Atrocity and the Atlantic Circuit WHAP/Napp

“After the indigenous Arawak peoples of thelarge islands of the Caribbean were wiped out by disease and abuse withinfifty years of Columbus’s first voyage and as the plantationeconomy spread, the Carib surviving on the smaller islandswere also pushed to the point of extinction. Farearlier and more completely than in any mainlandcolony, the West Indies were repeopled from across the Atlantic – first from Europe and then from Africa.

During the eighteenth centuryWest Indian plantation colonieswere the world’s most polarizedsocieties. On most islands 90 percent or more of theinhabitants were slaves. Power resided in the hands of aplantocracy, a small number of very rich men whoownedmost of the slaves and most of the land. Thus it is only a slight simplification to describeeighteenth-century Caribbean society as being made upof a large, abject class of slaves and a small, powerfulclass of masters. The profitability of a Caribbean plantation dependedon extracting as much work as possible from theslaves. Their long workday might stretch to eighteenhours or more as productivity was achieved through threat or force.

The most common reasonfor working hard was to escape punishment. A slavegang was headed by a privileged male slave, appropriatelycalled the ‘driver,’whose job was to ensure thatthe gang completed its work. Since production quotaswere high, slaves toiled in the fields from sunup to sunset,except for meal breaks. Those who fell behind due tofatigue or illness soon felt the sting of the whip. Openlyrebellious slaves who refused to work, disobeyed orders,or tried to escape were punished with flogging, confinementin irons, or mutilation. Sometimes slaves were punished with an ‘iron muzzle,’ which covered theirfaces and kept them from eating and drinking.

A clockwise networkof sea routes known as the AtlanticCircuit began in Europe, ran south to Africa, turned west acrossthe Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and then swept backto Europe. What drove the ships as much as thewinds and currents was the desire for the profits thateach leg of the circuit produced.The first leg, from Europe to Africa, carried European manufactures – notably metal bars, hardware, and guns – as well as great quantities of cotton textilesbrought from India. Some of these goods were traded forWest African gold, timber, and other products, whichwere taken back to Europe. More goods went to purchaseslaves, who were transported across the Atlantic tothe plantation colonies in the part of the Atlantic Circuitknown as the Middle Passage. On the third leg, plantationgoods from the coloniesreturned to Europe.” ~ The Earth and Its Peoples

1. Which of the following could NOT be a leg of the triangular trans-Atlantic trade?
(A) African slaves delivered to the Americas.
(B) Barbados rum sold to England.
(C) Mexican silver delivered to Manila.
(D) Manufactured goods sold to Africans.
(E) Barbados rum sold to North America. / 2. African slaves were in demand for the New World because
(A) So many native Americans died from imported diseases.
(B) Native peoples frequently escaped into the hinterlands.
(C) Sugar plantations in the Caribbean required considerable labor.
(D) Spanish and Portuguese conquerors disdained manual labor.
(E) All these answers are correct.
Key Words/
Questions / I. The Atlantic Slave Trade
A. From the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries, an estimated 11 million people were taken from African societies and brought to the Americas
  1. Shipped across Atlantic (“Middle Passage”) and deposited in Americas, Africans were subjected to forced labor, beatings and brandings
  2. Millions more died in the process of capture and transport
  3. Within Africa, some societies were disrupted; others strengthened
  4. An African Diaspora (the transatlantic spread of African peoples)
  5. Elements of African culture were introduced into American cultures
  6. Profits from slave trade and slavery enriched European and Americans
  1. Atlantic slave trade was stimulated by deaths of many Native American Indians and plantation economy
II. New World Slavery
  1. Slaves were treated as dehumanized property, lacking any rights
  2. Most distinctive difference was racial dimension
  3. Atlantic slavery came to be identified with Africa and “blackness”
  4. Origins of Atlantic slavery lie in Mediterranean and demand for sugar
1. Until Crusades, Europeans did not know of sugar; learned from Arabs
  1. Initially, Slavic-speaking peoples from Black Sea region furnished slaves for Mediterranean plantations, thus “Slav” became rootof “slave”
  2. In 1453, Ottomans seized Constantinople: cut off supply of Slavic slaves
H. At same time, Portuguese mariners explored the coast of West Africa
I. And Native Americans quickly perished from European diseases
III. Africans and the Trade
A. Africans supplied African slaves to European traders
  1. Europeans lacked immunities to tropical diseases of African interior
  2. Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves
  3. Europeans generally dealt as equals with local African authorities
  4. Europeans used silver from Americas to purchase goods from Africans
  5. In early 16th century, kingdom of Kongo damaged by slave trade
1. In 1526, Kongo king Alfonso, a Christian, begged Portuguese to stop
  1. Geographically, the slave trade drew on the societies of West Africa
  2. Socially, most slaves were drawn from marginal groups
  3. Divided into separate ethnic communities, there was no concept of an “African” identity – thus African sold prisoners of war (outside group)
  4. Some 80 percent of African slaves wound up in Brazil or the Caribbean
  5. About 5 to 6 percent found themselves in North America, with the balance in mainland Spanish America or in Europe itself
  6. Yet some African authorities sought to take advantage of new commercial opportunities and to manage slave trade
  7. Kingdom of Dahomey arose in early 18th century in part as an effort to contain constant raiding occasioned by coastal trade
1. For a time, Dahomey tried to limit the external slave trade
  1. But with hostile relations with neighboring kingdom, Dahomey turned to involvement in slave trade, under strict royal control

  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
  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?
(A)Spain
(B)England
(C)Portugal
(D)France
(E)Netherlands
  1. 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
4. The “middle passage” of the slave trade was the
(A) Forced march of slaves through central Africa from their homelands.
(B) Holding pens where African captives were held before sale to plantation owners.
(C) Ship voyage across the Atlantic in the cargo decks.
(D) Public auction of slaves in the Caribbean.
(E) None of these answers is correct. /
  1. 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
  1. 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)
  1. Where in the New World did slavery last the longest?
(A)Haiti
(B)Brazil
(C)Cuba
(D)The United States
(E)Mexico
8. Slavery’s impact on Africa
(A) Fell most heavily on the societies of west Africa.
(B) Was limited to the eastern shores of Africa.
(C) Was felt on the entire continent.
(D) Was barely noticeable by the end of the eighteenth century due to demographic growth.
(E) Was offset by the advances that came with European trade.

Reading: Arabs and Slavery

“Like Christians of this period, Muslims saw no moralimpediment to owning or trading in slaves. Indeed, Islam considered enslaving ‘pagans’ to be a meritoriousact because it brought them into the faith. Although Islamforbade the enslavement of Muslims, Muslim rulersin Bornu, Hausaland, and elsewhere were not strict observers of that rule.

Although both foreign Muslims and Europeans obtainedslaves from sub-Saharan Africa, there was a significantdifference in the numbers they obtained. Between 1550 and 1800 some 8 million Africans wereexported into the Atlantic trade, compared to perhaps 2million in the Islamic trade to North Africa and the MiddleEast. What effect did these losses have on Africa’spopulation? Scholars who have looked deeply into thequestion generally agree on three points: (1) even at thepeak of the trade in the 1700s sub-Saharan Africa’s overallpopulation remained very large; (2) localities thatcontributed heavily to the slave trade, such as the landsbehind the Slave Coast, suffered acute losses; (3) theability of a population to recover from losses was relatedto the proportion of fertile women who were shippedaway. The fact that Africans sold fewer women than meninto the larger Atlantic trade somewhat reduced itslong-term effects.” ~ The Earth and Its Peoples

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.

Valid Thesis: ______

In spite of the ravages of the slave trade, the population of Africa actually increased in the eighteenth century due to
(A) European settlement of Africa.
(B) Resettlement of Asian workers in parts of Africa.
(C) The introduction of new staple foods from the Americas.
(D) Improved health and life expectancy.
(E) The cessation of intertribal warfare in Africa. / African culture in the Americas included all of the following EXCEPT
(A) Distinctive language and dialect.
(B) Syncretic African-American religions.
(C) Traditional kinship ties.
(D) Distinctive foods and cuisine.
(E) Distinctive handicrafts.

Critical Thinking Question:

Do the roots of the uneven global distribution of wealth and prosperity have roots in the Atlantic Slave Trade or Atlantic Circuit? Prove your answer.

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