slavery (Eltis et al 2001). (3)

The Middle Passage

European slavers transported millions of Africans across the ocean in a terrifying journey known as the Middle

Passage. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave and abolitionist whose

memoir helped end the British slave trade in 1807, recalled the fearsomeness of the crew, the filth and gloom of

the hold, the inadequate provisions allotted for the captives, and the desperation that drove some slaves to

suicide. (Equiano claimed to have been born in Igboland in modern-day Nigeria, but he may have been born in

colonial South Carolina, where he collected memories of the Middle Passage from African-born slaves.) (2)

In the same time period, Alexander Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, described the sufferings of slaves from

shipboard infections and close quarters in the hold. Dysentery, known as “the bloody flux,” left captives lying in

pools of excrement. Chained in small spaces in the hold, slaves could lose so much skin and flesh from chafing

against metal and timber that their bones protruded. (2) Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases

like smallpox and conjunctivitis aboard slave ships. (1) One historian has referred to conditions Africans endured

in the Middle Passage as “probably the purest form of domination in the history of slavery as an institution.”

(Eltis, THE RISE OF AFRICAN SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS, 117). (2)

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“Middle” had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave ships, the Middle

Passage was one leg in the maritime trade in sugar and other semi-finished American goods, manufactured

European commodities, and African slaves. For the enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg

of three distinct journeys from Africa to the Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to a coastal

slave-trading factory,

often a trek of hundreds

of miles. Second—and

middle—was an oceanic

trip lasting from one to

six months in a slaver.

Third was acculturation

(known as “seasoning”)

and transportation to the

American mine,

plantation, or other

location where new

slaves were forced to

labor. (2)

Figure

25: Slaveshipposter by

Plymouth Chapter of the

Society for Effecting the

Abolition of the Slave

Trade is in the Public

Domain . This diagram

of the British slave ship,

Brookes, showing how

traders stowed African

slaves in order to

maximize capacity.

Recent estimates count

between 11 and 12

million Africans forced

across the Atlantic

between the sixteenth

and nineteenth

centuries, with about 2

million deaths at sea as

well as an additional

several million dying in the trade’s overland African leg or during seasoning. (2)

Summary of Transatlantic Slave Trade

It was the labor of enslaved Africans who extracted the gold and silver from South American mines, who grew

the sugar cane on Caribbean plantations, and later tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton on North American

plantations that helped power an entire system of capitalism. European capital funded slave ships who carried

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European goods to the coast of Africa in exchange for human beings who became slaves and by extension

commodities who were bought and sold to other traders and plantation owners.

These African slaves then produced commodities grown in European colonies that traders exported to Europe

for manufacturing and sale to consumers across the continent. Africans and their labor were the beating heart of

this interconnected system of global trade and capitalist expansion. For instance, in one single year, 1807,

Britain imported 297.9 million pounds of slave-produced sugar, 72.74 million pounds of cotton, and 16.4

million pounds of tobacco — virtually all of it produced by slaves.

In the year 1800 alone, historian Robin Blackburn estimates that about one million slaves performed labor on

British controlled plantations that amounted to about “2,500,000,000 hours of toil” combined. (Blackburn, THE

MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY , 581, Rediker, THE SLAVE SHIP , 347–348). That same African

slave labor in 1800 produced the equivalent of over 4 billion American dollars when adjusted for inflation in

2018.

Despite the exploitation and dehumanization they endured as slaves, Africans created new cultures and kinship

ties that drew from their roots in Africa and their new experiences and contacts in the Americas. These African-

American cultures would become the basis of black resistance and resilience for generations of slaves while,

later, also becoming a fundamental part of the history and culture of the United States of America. (1)