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Source: Liberties Lost, Caribbean Indigenous Societies and Slave
Systems
Authors: Hilary McD Beckles and Verene Shepherd
The Decline of White Slavery
In the 19th century white slavery remained an important institution in Europe, by the 12th and 13th centuries, the enslaved were still considered valuable possessions in European, Asian and African Societies. However the meaning of the term “slave” changed and varied . One persons right to another persons labour was seen as different and separate from one persons’ right to another person as property.
In the 14th century white chattel slavery rapidly declined as a labour system, and was not widely practised after this time in Europe.
A lot of people now thought that persons outside their family, religion, race and nation could be enslaved. The Christian Europeans and the Muslim Arabs began to organise a more frequent trading relationship with West Africa. Spain and Portugal knew about the labour system of Islam that was used within North American culture. These two countries led the way in trading enslaved humans and experimented with different forms of slavery. This is the system where a person is legally and officially recognised as the property of someone else.
The Rise of Slavery in Africa
Enslaved labour was used wherever agriculture grew and long distance trade was encouraged. The spread of Islam in Africa also helped the slave trade to grow. Africans traded slaves for horses as part of an enormous military build up along the middle Niger and the River Sénégal. In these Economies slaves who were employed in large scale agriculture and as the private property of their owners, came to symbolise wealth and prosperity.
Traditional Slavery
In most of West Africa, slavery was used to bring an outsider into the kinship system of a society. Before an outsider becomes a full member of the family or kin he or she served as a slave. Slavery in this case was meant to be temporary, like a phase to be passed through. It was understood by everyone that even a person who was captured in war, or reduced to slavery because of having committed a crime, could still achieve freedom in a family. However, this tradition changed in the early 15th century when slave markets were developed where Arabs and Americans were the main buyers. Now chattel slavery became the system that was expanding.
Many African states engaged in slave raiding, wars, and other conflicts in order to capture persons to sell to Europeans as slaves. The societies into which the Africans were imported by Europeans did not see them as human and tried to enforce their inferiority in relation to white people.
Portuguese Slave Trade
In the early15th century, the Portuguese began on a small scale, the trading of enslaved people from West Africa to Europe. In this development Prince Henry the navigator was an influential figure. His concern was with both gold and slave trading. Rumours of huge economic opportunities at Timbuktu drove Prince Henry’s Portuguese merchants to introduce major military and trading expeditions. One enormous effect of these visits to Guinea, and slave trading took on new and larger dimensions. By the 1440s, gold and slave trading were established along the River Sénégal. It wasn't easy however to obtain Africans for enslavement and at first many Wolof Kings were opposed to slave trading
kidnapping Africans became the main way to get large numbers of people to enslave. The Portuguese introduced the raiding of villages and the stealing of inhabitants as a way of conducting the slave business.
Africans initially resisted as best they could, but the Portuguese’s superior military capability made this difficult.
In 1448 the Wolofs made an organised attempt to ward off Portuguese kidnappers. This led to the killing of Vallarte, a Danish member of Prince Henry's inner circle, off the coast of Goree Island. The Portuguese however were persistent.
Europeans said that West Africans were different in physical appearance, dressed differently, possessed unfamiliar cultural and ethnic differences as the basis of prejudicial treatment. Black people, according to the Europeans, were inferior and could be legally enslaved. This argument was used to justify the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
The Portuguese and the Spanish Imperial Crowns approved of African enslavement in the Americas, allowing settlers to legally use Africans as chattel. The prominent supporters of both the Crowns were granted royal licences to import Africans as slaves into the colonies. With the genocide of Caribbean natives almost complete by the 1580s, the trade in enslaved Africans to the Spanish Caribbean became a major way to get rich.
The expansion of trade was encouraged by the development of sugar industries in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, and the many mining expeditions into the interior of these islands. Meanwhile, by the mid 16th century the Portuguese had established a large scale sugar plantation economy in Brazil, using enslaved Africans.
By 1600, Brazil was the largest producer of cane sugar in the world and dominated the European market. The sugar plantation business was based on the labour of over 100,000 enslaved Africans.
Dutch Slave Trade
The Dutch established a slaving network on the Gold Coast at the end of the 16th century, led by Bernard Eriks. They decided to focus their attention on the trade in humans rather than in gold and ivory. Eriks’ plan was to secure a slave trade link with the sugar producers in Portuguese Brazil because the demand for enslaved could no be met by the Portuguese traders. Other Dutch Merchants like Pieter Brandt and Pieter van der Broecks built up slave trading networks along Loango bay (on the southwest coast of Africa) between 1599 & 1602. In 1607 the Dutch West India was established, and later the Guinea company that established a trading fort at Mouri. King Christian IV of Denmark and King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden met with officials of the Dutch West India Company and discussed ways to enter the transatlantic slave trade. Adolphus approved of the formation of a South company to trade in Africans. The Danes followed with a company of their own. The Swedes supplied the slave ships and crew, while the Dutch provided the captains and finances.
Swedish soldiers protected the forts built in Africa to protect the captured Africans who were waiting to be traded.
Like the French and Dutch, the Swedes and Danes fought for a greater share of the trade in Africans on the Gold Coast. They also built forts and between them supplied over 50,000 Africans to the Caribbean during the 17th century.
After a series of failed trading businesses, in 1635 the French government established the Company of the Isles of America. The aim of the company was to supply Africans directly to its Caribbean colonies. However, by the mid by the mid-1640s Dutch enslavers had control of the slave market on the West African Coast, as well as the Caribbean and Brazilian markets. Between 1645 and 1670, the demand for enslaved Africans, and White indentured servants, in the English and French West Indian colonies increased at an astounding rate. The enormous expansion of the sugar production in the English colonies of Barbados, St Kitts, Antigua, and Jamaica, and the French colony of Martinique, demanded enslaved Africans at a level that the colonising nations could not distribute. The Dutch effectively filled this short fall.
First the Dutch established trade and kidnapping arrangements on the West Indian markets by supplying the French and English with Africans on favourable credit terms.
In 1640s and 1650s the Dutch West India Company had no significant rival. In 1670 over 100,000 Africans in the English West Indian colonies, were most supplied by the Dutch. So within 100 years of Columbus’ visit to the Caribbean, Africans were the main form of forced labour in the Americas. White labour, which had been imported from Europe under the contracts of temporary servitude, proved to be inadequate. The Caribbean indigenous population was crippled and could not reproduce itself. By 1650 the Spanish colonies had over 375,000 enslaved Africans; some 30,000 were in the Central America region, and about half this number in the islands of the Caribbean.
The Impact of the Transatlantic Human Trade
The transatlantic trade in humans was a reign of terror unleashed upon the African continent. Initially the enslavers focused mainly on West, Central and Southern Africa but by the end of the 18th century enslavers had reached the eastern coast of Africa in search of persons to enslave. Their activities led to a devastatingly negative outcome of the local community and national life. It disrupted the economic and financial order; agricultural production; the way the communities had handled food scarcity; political organisation; and the social and psychological well being of the inhabitants. The transatlantic trade was the result of the Europeans undermining the material and cultural development of the Africans. The participation of the Africans themselves in the trade deepened rather than lessened the meaning of this crime against humanity.
The human trade affected the different parts of Africa differently. Some small societies were completely destroyed; those that refused to participate were militarily assaulted until they did. Societies that chose to benefit from the relationship with the European slavers found it necessary to attack the communities of neighbouring states.
In these attacks the number of people who were killed or crippled, especially the elderly, the very young, and women, were far more than those who were finally shipped across the Atlantic. Once the local Kings saw the profitability of the human trade they increased the slave raids to meet the demand. Where possible the Europeans used the Kings to work with as their business partners.
After centuries of having an organised community life, millions of people had to go back to being nomads. In doing this, people lost their ability to manage food production and distribution. They became vulnerable to famine caused by drought and had little access to fertile land. Along the rivers for example, where there had been large scale farming now became danger zones due to high risk of being kidnapped. These circumstances restricted and undermined growth and development in sub- Saharan Africa.
The trade caused a major depopulation in West and Central Africa. Skills and competencies of millions of people were lost. Seventy percent of the people were sold across the Atlantic. This meant that there was very little chance for normal growth to take place in most African places, and community life was seriously affected.
The transatlantic human trade:
· Weakened the economic potential of many African communities and threw them off their development path.
· Destroyed and corrupted political institutions, and systems of governance.
· Created immeasurable levels of fear, social contest, warfare and dishonour. And it undermined moral and civic practises in community life and culture
· Meant there was a massive drain of skills, abilities, and the general pool of human resources needed for sustainable development
· Created within some societies an impulse to rebel against the European presence that could have been beneficial in some areas.
· Had a significant impact on gender roles in African societies because of the removal of more men than women
Prepared by P. Morgan
St. Hugh’s High School
January 2009