[edit]
Map of Meridian Line set under the Treaty of Tordesillas The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840
The first Atlantic system involved the trade of enslaved Atlantic Creoles to American colonies of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Atlantic Creoles were Africans who adapted to various languages, cultures, and economies during the Atlantic slave trade period. They were multilingual and worked as merchants, sailors, and interpreters. They traded with Europeans along the African coast and established Creole communities in Africa and the Americas and were the first captured and enslaved. With the European settlement of lands in the New World, the main destination of the slave trade shifted from Europe to the Americas.
The first enslaved Africans arrived in continental North America in the 16th century, often with European explorers. They continued to arrive in limited numbers, not only from Africa but also from Europe, the Caribbean islands, and other Atlantic coastal regions. During the first Atlantic slave trade system, most of the slavers were Portuguese, giving Portugal a near-monopoly. The Treaty of Tordesillas did not allow Spanish ships in African ports. Spain relied on Portuguese ships and sailors to bring slaves across the Atlantic. From 1525, slaves were transported directly from the Portuguese colony of Sao Tomé across the Atlantic to Hispaniola. A burial ground in Campeche, Mexico, suggests enslaved Africans had been brought there not long after Hernán Cortés completed the conquest of Aztec and Mayan Mexico in 1519. The graveyard was in use from 1550 to the late 17th century. By the 1530s there were large numbers of African slaves in the recently conquered Inca capital of Cusco as attested by Diego de Almagro departing this city with about 100 black Africans for Chile in 1535. In 1562, John Hawkins captured Africans in what is now Sierra Leone and took 300 people to sell in the Caribbean. In 1564, he repeated the voyage, this time using Queen Elizabeth's own ship, Jesus of Lübeck, and numerous English voyages followed.
Around 1560, the Portuguese began a slave trade to Brazil. From 1580 until 1640, Portugal was temporarily united with Spain in the Iberian Union. Most Portuguese contractors who obtained the asiento between 1580 and 1640 were conversos. For Portuguese merchants, many of whom were "New Christians" or their descendants, the union of crowns presented commercial opportunities in the slave trade to Spanish America.[page needed]
A slave market in Brazil
Until the middle of the 17th century, Mexico was the largest single market for slaves in Spanish America. While the Portuguese were directly involved in trading enslaved people to Brazil, the Spanish Empire relied on the Asiento de Negros system, awarding Genoese merchant bankers the license to trade slaves from Africa to their colonies in Spanish America. Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and Hispaniola received most slave arrivals, mainly from Angola. This division of the slave trade between Spain and Portugal upset the British and Dutch who invested in the British West Indies and Dutch Brazil producing sugar. After the Iberian Union fell apart, Spain prohibited Portugal from directly engaging in the slave trade as a carrier. Under the Peace of Münster, the slave trade was opened to the traditional enemies of Spain, causing Spain to lose a large share to the Dutch, French, and English. For 150 years, Spanish transatlantic traffic was operating at trivial levels. In many years, not a single Spanish slave voyage set sail from Africa. Unlike all their imperial competitors, the Spanish almost never delivered slaves to foreign territories. By contrast, the British, and the Dutch before them, sold slaves everywhere in the Americas.
The second Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans by mostly English, French, and Dutch traders and investors. The main destinations of this phase were the Caribbean islands Curaçao, Jamaica and Martinique, as European nations built up economically slave-dependent colonies.[page needed] In 1672, the Royal Africa Company was founded. In 1674, the New West India Company became more deeply involved in slave trade. From 1677, the Compagnie du Sénégal, used Gorée to house the slaves. The Spanish proposed to get slaves from Cape Verde, located closer to the demarcation line between the Spanish and Portuguese empire, but this was against the WIC-charter. The Royal African Company usually refused to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies, though they did sell them to all comers from their factories in Kingston, Jamaica and Bridgetown, Barbados. In 1682, Spain allowed governors from Havana, Porto Bello, Panama, and Cartagena, Colombia to procure slaves from Jamaica.
Island of Gorée, Senegal
By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa. By the 18th century, Portuguese Angola again become one of the principal sources of the slave trade. After the War of the Spanish Succession, as part of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the Asiento was granted to the South Sea Company. Despite the South Sea Bubble, the British maintained this position during the 18th century, becoming the biggest shipper of slaves across the Atlantic. Most of the slave trade took place during the 18th century, with the Portuguese, British, and French being the main carriers of nine out of ten slaves abducted in Africa. Slave trading was regarded as crucial to Europe's maritime economy, as noted by an English slave trader: "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is ... It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves."
Slave trading became a business for privately owned enterprises, reducing international complications. After 1790, captains often compared slave prices in major markets of Kingston, Havana, and Charleston, South Carolina before deciding where to sell. For the last sixteen years of the transatlantic slave trade, Spain was the only transatlantic slave-trading empire. Following the British Slave Trade Act 1807 and U.S. bans on the African slave trade, it declined, but the period thereafter still accounted for 29% of the Atlantic slave trade.[page needed] Between 1810 and 1860, over 3.5 million slaves were transported, with 850,000 in the 1820s.
Triangular trade[edit]
Main article: Triangular trade
Diagram of triangular trade
The first side of the triangle was the export of goods from Europe to Africa. African kings and merchants took part in the trading of slaves from 1440 to about 1833. For each captive, the African rulers would receive goods from Europe. These included guns, ammunition, alcohol, indigo dyed Indian textiles, and other factory-made goods. The second leg of the triangle exported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas and Caribbean Islands. The third part of the triangle was the return of goods to Europe from the Americas. The goods were the products of slave plantations and included cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum. Sir John Hawkins, considered the pioneer of the English slave trade, was the first to run the triangular trade, making a profit at every stop.
Labour and slavery[edit]
A Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion, produced in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood
The Atlantic slave trade was the result of, among other things, labour shortage, itself in turn created by the desire of colonists to exploit New World land and resources for profit. Native peoples were at first utilized as slave labour by Europeans until a large number died from overwork and Old World diseases. In the mid-16th century, the Spanish New Laws, prohibited slavery of the Indigenous people. A labour shortage resulted. Alternative sources of labour, such as indentured servitude, failed to provide a sufficient workforce. Many crops could not be sold for profit, or even grown, in Europe. Exporting crops and goods from the New World to Europe often proved to be more profitable than producing them in Europe. A vast amount of labour was needed to create and sustain plantations that required intensive labour to grow, harvest, and process prized tropical crops. West Africa (part of which became known as "the Slave Coast"), Angola and nearby Kingdoms and later Central Africa, became the source for enslaved people to meet the demand for labour. The reason for the shortage of labour was that, with much cheap land available and many landowners searching for workers, free European immigrants were able to become landowners themselves relatively quickly, thus increasing the need for workers. Labour shortages were mainly met by the English, French and Portuguese with African slaves.
Slaves embarked to America from 1450 until 1866 by country
Thomas Jefferson attributed the use of slave labour in part to the climate, and the consequent idle leisure afforded by slave labour: "For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour." Economist Elena Esposito argues that the enslavement of Africans in America was attributable to the fact that the American south was sufficiently warm and humid for malaria to thrive; the disease had debilitating effects on the European settlers. Conversely, many enslaved Africans were taken from regions of Africa which hosted potent strains of the disease, so they had developed resistance. This resulted in higher malaria survival rates in the American south among enslaved Africans than European labourers, making them a more profitable source of labour and encouraging their use.
David Eltis argues that Africans were enslaved because of cultural beliefs in Europe that prohibited the enslavement of cultural insiders, even if there was a source of labour that could be enslaved (such as convicts, prisoners of war and vagrants). Eltis argues that traditional beliefs existed in Europe against enslaving Christians (few then not being Christian) and those slaves that existed tended to be non-Christians and their immediate descendants (since a slave converting to Christianity did not guarantee emancipation). Eltis argues that while all slave societies have demarked insiders and outsiders, Europeans took this process further by extending the status of insider to the entire European continent, rendering it unthinkable to enslave a European since this would require enslaving an insider. Africans were viewed as outsiders and thus qualified for enslavement. While Europeans may have treated some types of labour, such as convict labour, with conditions similar to slaves, these labourers would not be regarded as chattel and their progeny could not inherit their subordinate status, thus not making them slaves in the eyes of Europeans. The status of chattel slavery was thus confined to non-Europeans, such as Africans. For the British, slaves were no more than animals and could be treated as commodities, so situations like the Zong massacre occurred without justice for the victims.
African participation[edit]
Slave traders in Gorée, Senegal, 18th century
African partners, including rulers, traders and military aristocrats, played a direct role in the slave trade. They sold slaves acquired from wars or through kidnapping to Europeans or their agents. Those sold into slavery were usually from a different ethnic group than those who captured them, whether enemies or just neighbors. These captive slaves were considered "other", not part of the people of the ethnic group or "tribe"; African kings were only interested in protecting their ethnic group, but sometimes criminals would be sold.
Most other slaves were obtained from kidnappings, or raids that occurred at gunpoint through joint ventures with the Europeans.[failed verification] The kingdom of Dahomey supplied war captives to European slave traders. Dahomey King Agaja, who ruled from 1718 to 1740, took control of key trade routes for the Atlantic slave trade by conquering the neighbouring kingdoms of Allada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727. A decrease in the slave trade in the area was observed after this conquest, however Agaja did create significant infrastructure for the slave trade and actively participated in it.
Africans from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) participated in the slave trade through intermarriage, or cassare, meaning 'to set up house', derived from the Portuguese 'casar', meaning 'to marry'. Cassare formed political and economic bonds between European and African slave traders. Cassare was a pre-European-contact practice used to integrate the "other" from a differing African tribe. Early on in the Atlantic slave trade, it was common for elite West African families to marry their women to European traders in alliance, bolstering their syndicate. The marriages were even performed using African customs, which Europeans did not object to, given how important the connections were.
African awareness of the conditions of slavery in the Americas[edit]
A slave market in Dahomey
It is difficult to reconstruct and generalize how Africans residing in Africa understood the Atlantic slave trade, though there is evidence African elites and slave traders had awareness of the conditions of the slaves transported to the Americas. According to Robin Law, the elites of Dahomey must have had an "informed understanding" of the fates of the Africans they sold into slavery. Dahomey sent diplomats to Brazil and Portugal who returned with information about the trips. Royal elites of Dahomey had experienced slavery in the Americas before returning to their homeland. The only apparent moral issue that the kingdom had with slavery was the enslavement of fellow Dahomeyans, an offense punishable by death, rather than the institution of slavery itself.
On the Gold Coast, it was common for slave-trading African rulers to encourage their children to learn about Europeans by sending them to sail on European ships, live inside European forts, or travel to Europe or America for an education. Diplomats traveled to European cities. The elites rescued fellow elites tricked into slavery in the Americas by sending demands to the Dutch and British governments, who complied due to fears of reduced trade. An example is the case of William Ansah Sessarakoo, who was rescued from slavery in Barbados after being recognised by a visiting slave trader of the same Fante ethnic group, and later became a slave trader himself. Fenda Lawrence was a slave trader from the Gambia who lived and traded in Georgia and South Carolina as a free person.
A common assumption by Africans who were unaware of the purpose of the Atlantic slave trade was that the Europeans were cannibals who planned on cooking and eating their captives. This rumour was a source of significant distress for enslaved Africans.
African opposition to the slave trade[edit]
Boukary Koutou's Mossi cavalry returning with captives from a raid, Ouagadougou-
Sometimes trading between Europeans and African leaders was unequal. Europeans influenced Africans to provide more slaves by forming military alliances with warring African societies to instigate more fighting, which would provide more war captives to the African rulers to trade as slaves. Europeans shifted the location of disembarkation points for trade along the African coast to follow military conflicts. In areas of Africa where slavery was not prevalent, European slave traders negotiated with African rulers on their terms for trade, and African rulers refused to supply European demands. Africans and Europeans profited from the slave trade; however, African populations suffered greatly. The Mossi Kingdoms resisted the Atlantic slave trade and refused to participate in the selling of people. However, as time progressed more European slave traders entered into West Africa, had more influence in African nations and the Mossi became involved in slave trading in the 1800s.
Burning of a village in Africa, and capture of its inhabitants. To escape slave raids some Africans escaped into swamp regions or to other areas.
Although many African nations profited from the Atlantic slave trade, many African nations resisted such as the Djola and Balanta. Some African nations organized into military resistance movements and fought African slave raiders and European slave traders entering their villages. The Akan, Etsi, Fetu, Eguafo, Agona, and Asebu people organized into the Fante coalition and fought slave raiders and protected themselves from capture and enslavement. Chief Tomba was born in 1700 and his father was a general from the Jalonke-speaking people who fought against the slave trade. Tomba became ruler of the Baga people in present-day Guinea Bissau in West Africa and made alliances with nearby African villages against African and European slave traders. His efforts were unsuccessful: Tomba was captured by African traders and sold into slavery.
On July 1, 1839, enslaved Mende people aboard the Amistad revolted and took control of the ship. This incident led to a Supreme Court case in 1841.
Donna Beatriz Kimpa Vita in Kongo and Senegalese leader Abd al-Qadir, advocated resistance against the forced exportation of Africans. In the 1770s, leader Abdul Kader Khan opposed the Atlantic slave trade through Futa Toro, present-day Senegal. Kader Khan and Futa Toro nation resisted French slave traders and colonizers who wanted to enslave Africans and Muslims from Futa Toro. Other forms of resistance by African nations was migration to different areas in West Africa such as swamps and lake regions to escape slave raids. Efik participated in slave dealing as a form of protection against enslavement. African resistance occurred in every phase of the slave trade to resisting marches to the slave holding stations, resistance at the coast, and on slave ships. Aboard the slave ship Clare, the enslaved Africans revolted and drove the crew from the vessel, took control of the ship, and landed near Cape Coast Castle in present-day Ghana in 1729. Enslaved Africans sunk ships, killed the crew, and set fire to ships with explosives. Slave traders and white crewmembers prevented rebellions by loading women, men, and children separately inside slave ships because enslaved children used loose pieces of wood, and tools they found and passed them to the men to free themselves and fight the crew. From the records of slave ship captains, between 1698 and 1807, there were 353 acts of insurrection aboard slave ships. Most rebellions were defeated. Igbo slaves on ships committed suicide by jumping overboard as an act of resistance. To prevent suicides, crewmen placed nets around slave ships to catch enslaved persons that jumped overboard. White captains invested in firearms, swivel guns, and ordered crews to watch slaves to prevent or prepare for possible revolts.
John Newton was a captain of slave ships and recorded in his journal how Africans mutinied on ships, and some were successful in overtaking the crew. In 1730 the slave ship Little George departed from the Guinea Coast to Rhode Island with a cargo of 96 enslaved Africans. A few slaves slipped out of their iron chains and killed three watchmen on deck and imprisoned the captain and crew. The Africans received a promise of freedom in a deal made with the captain and crew. Africans reclaimed the ship and sailed it back to Africa's shore. The captain and crew failed in their attempt to re-enslave the Africans.
According to research by Jane Landers, more rebellions occurred when there were large numbers of African women aboard.
European participation[edit]
Europeans provided the market for slaves, rarely traveling beyond the coast or entering the African interior, due to fear of disease and native resistance. They typically resided in fortresses on the coasts, where they waited for Africans to provide them captured slaves from the interior in exchange for goods. Cases of European merchants kidnapping free Africans into slavery often resulted in retaliation from Africans, who could momentarily stop trade and kill Europeans. Europeans who desired uninterrupted trade aimed to prevent kidnapping incidents, and the British passed the "Acts of Parliament for Regulating the Slave Trade" in 1750 which outlawed the abduction of free Africans by "fraud, force, or violence". According to the Lowcountry Digital Library, "When Portuguese, and later their European competitors, found that peaceful commercial relations alone did not generate enough enslaved Africans to fill the growing demands of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they formed military alliances with certain African groups against their enemies. This encouraged more extensive warfare to produce captives for trading."
A slave being inspected
In 1778, Thomas Kitchin estimated that Europeans were bringing an estimated 52,000 slaves to the Caribbean yearly, with the French bringing the most Africans to the French West Indies. The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the last two decades of the 18th century, during and following the Kongo Civil War. Wars among tiny states along the Niger River's Igbo-inhabited region and the accompanying banditry spiked in this period. Another reason for the peak was major warfare conducted by expanding states, such as the kingdom of Dahomey, the Oyo Empire, and the Ashanti Empire.
Slavery in Africa and the New World contrasted[edit]
Further information: Slavery in Africa
Forms of slavery varied. Slavery in Africa was not heritable—that is, the children of slaves were free—while in the Americas, children of slave mothers were considered born into slavery.[disputed – discuss] This was connected to another distinction: slavery in West Africa was not reserved for racial or religious minorities, as it was in European colonies, although the case was otherwise in places such as Somalia, where Bantus were taken as slaves for the ethnic Somalis.
The treatment of slaves in Africa was more variable than in the Americas. At one extreme, the kings of Dahomey routinely slaughtered slaves in thousands in sacrificial rituals, and slaves as sacrifices was known in Cameroon. Slaves in other places were often treated as part of the family, "adopted children", with significant rights including the right to marry without their masters' permission. Explorer Mungo Park wrote:
The slaves in Africa, I suppose, are nearly in the proportion of three to one to the freemen. They claim no reward for their services except food and clothing, and are treated with kindness or severity, according to the good or bad disposition of their masters ... The slaves which are thus brought from the interior may be divided into two distinct classes—first, such as were slaves from their birth, having been born of enslaved mothers; secondly, such as were born free, but who afterwards, by whatever means, became slaves. Those of the first description are by far the most numerous ...
In the Americas, slaves were denied the right to marry freely and masters did not generally accept them as equal members of the family. New World slaves were considered the property of their owners, and slaves convicted of revolt or murder were executed.
Slave market regions and participation[edit]
Major slave trading regions of Africa, 15th–19th centuries
Europeans would buy and ship slaves to the Western Hemisphere from markets across West Africa. The number of enslaved people sold to the New World varied throughout the slave trade. As for the distribution of slaves from regions of activity, certain areas produced far more enslaved people than others. Between 1650 and 1900, 10.2 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas from the following regions in the following proportions:[page needed]
Senegambia (Senegal and the Gambia): 4.8%
Upper Guinea (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone): 4.1%
Windward Coast (Liberia and Ivory Coast): 1.8%
Gold Coast (Ghana and east of Ivory Coast): 10%
Bight of Benin (Togo, Benin and Nigeria west of the Niger Delta): 20%
Bight of Biafra (Nigeria east of the Niger Delta, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon): 15%
West Central Africa (Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola): 39%
Southeastern Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar): 5%
Although the slave trade was largely global, there was considerable intracontinental slave trade in which 8 million people were enslaved within the African continent. Of those who did move out of Africa, 8 million were forced out of East Africa to be sent to Asia.
African kingdoms of the era[edit]
There were over 173 city-states and kingdoms in the African regions affected by the slave trade between 1502 and 1853, when Brazil became the last Atlantic import nation to outlaw the slave trade. Of those 173, no fewer than 68 could be deemed nation-states with political and military infrastructures that enabled them to dominate their neighbours. Nearly every present-day nation had a pre-colonial predecessor, sometimes an African empire with which European traders had to barter.
Ethnic groups[edit]
The different ethnic groups brought to the Americas closely correspond to the regions of heaviest activity in the slave trade. Over 45 distinct ethnic groups were taken to the Americas during the trade. The ten most prominent, according to slave documentation of the era and modern genealogical studies are listed below.
The BaKongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Angola
The Mandé of Upper Guinea
The Gbe speakers of Togo, Ghana, and Benin (Fon, Ewe, Adja, Mina)
The Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast
The Wolof of Senegal and the Gambia
The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria
The Ambundu of Angola
The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and Benin
The Tikar and Bamileke of Cameroon
The Makua of Mozambique
