A Great Atrocity WHAP/Napp

A Great Atrocity WHAP/Napp

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“Most of the migrations of Europeans to the Americas were of free peoples, who moved by choice. But throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Africa contributed more immigrants to the New World than did Europe. These Africans came as slaves, taken as captives and transported against their will.

Trading in African slaves was not new. The Romans had included Africans among their slaves and since about the seventh century C.E. Arab camel caravans had carried gold and slaves northward across the Sahara to the Mediterranean in exchange for European cotton and woolen textiles, copper, and brass. On its east coast, Africa had been long integrated into the Indian Ocean trade by Muslim and Arab traders. They exported from Africa gold, slaves, ivory, and amber and imported cotton and silk cloth.

Portuguese and later, other European ships reoriented the trade routes of Africa to the Atlantic coast. Caravans continued to cross the desert, but far more trade now came to the new coastal town fortresses. Here, Africans brought gold and slaves to trade to the European shippers. The number of slaves sold rose from under a thousand a year in 1451-75, when Portugal began to trade in slaves from the West African coast, to about 7500 a year in the first half of the seventeenth century, to about 50,000 a year throughout the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. In all, the transatlantic slave trade carried some 10 million people from Africa to the western hemisphere to work as slaves, generally on sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations.

The slaves took on economic importance in direct proportion to the expansion of the sugar plantation economy of the Caribbean after 1650. In the 1700s, the plantations reached their maximum productivity and profitability. Between 1713 and 1792 Britain alone imported £162 million of goods from the Caribbean, almost all of it sugar. This was half again as much as all British imports from Asia during the same period. France held the richest single sugar colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue, (modern Haiti).

The slaves often fared poorly on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil, where owners often believed it was cheaper to work them to death and buy replacements from among those coming from Africa rather than to feed, clothe, and house them adequately to sustain life. In North America, which concentrated on producing other crops and where planters encouraged their reproduction, they fared much better.” ~ The World’s History

1-Compare European and African migrants to the Americas. ______

2-Identify continuities and changes regarding Atlantic slavery and earlier forms. ______

3-How did Portuguese and other Europeans reorient the trade routes of Africa? ______

4-How did the Atlantic Slave trade change over time? ______

5-Discuss the role of sugar in the slave trade. ______

1. The Atlantic Slave Trade

1. From the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries, an estimated 11 million people were taken from African societies and brought to the Americas
2. Shipped across Atlantic (“Middle Passage”) and deposited in Americas, Africans were subjected to forced labor, beatings and brandings
3. Millions more died in the process of capture and transport
4. Within Africa, some societies were thoroughly disrupted; others were strengthened
5. An African Diaspora (the transatlantic spread of African peoples)
6. Elements of African culture were introduced into American cultures
7. Profits from slave trade and forced labor of African slaves enriched European and Euro-Americans

1. Slaves were treated as dehumanized property, lacking any rights
2. Most distinctive difference was racial dimension
3. Atlantic slavery came to be identified wholly with Africa and with “blackness”
4. Origins of Atlantic slavery lie in Mediterranean world and demand for sugar
5. Until Crusades, Europeans knew nothing of sugar; learned about sugar from Arabs
6. Initially, Slavic-speaking peoples from Black Sea region furnished bulk of slaves for Mediterranean plantations, so much so that “Slav” became basis for word “slave”
7. In 1453, Ottomans seized Constantinople: supply of Slavic slaves was effectively cut off

1. Africans supplied African slaves to European traders
2. Europeans lacked immunities to tropical diseases of African interior
3. Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves
4. Europeans generally dealt as equals with local African authorities
5. Europeans used silver mined in Americas to purchase goods to pay Africans
6. In early 16th century, kingdom of Kongo damaged by commerce in slaves
7. In 1526, Kongo king Alfonso, a Christian, begged Portuguese to stop trade
8. Geographically, the slave trade drew on the societies of West Africa
9. Socially, most slaves were drawn from marginal groups – prisoners of war, criminals, debtors, people “pawned” during times of difficulty
10. Divided into separate communities, there was no concept of an “African” identity
11. Some 80 percent of African slaves wound up in Brazil or the Caribbean
12. About 5 to 6 percent found themselves in North America, with the balance in mainland Spanish America or in Europe itself
13. Yet some African authorities sought to take advantage of new commercial opportunities and to manage slave trade in their own interests
14. Kingdom of Dahomey arose in early 18th century in part as an effort to contain constant raiding occasioned by coastal trade
15. For a time, Dahomey tried to limit the external slave trade
16. But with hostile relations with neighboring kingdom of Oyo, Dahomey turned to involvement in slave trade, under strict royal control

1-Identify the dates of the Atlantic slave trade. ______

2-How many Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas? ______

3-Why were Africans brought to the Americas? ______

4-What was the Middle Passage? ______

5-What was the African diaspora and how did it shape culture in the Americas? ______

6-How were slaves treated in the Americas? ______

7-What was the most distinctive difference in slavery in Americas and other areas? ______

8-What was the relationship between sugar and slavery? ______

9-How did the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople affect the slave trade? ______

10-Why were the Portuguese the first Europeans involved in Atlantic slavery? ______

11-Why did Africans supply Europeans with slaves? ______

12-How did Europeans treat African slave traders? ______

13-How did Europeans pay for slaves? ______

14-Describe individuals captured in the Atlantic slave trade. Where were they from? ______

15-Why was there no concept of an “African” identity in the years of the slave trade? ______

16-Where were the majority of slaves brought? ______

17-Why were the majority of slaves brought to this location? ______

18-What percentage of slaves arrived in North America? ______

19-What did some African authorities seek to take advantage of? ______

20-Why did the kingdom of Dahomey arise? ______

21-What did the rulers of Dahomey initially seek to do? ______

22-Why did the rulers of Dahomey change their initial policy regarding slavery? ______

23-Were Africans active participants in the slave trade? Explain your answer. ______

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?

1. 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?

1. Which trend was most typical in slave-capturing coastal West African kingdoms, such as Dahomey, which supplied the Atlantic slave trade?

1. Which would be the LEAST typical trade transaction along Africa’s northeast coast in the period 1450 – 1750?

1. To which location was the greatest number of enslaved Africans transported?

1. Where in the New World did slavery last the longest?

Thesis Practice: Comparative

Analyze similarities and differences in the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in the Arab slave trade and the Atlantic slave trade.

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