A Great Atrocity
WHAP/Napp
Cues: / Notes:I. The Atlantic Slave Trade
A. During 400 years from mid-15th to the mid-19th centuries, trade in humankind took an estimated 11 million people from African societies
B. Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in Middle Passage and deposited in the Americas, where subjected to forced labor, beatings and brandings
C. Millions more died in the process of capture and transport
D. Within Africa, some societies were thoroughly disrupted; others were strengthened; many were corruptedàElites-enriched…slaves victimized
E. In the Americas, the slave trade added a substantial African presence to the mix of European and Native American peoples
F. An African Diaspora (the transatlantic spread of African peoples) injected into new societies issues of race that still endure today
G. Elements of African culture, such as religious ideas, musical and artistic traditions, and cuisine, were introduced into American cultures
H. The profits from the slave trade and the forced labor of African slaves enriched European and Euro-American societies
I. The Atlantic slave trade was stimulated by the plantation complex of the Americas and the deaths of many Native American Indians
J. But Atlantic slave trade and slavery in Americas was a large-scale expression of almost universal human practice – of owning human beings
K. But slavery in the Americas was distinctive in several ways
II. New World Slavery
A. Based on plantation agriculture and slaves were treated as dehumanized property, lacking any rights
B. The most distinctive difference was the racial dimension
C. Atlantic slavery came to be identified wholly with Africa and with “blackness”
D. Origins of Atlantic slavery lie in Mediterranean world and a demand for sugar
E. Until Crusades, Europeans knew nothing of sugar and relied on honey or fruit
F. Learned about sugarcane from Arabs and techniques for producing sugar
G. Sugar productionàfirst “modern” industry requiring huge capital investment, substantial technology, factory-like discipline, and mass market of consumers
H. Initially, Slavic-speaking peoples from the Black Sea region furnished the bulk of the slaves for Mediterranean plantations, so much so that “Slav” became the basis for the word “slave” in many European languages.
I. But in 1453, the Ottoman Turks seized Constantinople and the supply of Slavic slaves was effectively cut off
J. At the same time, Portuguese mariners were exploring the coast of West Africa looking for gold but finding an alternative source of slaves available for sale
K. And Native Americans quickly perished from European diseases
Summaries:
Cues: / III. Africans and the Trade
A. Africans supplied African slaves to European traders
B. Europeans often died when they entered the African interior because they lacked immunities to tropical diseases
C. Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves at the lowest cost and European firearms increased warfare
D. Europeans generally dealt as equals with local African authorities
E. Europeans purchased slaves with Indian textiles, cowrie shells (money in West Africa), European metal goods, firearms and gunpowder, tobacco, etc.
F. Europeans purchased some of these items with silver mined in the Americas
G. The slave trade connected with commerce in silver and textiles as it became part of an emerging worldwide network of exchange
H. In early 16th century, the kingdom of Kongo had been badly damaged by commerce in slaves, authority of its rulers had been severely undermined
I. In 1526, the Kongo king Alfonso, a convert to Christianity, begged the Portuguese to halt the slave trade
J. Geographically, the slave trade drew on the societies of West Africa, from present-day Mauritania in the north to Angola in the south
K. Socially, most slaves were drawn from marginal groups – prisoners of war, criminals, debtors, people “pawned” during times of difficulty
L. Africans did not generally sell members of own communities into slavery
M. Divided into hundreds of separate, usually small-scale, and often rival communities, people of West Africa had no concept of an “African” identity
N. Some 80 percent of African slaves wound up in Brazil or the Caribbean, where the labor demands of the plantation economy were the most intense
O. About 5 to 6 percent found themselves in North America, with the balance in mainland Spanish America or in Europe itself
P. In small-scale societies that were frequently subjected to slave raiding and that had little centralized authority, insecurity was pervasive
Q. Some large kingdoms (Kongo and Oyo) slowly disintegrated as access to trading opportunities/firearms enabled regions to establish independence
R. Yet some African authorities sought to take advantage of new commercial opportunities and to manage the slave trade in their own interests
S. The kingdom of Dahomey arose in early 18th century in part as an effort to contain the constant raiding and havoc occasioned by the coastal trade
T. For a time, Dahomey tried to limit the external slave trade
U. But with hostile relations with neighboring kingdom of Oyo, Dahomey turned to involvement in the slave trade, under strict royal control
V. Unlike in Benin (which tried to avoid and then greatly restricted its participation), the slave trade in Dahomey became the chief business of the state and remained so until well into the nineteenth century
W. Dawning of a genuinely global economy in early modern era was tied to empire building and to slavery
X. Slavery lost its legitimacy during the nineteenth century, and formal territorial empires largely disappeared in the twentieth
Summaries:
Questions:
· What was distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade? What did it share with other patterns of slave owning and slave trading?
· What explains the rise of the Atlantic slave trade?
· What roles did Europeans and Africans play in the unfolding Atlantic slave trade?
· In what different ways did the Atlantic slave trade transform African societies?
1. Which of the following does NOT belong in a list of factors preventing European powers from establishing anything more than a limited coastal settlement on the African continent in the period 1450 – 1750?(A) Climate
(B) Disease
(C) Impassable rivers
(D) Strict organized African resistance
(E) Inferior weapons technology
2. Which European power was the first to establish large-scale slave-trading operations on the African continent for the purposes of export to plantations in the Americas?
(A) Spain
(B) England
(C) Portugal
(D) France
(E) Netherlands
3. Which trend was most typical in slave-capturing coastal West African kingdoms, such as Dahomey, which supplied the Atlantic slave trade?
(A) Mass conversion to Christianity
(B) Increasing hierarchy, centralization, and importance of military capacity including use of firearms
(C) Depopulation as younger generations were shipped away
(D) Industrialization as a result of capital accumulation due to slave trade
(E) Development of representative government / 4. Which would be the LEAST typical trade transaction along Africa’s northeast coast in the period 1450 – 1750?
(A) Ivory exported to India
(B) Gold exported to Persia
(C) Female slaves exported to Arabian peninsula for domestic labor
(D) Female slaves exported to a West Indies sugar plantation
(E) Copies of the Koran imported to coastal towns
5. To which location was the greatest number of enslaved Africans transported?
(A) Spanish Mexico
(B) Portuguese Brazil
(C) British North America
(D) Dutch Indonesia
(E) French Saint-Domingue (Haiti)
6. Where in the New World did slavery last the longest?
(A) Haiti
(B) Brazil
(C) Cuba
(D) The United States
(E) Mexico
Excerpt from autocww.colorado.edu
The Atlantic slave trade developed after Europeans began exploring and establishing trading posts on the Atlantic (west) coast of Africa in the mid-15th century. The first major group of European traders in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the French. In the 16th and 17th centuries, these European colonial powers began to pursue plantation agriculture in their expanding possessions in the New World (North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean islands), across the Atlantic Ocean. As European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more New World lands became available for European use, the need for plantation labor increased.
West and west central African states, already involved in slave trading, supplied the Europeans with African slaves for export across the Atlantic. Africans tended to live longer on the tropical plantations of the New World than did European laborers (who were susceptible to tropical diseases) and Native Americans (who were extremely susceptible to "Old World" diseases brought by the Europeans from Europe, Asia, and Africa). Also, enslaved men and women from Africa were inexpensive by European standards. Therefore, Africans became the major source, and eventually the only source, of New World plantation labor.
The Africans who facilitated and benefited from the Atlantic slave trade were political or commercial elites–generally members of the ruling apparatus of African states or members of large trading families or institutions. African sellers captured slaves and brought them to markets on the coast. At these markets European and American buyers paid for the slaves with commodities–including cloth, iron, firearms, liquor, and decorative items–that were useful to the sellers. Slave sellers were mostly male, and they used their increased wealth to enhance their prestige and connect themselves, through marriage, to other wealthy families in their realms.
The Africans who were enslaved were mostly prisoners of war or captives resulting from slave raids. As the demand for slaves grew, so did the practice of systematic slave raiding, which increased in scope and efficiency with the introduction of firearms to Africa in the 17th century. By the 18th century, most African slaves were acquired through slave raids, which penetrated farther and farther inland. Africans captured in raids were marched down well-worn paths, sometimes for several hundred miles, to markets on the coast.
From the mid-15th to the late-19th century, European and American slave traders purchased approximately 12 million slaves from West and west central Africa. A small percentage of these slaves, particularly in the early years of the trade, were sent to Europe, especially to Spain and Portugal. Most, however, were shipped across the Atlantic for sale in Portuguese-administered Brazil; the British, French, Dutch, and Danish islands of the Caribbean; Spanish-controlled South and Central America; and the British North American mainland (later the United States and Canada). The Atlantic crossing, known as the Middle Passage, was nightmarish for slaves, who were poorly fed, subject to abuses at the hands of the crew, and confined to cramped storage holds in which diseases spread easily. Historians estimate that between 1.5 and 2 million slaves died during the journey to the New World.Thesis Statement: Comparative: Roman Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade
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