Effects
of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Americas
The Atlantic slave trade was one of the most
important examples of forced migration in human history. While slavery in the
U.S. is well-documented, only ten percent of the slaves imported from Africa
came to the United States; the other ninety per cent were disbursed throughout
the Americas—nearly half went to Brazil alone. Where did they go? What did
slavery look like in other parts of the New World? And what are the lingering
effects on the modern world?
It’s
important to discuss slavery as a historical phenomenon, both inside and
outside of the U.S. 80% of African slaves went to Brazil or to the Caribbean.
In contrast, only 10% went to the U.S., where slavery was maintained through
natural reproduction among the slave population as opposed to the constant
supply of new slaves from Africa. In order to present the big picture to
students, we should compare the slave trade and slavery across the region as a
whole.
Development
of slave trade
The Portuguese went to Africa in 15th century looking to bypass Muslim North
Africans who had a monopoly on the sub-Saharan trade in gold and spices. As they
explored and traded in West Africa, the Portuguese learned that money could be
made by transporting slaves along the Atlantic coast to Muslim merchants.
In addition to trading in Africa, the
Portuguese began to export small numbers of slaves to Europe, to work in the
cities. At the end of the 15th century,
about 10% of the population of Lisbon (one of the largest cities in Europe) was
African. Also, at this time, Europeans established sugar plantations on the
islands off of Northwest Africa and the slave trade to those islands became
profitable. I want to highlight this because the use of slave labor for
plantation agriculture foreshadows the development of slavery in the Americas.
Soon
enough, other countries became interested in the profitable slave trade.
English and Dutch ships joined in. They would raid Portuguese ships as well as
going onto the mainland to enslave Africans for the trade.
When Europeans began to explore the Americas,
Africans were part of most expeditions to the region. The Spanish brought them
in the early 16th century to work on sugar
plantations and in gold mines on the island of Hispaniola (current-day Haiti
and the Dominican Republic). Slaves were also put to work draining the shallow
lakes of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, in Mexico.
The slave trade increased in the seventeenth
century, as more large-scale agricultural production increased the need for
labor. The demand for sugar, a highly profitable crop that grew well in various
parts of the Americas, continued to grow. And the Europeans introduced large-scale
production of indigo, rice, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and cotton. Imports of
African slaves increased over the latter half of the 17th century and into the 18th. Approximately 1.3 million slaves were exported on
the trans-Atlantic route in the 17thcentury; over 6
million were exported in the 18th century.
The end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
began in the early 19th century, with bans on the
importation of slaves in Britain and the U.S. in 1807. International pressure,
as well as British blockades of slave ships, led to the decline of the slave
trade, which had mostly ended by the 1850s.
The
effects of the slave trade on West Africa were massive, especially in terms of
demographics. When we look at slave trade maps over the centuries (and there
are some on the website), we can see that West African populations were vastly
reduced to the point where slave traders were launching further into the
interior of the continent to purchase slaves. The coastal areas couldn’t feed
the European demand for slave labor. In addition to the loss of able-bodied
workers to the Americas, the slave trade caused wars and slave raids that
brought about additional deaths, as well as environmental destruction. Only a
few traditional kingdoms (like Benin, a kingdom in southern Nigeria) were able
to limit the trade or regulate it with local law. In the end, though, few were
successful over the long haul: these small, centralized kingdoms were not very
effective at resisting the slave trade and their populations dwindled as European
demand and greed increased.
Brazil
By
the time the Portuguese started to pay attention to Brazil, they had been
active in the slave trade for nearly a century. Although the Portuguese arrived
in Brazil in 1500, they only established a strict bureaucracy in 1549—to fight
off French and British incursions.
We
have to remember: Europeans were exploring the American continents throughout
the sixteenth century, with each aspiring imperial power trying to find land
and profitable resources to claim for itself. Explorers were delving deeper
into the continents and “entrepreneurs” were finding products to send back to
European markets. Brazil is actually named for its first primary sector export:
brazilwood.
In the mid-16th century,
sugar plantations began to spring up in the Northeast, where sugar grew well.
The colonists looked to the Indians to provide the necessary work force for
this labor-intensive crop. However, the enslaved Indians quickly fell
victim to European diseases (an important aspect of the Columbian Exchange) or
fled to the unnavigated interior of the country. The Portuguese decided
that the Indians were too fragile for plantation labor and, already active in
the Atlantic slave trade, they began to import African slaves. Soon, the
sugar plantation system became entirely dependent on African slave labor.
While slaves were initially brought in to
provide labor for the sugar plantations, the eventual overabundance of African
slaves caused them to be used in almost all areas of the economy. Slaves were
distributed in Brazil based on the primary export of the time, depending on
where they were needed for work: first, on the sugar plantations in the
Northeast, then in the gold mines of the Southeast, on the coffee plantations
of the South, and in the major cities of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro as
household servants. By the late 18th century,
about half of the households in Brazil’s most prominent cities held slaves. The
slave trade, which allowed for the constant importation of inexpensive labor,
allowed Brazil to develop several major industries and filled their need for
most manual labor in almost every profession.
Over the centuries, Portugal exploited
different parts of Africa. In the 16th century,
Senegambia provided most of Brazil’s slaves; in the 17th century, Angola and the Congo rose to
dominance; and in the 18th century,
slaves were coming from the Mina Coast and Benin. “Without Angola no
slaves, without slaves no sugar, without sugar no Brazil” was a common
expression during the 17th century.
During the last 50 years of the slave trade, large numbers of Yoruba people
(from the area that is currently Nigeria and Benin) were brought to cities in
Northeastern Brazil, resulting in a lasting impact on the culture of that
region.
African
slaves were brought into Brazil as early as 1530, with abolition in
1888. During those three and a half centuries, Brazil received
4,000,000 Africans, over four times as many as any other American destination.
The slave trade lasted longer in Brazil than
in almost any other country in the Americas. Slavery was abolished in the
British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Spanish America a
generation or more before it was abolished in Brazil. When Brazil gained
independence, in 1822, slavery was such an entrenched part of the system that
the elites who structured the new nation never seriously debated the
issue. We should note here that slavery in Brazil was justified by the
need for labor, but slavery was rarely defended on racial grounds; for the
Portuguese the key issue was legal status, not race. Not only was the slave
trade continuing, the same number of Africans (1.7 million) entered Brazil
between 1800 and 1850 as during the entire 18th century.
The late date of abolition, and the high numbers of slaves that entered Brazil
late into the 19th century, contributed to
the country’s cultural connection to Africa.
Brazil’s
slave trade lasted two generations longer than that of the U.S., and more
slaves were African-born than in the U.S. This has led to a Brazilian
connection to Africa that has not been as present in the United States.
The transference of African culture, in these circumstances, was much more
direct than in the U.S., where links to Africa were relegated to stories of
one’s ancestors rather than to one’s own experience. Only recently have
U.S. African-Americans begun to develop that connection with Africa in a way
that more closely resembles the situation in Brazil.
The
lingering effects of the slave trade—and the institution of slavery—can be seen
every day in Brazilian cuisine, religion, music, and dance. It can be seen in
the people, in a black and brown population that is larger than the population
of every African country except for Nigeria.
Haiti
The
island of Hispaniola was originally settled by the Spanish, due to its key
location as a launching place for conquests of new territory in the
Americas. The Spanish introduced slavery and small-scale sugar production
almost immediately. The first slaves were TaÃno Indians, who dwindled from a
population of hundreds of thousands in 1492, to 150 in 1550. As the indigenous
population was dying of abuse and disease, African slaves were brought in; the
first 15,000 Africans arrived in 1517. Although the Spanish settled on
the eastern part of the island, they focused their attention on their more
prosperous colonies in other parts of the Americas. This led, in the
early 1660s, to an incursion into the western part of the island by the
French. In 1697, after decades of fighting over the territory, the Spanish
ceded the western part of the island to the French, who henceforth called it
Saint-Domingue (which eventually became Haiti; for our purposes, I’ll refer to
it as Haiti).
The French were very involved in the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, just behind the Portuguese and the British in terms
of volume. Between the end of the 17th century,
around the time that they settled on Hispaniola, and the mid-19th century, the French made more than 4,000
registered slaving trips to the Americas. So, much like the Portuguese, the
French had easy and regular access to slave labor. The French originally
cultivated indigo but quickly exhausted the soil. Indigo might not have worked,
but that wasn’t due to a labor shortage. They quickly moved on to another labor
intensive, and even more profitable, crop: sugar.
More
than 100 sugar plantations were established between 1700 and 1704. Sugar
production was very profitable and Haiti quickly became the richest of France’s
colonies. As sugar expanded, so did the slave population. By 1720, the
French were importing 8,000 slaves each year from Africa. Haiti was the
main destination for most of the slaves carried across the Atlantic on French
ships. An interesting note about the triangular trade is that ships
criss-crossed the ocean loaded with valuable goods (whether that be textiles,
slaves, or sugar), but almost no money. This whole system worked by barter,
with slaves being traded for sugar (although slaves were worth twice as much as
the sugar; later, boats would have to travel to France to bring the rest of the
sugar that was owed to the slave traders).
When the French began to plant coffee, around
1734, profits in Haiti soared and more slaves were needed for yet another
labor-intensive crop. Haiti was soon producing 60% of the world’s coffee. Crop
expansion required additional labor, as did the high mortality of the slave
population due to harsh working conditions. The average life span of a slave in
Haiti was less than seven years. By the mid-18th century,
more than 10,000 slaves arrived each year, with more than 40,000 arriving in
1787. By then, there were nearly half a million slaves in Haiti and 2/3 of
those slaves were African-born.
Easy
access to slaves coupled with soaring profits from cash crops created a
situation in which the slave population of Haiti vastly outnumbered free
colonists. But somehow, even with inferior numbers, the French were able
to establish a system in which the lopsided population didn’t work against
them: for a century, they didn’t face a massive slave revolt. However, as time
wore on, and as the rich plantation owners and working class colonists fought
amongst themselves over their relationship (and privileges) with France, the
slaves, who outnumbered the free population more than 10 to 1, began to
organize. Eventually, their organization led to the Haitian Revolution, which
we’ll discuss in greater detail in another episode.
This hegemony, in which a French minority
ruled a large enslaved population, was possible due to the French belief in
their socio-political superiority which resulted in their strict, and often
violent, control of the slave population. The French believed that they were
superior to the people they conquered and the people that they enslaved.
Whereas the Portuguese were defending slavery on the basis of the need for
labor, the French justified it on racial grounds. They were invested enough in
the concept of their racial superiority that during the colonial period they
tracked people’s racial heritage into 128 parts (which is six generations, so
think about this as tracking your ancestry back to your great-great-great-great
grandparents). They were focused on how that ancestry broke down between
European and African roots. A European had to have 128 parts European heritage,
an African had 128 parts African heritage, a mulatto was half-half (or 64/64).
The true obsession was shown in the categories in between. Even someone who had
125–127 European parts was called “mixed blood” in Haiti.
So,
while the massive and continued importation of African slaves allowed Haiti to
become France’s richest colony in the New World, it also created a highly
hierarchical and racialized structure in which the French elite were convinced
of their superiority, in every way. It came as quite a shock to them when the
slaves revolted, and their refusal to let go of the colony led to a 13-year war
that eventually devastated the landscape that had been so profitable.
Spanish colonies
Although
the numbers of slaves that ended up in Haiti and Brazil were far greater, the
Spanish were also buying slaves to work in their colonies. The primary
difference here was that the Spanish were not as active in the slave trade
directly from Africa, and were more often purchasing slaves from British and
Dutch traders.
As I mentioned before, African slaves were
with the Spanish from the very beginning. It’s rather ironic that African slave
labor helped the Spanish as they completed the conquest of the Aztecs in
Tenochtitlán. Slaves were also put to work in the sugarcane and rice fields of
Mexico, along the coast of Veracruz. The numbers were significantly smaller
than in Brazil and Haiti, however, with a slave population of only 16,000 in
all of Mexico in the mid-18th century.
Still, the black population outnumbered the Spanish settlers in the colony.
Like
in Mexico, slaves traveled with the conquistadors of Peru. Francisco Pizarro
received a permit to bring in slaves for public construction: they built the
first Spanish roads and bridges (although the Inca infrastructure had already
been in place).
The
Spanish colonies where sugar or mining were king employed considerable slave
labor: Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. In other parts of Spanish
America where large-scale agriculture or extractive industries weren’t the main
economic sector, such as Argentina and Costa Rica, slaves were used in artisan
and domestic work, but their numbers were never very large. Still their
presence wasn’t insignificant: Africans were nearly one-third of the population
of Buenos Aires in the early 1800s.
Like the French, the Spanish justified
slavery on racial grounds; like the French, they focused on each person’s
ancestry. In Mexico, they created a series of “casta paintings” (casta being
the Spanish word for caste) in which they literally illustrated the various
racial categories. Through these paintings, you would learn that someone who
had a Spanish parent and a mestizo (half Spanish, half Indian) parent was a castizo…and
so on. Dozens of racial categories were defined in these casta paintings.
Because the Indian populations in Mexico were greater than in Brazil and Haiti,
many of the racial categories focused on that mixing, but African mixes were
also included. As in Haiti, the presence of African slaves in Mexico contributed
to the Europeans’ concerns with race and racial purity. A lot of time was spent
distinguishing Europeans from the indigenous, African, and mixed populations,
all of whom they considered inferior.
Whether
in large numbers or relatively small, African slaves drove the economies of the
New World colonies. Their labor helped to build the infrastructure of the
region and the riches of European nations. European domination of the slave
trade allowed easy access to inexpensive labor—labor that was also deemed
highly expendable—which in turn allowed European powers to exploit the
resources of the Americas for three hundred years.
Map: Overview of the slave trade out of Africa,
1500–1900
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Africa Enslaved:
Comparative Slave Systems outside the United States
Hemispheres curriculum unit. Primary sources, grouped according to theme (e.g., legal status, slave labor, rights and responsibilities, etc.) examine slavery in Brazil, Haiti, Ottoman Egypt, and the Swahili Emirates of East Africa.
Hemispheres curriculum unit. Primary sources, grouped according to theme (e.g., legal status, slave labor, rights and responsibilities, etc.) examine slavery in Brazil, Haiti, Ottoman Egypt, and the Swahili Emirates of East Africa.
Robert Harms, “Early
Globalization and the Slave Trade,” YaleGlobal, May 9, 2003.
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