Africa The Slave Trade and The Arrival of the West

World History: Africa – The Slave Trade and The Arrival of the West

1. The Slave Trade
2. The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all history. Between 1492 and 1870 approximately 11,000,000 black slaves were carried from Africa to one port or another of the Americas.
3. They were taken to work on sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields or in houses as servants.
4. The shippers were, in order of scale, the Portuguese and Brazilians, the English, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the North Americans. The height of the trade came in the 1780s when the English and French were each carrying 40,000 slaves a year.
5. The captives were procured through trade with African monarchs or merchants who were established on the estuaries of nearly all the great African rivers that flow into the Atlantic.
6. The goods exchanged for slaves were textiles, copper, or iron bars, guns, drink (wine, brandy, rum) and a vast number of miscellaneous objects such as beads, hats, shaving bowls, knives (Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade, pgs 791-798).
7. Hundreds of thousands of Africans participated in the trade but especially the kings in Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Loango, Congo and Angola. Mozambique and Madagascar also contributed their thousands of prisoners to the European boats (Thomas, pgs 210-231).
8. Slavery in Africa resulted from captivity in war, from kidnappings or raids on neighbors, or sometimes from judicial decisions after crimes.
9. Slavery made England rich, as it had made Spain and Portugal rich before her. Slavery to satisfy the needs of France’s Caribbean possessions made France rich. It was still important enough in the nineteenth century to make Napoleon sacrifice a French army to crush a slave revolt in what is now Haiti.

1. Expansion of the Slave Trade
2. For the first 150 years of its existence an average of 2,500 slaves were exported each year between 1450 and 1600. However this figure rose to approximately 19,000 annually between 1601-1700 and reached a peak of 61,000 per year during the following century (1701-1800).  (John Reader, Africa – The Biography of a Continent, pg 380).
3. The surge can be explained by the discovery of the Americas and the European taste for sugar. The Europeans brought disease to the New World and the native peoples had no resistance. They succumbed to the viral infections by the tens of millions.
4. The resulting labor shortage fueled the slave trade. A triangle of trade developed: Manufactured goods from Europe were exchanged for slaves in Africa. Slaves were exchanged for sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean; sugar was sold for cash in Europe.
5. The Portuguese were the first large slavers but were replaced by the Dutch in the 1640s. The British and French then supplanted the Dutch. The major British slave colony was Jamaica. The French held Saint Domingue (Haiti). Of the 9,391,100 slaves shipped across the Atlantic fewer than 5% were landed in what is now the United States of America.
6. The largest proportion, 42%, was sold to plantation owners on the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Thirty-eight percent were shipped to Brazil by the Portuguese. Between 10 and 20% (930,000 to 1,860,000) died en route (Reader, pg 382).
7. The Middle Passage
8. The journey across the ocean was usually completed over 2-3 months. For that time period the slaves were chained in the holds of ships. The number of slaves a ship carried was determined by its size. How many human beings could be packed into the holds? Two slaves per gross ton is an often quoted rating.
9. Ships averaging from 200 to 300 tons specifically designed and constructed for ferrying Africans across the Atlantic could carry “between 500 and 600 slaves”, a Liverpool shipper told a British government inquiry in 1789.
10. Captains earned commission on the slaves they landed; so some packed their ships, gambling for maximum returns, in the knowledge that slave mortality was a loss to the company whose goods had paid for them in Africa, not to themselves.
11. The Royal Africa Company, in 1713, issued instructions stipulating that each slave should be allowed five foot in length, eleven inches in width and 23” in height. Slaves were chained together in pairs.
12. Slave holds were scraped and fumigated with tar, tobacco and sulfur then washed out with vinegar. But shortly after the slaves were loaded the infamous stink soon pervaded the ship.
13. The holds were not ventilated. Toilet facilities consisted of buckets which were often left overflowing. Many slaves grew too sick to use them. Dysentery and seasickness led to a foul hold. Unwashed bodies, heat and perspiration worsened the conditions. A surgeon reported:

The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the dysentery that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting (Reader, pg 390).

1. Africa Transformed
2. The demand of European powers for African slaves and the trade of cloth, copper, iron, guns and gunpowder for people had a broad impact on Africa’s social, political and economic fabric in the opinion of many historians.
3. Kidnapping, capture and enslavement threatened villagers in various parts of West Africa for up to 400 years. The widespread impact of the slave trade on African society can be judged by the fact that in 1850 over 200 different languages were identified among the 40,000 former slaves living in Freetown district.
4. Though virtually all had been enslaved after the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished in 1807-08, their origins covered most of West and west-central Africa and included even a few areas of East Africa.
5. One-third of this 40,000 had been captured in war, another 1/3 had been kidnapped as children or as adults travelling outside their homeland and the remaining third had been sold by relatives or superiors sometimes to meet a debt.
6. Millions of additional slaves were kept in Africa as chattel of their captors. It is estimated that 7 million were enslaved by fellow Africans. Untold millions of other captives perished either during the Middle Passage to the New World or within a short time of their capture in Africa itself.
7. The export of about 11 million slaves from 1500 to 1800 including the astronomical increase between 1650 and 1800 in the Atlantic sector could not have occurred without the transformation of the African political economy (Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd Edition).
8. Lastly, Europeans exchanged millions of guns with their African trading partners. The British traders alone are estimated to have shipped between 283,000 and 394,000 guns a year into West Africa per year between 1750 and 1807 when the legal slave trade ended.

World History: Africa – The Slave Trade and The Arrival of the West

Name _____________________________________________________(10 Points)

1. The transportation of an estimated eleven million people from Africa to the Western hemisphere took place over how many years?

1. What nation transported the most slaves?
2. How many Africans participated in the capture and enslavement of other peoples?
3. What effect did the slave trade have on England, Spain and Portugal?
4. A French army crushed a slave revolt on what island?
5. Demand for what commodity/crop caused the slave trade to surge?
6. Why did the Europeans not enslave the natives of the Western Hemisphere?
7. What was the major British slave island?
8. What percentage of Africans transported across the Atlantic were brought to U.S ports?
9. What percentage were sent to Brazil?
10. What percentage of slaves are thought to have died during the ocean voyage?
11. Captains received cash commissions based on what outcome?
12. How much space (width-wise) was accorded each slave as recommended by the Royal Africa Company?
13. How were the holds in which slaves travelled ventilated to provide fresh air?
14. What 2 maladies led to both diarrhea and nausea among the captives?
15. What adjectives did a surgeon use to describe the conditions of the hold in which the slaves were kept?
16. How many different languages were spoken by the people of Freetown?
17. How did the people of Freetown fall into slavery?
18. Why is the figure of 11 million slaves incomplete?
19. What “good” did British traders pour into West Africa at the rate of hundreds of thousands of units a year?