Reasons for the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade:

·  Several factors increased the demand for African slaves.

·  One was the labor-intensive nature of planting, harvesting, and refining sugar.

·  As sugar cultivation became more important to European colonial economies, the need for labor became more urgent.

·  In 1490, the Portuguese began using slaves on the sugar plantations of São Tomé, an island off the West African coast.

·  During the 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean became major centers of sugar production, and the desire for slave labor there became more intense.

·  Also during the early 1500s, it became clear to the Spanish and Portuguese that, in the New World, Native Americans were not well suited as slaves.

·  In addition, the Catholic Church had managed by 1542 to abolish the Encomienda system that had allowed the Spanish to place Native Americans in servitude.

·  If the Spanish and Portuguese wanted a source of slave labor – not just for sugar cultivation, but also mining, agricultural work of all kinds, and menial labor in general – they had to turn elsewhere.

·  Africa seemed to them to be the ideal source.

The Growing Scope of the Atlantic Slave Trade:

·  A small trickle of slaves had already been brought from Portugal and Europe to the Americas during the late 1400s.

·  It was in 1518, however, that the Portuguese brought the first recorded shipment of slaves directly from Africa to the New World.

·  If almost 1,000 slaves per year had been taken from Africa to Europe during the last half of the 1400s, the number of slaves taken from Africa – now to the Americas – more than doubled during the 1500s, to more than 2,000 per year.

·  At least 275,000 slaves were brought to the New World over the course of the century.

·  The slave trade mushroomed in scale during the 1600s and 1700s.

·  First, the Spanish and Portuguese appetite for slaves increased dramatically.

·  Roughly 37 percent of all slaves ever brought to the New World went to Brazil, while 15 percent to Spanish America.

·  Second, as other European nations founded colonies in the Caribbean and North America, they wanted slaves as well.

·  The non-Spanish Caribbean was the destination for fully 41 percent of all slaves taken from Africa.

·  The southern colonies of British North America, where slaves were used to grow crops such as cotton and tobacco, became home to approximately 5 percent.

·  More than a million slaves were transported from Africa during the 1600s.

·  At least 6 million were shipped during the 1700s, the Atlantic slave trade’s peak century.

·  All told, perhaps 12 million Africans were enslaved from the late 1400s through the late 1800s.

The Middle Passage:

·  The conditions under which slaves were captured and shipped to the Americas were notoriously appalling.

·  Many slaves were captives or prisoners of war, herded like animals to the coast and sold to European slavers by other Africans.

·  Most slaves were separated from their families; many were mixed in with members of other tribes, who spoke different languages and followed different customs.

·  At ports on the West African shoreline, slaves were loaded onto ships to make the infamous “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic.

·  The more slaves a ship could carry, the greater its profits, so slaves were packed into boats as tightly as possible.

·  Typically chained, lying on their backs, surrounded by hundreds of other bodies, all in darkness, slaves endured a nightmarish sea journey for weeks.

·  Upon arrival in the New World, they would be taken to slave markets and sold to their new masters.

·  During the early years of the slave trade, up to 25 percent of slaves perished during the Middle Passage.

·  By the 1700s, slavers had become more efficient at keeping slaves alive during the journey (not for humane reasons, but to cut down on the financial loss that every dead slave represented).

·  During the 1700s and 1800s, the average death rate had been reduced to 10 percent or under.

Atlantic Slavery, the Triangular Trade, and the World Economy:

·  By the 1700s, African slavery had become a crucial element in European economic life and global trade.

·  Not until the early 1800s, not a single major nation made slavery of the trade in slaves illegal.

·  Slave trade was an integral part of exchange known as triangular trade.

·  Although European home countries also traded directly with their New World colonies, exchanging colonial raw materials for European manufactured goods, triangular trade was most common during the 1600s and 1700s.

·  Typically, European manufactured goods (metalware, cotton textiles, processed alcohol such as gin and rum, firearms) would be brought to Africa and exchanged for gold, ivory, timber, and slaves.

·  While the gold, ivory, and timber would eventually be brought back to Europe, the slaves were taken to the Americas and sold for hard cash or traded for goods.

·  The Middle Passage was, therefore, the second leg of the triangular trade. In the Americas, slaves would be traded for raw materials, such as furs, tobacco, raw cotton, sugar products, and silver.

·  The raw materials would be brought back to Europe.

A Far Cry from Africa (1962)

Derek Walcott

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt

Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,

Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.

Corpses are scattered through a paradise.

Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:

"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"

Statistics justify and scholars seize

The salients of colonial policy.

What is that to the white child hacked in bed?

To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break

In a white dust of ibises whose cries

Have wheeled since civilization's dawn

From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.

The violence of beast on beast is read

As natural law, but upright man

Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.

Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars

Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,

While he calls courage still that native dread

Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again

A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,

The gorilla wrestles with the superman.

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

How can I turn from Africa and live?