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Slavery and the slave trade as international issues 1890 1939.pdf - 1 views

Mbalenhle Magagula History 2A

shared by mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • chapter
  • discusses the international anti-slavery campaign between 1890 and 1939. The slavery issue was used by the colonial powers during the partition of Africa to further their own ends, but, once their rule was established, they took only minimal action to end the institution and sometimes even supported it. The three slavery committees of the League of Nations were established not because of any increased anti-slavery zeal on the part of the colonial rulers, but in order to deflect persistent humanitarian calls for action. They nevertheless set standards for the treatment of labour and projected a number of social questions into the international
  • arena
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 1919 Slavery became a major international concern from the day in 1807 when the British outlawed their own slave trade. Once this step was taken it was clearly in Britain's interest to get rival colonial and maritime powers to follow suit in order to prevent this lucrative trade from passing into foreign hands and providing foreign colonies with needed manpower. In 1815 the British tried to get other powers to outlaw it and even to establish a permanent committee to monitor progress. However, their rivals saw this as an attack on their commerce and on their colonies. They would only agree to append a declaration to the Treaty of Vienna proclaiming that the slave trade was 'repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality'. This was an important step in the direction of the present human rights movement, but it had no practical value. There followed a long and bitter campaign, during which, by bribery and cajolery, the British secured a network of treaties giving the Royal Navy unique powers to search and seize suspected slavers flying the flags of other nations. 1 As the result of this campaign, the British came to view themselves as the leaders of an international 'crusade' against slavery, the burden of which they had borne almost alone. British statesmen recognized that the cause was popular with the electorate and that Parliament would sanction expenditure and high handed action against foreign countries if these were presented as anti
  • became
  • lavery became a major international concern from the day in 1807 when the British outlawed their own slave trade. Once this step was taken it was clearly in Britain's interest to get rival colonial and maritime powers to follow suit in order to prevent this lucrative trade from passing into foreign hands and providing foreign colonies with needed manpower. In 1815 the British tried to get other powers to outlaw it and even to establish a permanent committee to monitor progress. However, their rivals saw this as an attack on their commerce and on their colonies. They would only agree to append a declaration to the Treaty of Vienna proclaiming that the slave trade was 'repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality'. This was an important step in the direction of the present human rights movement, but it had no practical value. There followed a long and bitter campaign, during which, by bribery and cajolery, the British secured a network of treaties giving the Royal Navy unique powers to search and seize suspected slavers flying the flags of other nations.As the result of this campaign, the British came to view themselves as the leaders of an international 'crusade' against slavery, the burden of which they had borne almost alone. British statesmen recognized that the cause was popular with the electorate and that Parliament would sanction expenditure and high handed action against foreign countries if these were presented as antiSLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE AS INTERNATIONAL ISSUES
  • a major international concern from the day in 1807 when the British outlawed their own slave trade. Once this step was taken it was clearly in Britain's interest to get rival colonial and maritime powers to follow suit in order to prevent this lucrative trade from passing into foreign hands and providing foreign colonies with needed manpower. In 1815 the British tried to get other powers to outlaw it and even to establish a permanent committee to monitor progress. However, their rivals saw this as an attack on their commerce and on their colonies. They would only agree to append a declaration to the Treaty of Vienna proclaiming that the slave trade was 'repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality'. This was an important step in the direction of the present human rights movement, but it had no practical value. There followed a long and bitter campaign, during which, by bribery and cajolery, the British secured a network of treaties giving the Royal Navy unique powers to search and seize suspected slavers flying the flags of other nations.As the result of this campaign, the British came to view themselves as the leaders of an international 'crusade' against slavery, the burden of which they had borne almost alone. British statesmen recognized that the cause was popular with the electorate and that Parliament would sanction expenditure and high handed action against foreign countries if these were presented as antiSLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE AS INTERNATIONAL ISSUES
  • slavery measures. Thus, the 'crusade' could often be used to further other interests - a fact not lost on rival powers. The spearhead of the anti-slavery movement was the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.A middle-class and largely Quaker organization, it wielded an influence out of proportion to its tiny membership and minuscule budget because of its close links with members of both Houses of Parliament, with government officials and missionary societies, and its ability to mount impressive propaganda campaigns. By the 1870s the Atlantic slave traffic was a thing of the past. The trade, however, still flourished in Africa and there was an active export traffic to the Muslim world. Attention was forcefully drawn to this by European traders and missionaries penetrating ever further into the interior as the European colonial powers began to partition the coast in the 1880s. Africans took up arms against the intruders and by 1888 the French Cardinal Lavigerie found his missions on the Great Lakes under attack. In response, he launched an anti-slavery 'crusade' of his own, with papal blessing, calling for volunteers to combat this scourge in the heart of Africa.
  • 19 The British, anxious to retain their leadership of the anti-slavery movement and worried at the prospect of unofficial crusaders rampaging around Africa, persuaded Leopold II of Belgium, ruler of the Congo Independent State, to invite the leading maritime and colonial powers, together with the Ottoman Empire, Persia and Zanzibar, to Brussels to discuss concerted action against the export of slaves from Africa. The colonial powers, led by the wily king, proceeded to negotiate a treaty against the African slave trade on land, as well as at sea, and carefully designed it to serve their territorial and commercial ambitions. The Brussels Act of 1890 was a humanitarian instrument in so far as it reaffirmed that 'native welfare' was an international responsibility; and bound signatories to prevent slave raiding and trading, to repatriate or resettle freed and fugitive slaves, and to cut off the free flow of arms to the slaving areas. 4 But it had important practical advantages for the colonial rulers. By binding them to end the trade in slaves and arms, it not only dealt a blow to African resistance, but was an attempt to prevent unscrupulous colonial administrations from attracting trade to their territories by allowing commerce in these lucrative products. By stating that the best means of attacking the traffic was to establish colonial administrations in the interior of Africa, to protect missionaries and trading companies, and even to initiate Africans into agricultural and industrial labour, it put an anti-slavery guise on the colonial occupation and exploitation of Africa
  • Realities Most notably, the Brussels Act did not bind signatories to suppress slavery. None of the colonial powers was prepared to commit itself to this, although they all believed that it should be ended, and they all knew that as long as there was a market for slaves the traffic would continue. British experience with abolition had not been happy. In plantation colonies, freed slaves, instead of becoming more productive wage labourers, had where possible, opted to work for themselves as artisans or in other occupations, or to become subsistence farmers. Production had declined. In the tiny British footholds on the West Coast of Africa fear of losing their slaves threatened to drive away the native merchants upon whom the colonies depended, while in South Africa abolition had been a factor in promoting the Boer exodus known as the Great Trek. In their Indian empire, however, the British devised a form of emancipation which minimized these dangers and provided a model to be used in Africa as new territories were acquired. 5 They merely declared that slavery no longer had any legal status. This meant that no claims could be countenanced in court on the basis of slavery, hence slaves who wished to leave might do so. But slave holding was still legal, and slaves were not actually freed. This model of abolition was ideal for the government. It was cheap - no compensation needed to be paid to owners. The impact could be delayed by not informing the slaves of their rights. There was thus no large scale sudden departure and very little disruption of the economy or alienation of masters. The humanitarians, also disappointed with the results of outright abolition in the colonies, were willing to accept this solution because slavery in India was considered 'benign' - that is less cruel than its counterpart in the Americas — and slaves would not be suddenly freed without means of support. This, therefore, became the model of abolition used in most of British Africa. 6 As the empire expanded colonies, in which slavery had to be outlawed, were kept to a minimum and new annexations became 'protectorates' in which full colonial administrations did not have to be introduced, and 'native' customs including slavery could continue even if it had lost its legal status. Other powers found similar legal subterfuges to avoid freeing slaves, or 'they outlawed slavery but then did not enforce their laws. 7 As the scramble for Africa gained momentum none of the colonial rulers had the resources to risk alienating slave-owning elites, upon whose cooperation they often depended, or disrupting the economies of their nascent dependencies. They justified their failure to attack slavery by claiming that African slavery was also benign, and that once robbed of its cruellest features - slave raiding, kidnapping, and trading
mbalenhle2003

The Causes and Consequences of Africa's Slave Trade - 3 views

Mbalenhle Magagula History 2A

shared by mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • These were lists of slaves that were emancipated in 1884–1885 and in 1874–1908. The list recorded the slave’s name, age, ethnic identity, date freed, and former master’s name. 22 Together, the three samples include 9,774 slaves with 80 different ethnicities. Two additional samples of slaves shipped to Mauritius in the 19th century are also available. However, these samples only distinguish between slaves that were originally from the island of Madagascar and slaves from mainland Africa. 23 The data from the Mauritius samples are used to distinguish between slaves who were originally from mainland Africa and those from Madagascar. The number of slaves from mainland Africa are then disaggregated using the sample of slaves from the Zanzibar National Archive documents, as well as a small sample of nine slaves from Harris’ The African Presence in Asia. In total, the Indian Ocean ethnicity data include 21,048 slaves with 80 different ethnicities.
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23
       
      The Red Sea statistics come from two samples: 62 slaves from Jedda, Saudi Arabia, and five slaves from Bombay, India. The samples from India and Saudi Arabia are from two British studies that were submitted to the League of Nations and were later published in the League of Nations' Council Documents in 1936 and 1937, respectively, by Harris' The African Presence in Asia.24The samples contain data on 67 slaves overall, representing 32 different racial groups. There are two samples available for the trans-Saharan slave trade: one from Central Sudan and the other from Western Sudan. 5,385 slaves' origins are revealed through the samples, and 23 different nationalities are identified.25The Saharan ethnicity data's primary flaw is that they do not include samples from all locations.
  • These were lists of slaves that were emancipated in 1884–1885 and in 1874–1908. The list recorded the slave’s name, age, ethnic identity, date freed, and former master’s name. 22 Together, the three samples include 9,774 slaves with 80 different ethnicities. Two additional samples of slaves shipped to Mauritius in the 19th century are also available. However, these samples only distinguish between slaves that were originally from the island of Madagascar and slaves from mainland Africa. 23 The data from the Mauritius samples are used to distinguish between slaves who were originally from mainland Africa and those from Madagascar. The number of slaves from mainland Africa are then disaggregated using the sample of slaves from the Zanzibar National Archive documents, as well as a small sample of nine slaves from Harris’ The African Presence in Asia. In total, the Indian Ocean ethnicity data include 21,048 slaves with 80 different ethnicities.
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23
       
      These were lists of slaves who were freed between 1874 and 1908 and between 1884 and 1885. The list included the name, age, ethnicity, date of freedom, and former master's name for each slave.22There are 9,774 slaves total in the three datasets, representing 80 distinct ethnic groups. There are also two other examples of slaves who were sent to Mauritius in the 19th century. These samples, however, only make a distinction between slaves from the continent of Africa and those who were originally from the island of Madagascar.23The information from the Mauritius samples is utilized to distinguish between slaves who came from Madagascar and those who came from the continent of Africa. The number of slaves from continental Africa is then broken down using a small sample of nine captives from Harris' The African Presence in Asia as well as a sample of slaves from the Zanzibar National Archive papers.
  • The Red Sea data are from two samples: a sample of five slaves from Bombay, India and a sample of 62 slaves from Jedda, Saudi Arabia. The sample from India is from Harris’ The African Presence in Asia, and the sample from Saudi Arabia which is from two British reports submitted to the League of Nations, and published in the League of Nations’ Council Documents in 1936 and 1937. 24 In total, the samples provide information for 67 slaves, with 32 different ethnicities recorded. For the trans-Saharan slave trade, two samples are available: one from Central Sudan and the other from Western Sudan. The samples provide information on the origins of 5,385 slaves, with 23 different ethnicities recorded. 25 The main shortcoming of the Saharan ethnicity data is that they do not provide samples from all regions from which slaves were taken during the Saharan slave trade. However, the shipping data from Ralph Austen not only provide information on the volume of trade, but also information on which caravan slaves were shipped on, the city or town that the caravan originated in, the destination of the caravan, and in some cases, the ethnic identity of the slaves being shipped
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23
       
      The Red Sea statistics come from two samples: 62 slaves from Jedda, Saudi Arabia, and five slaves from Bombay, India. Both the sample from India and the sample from Saudi Arabia are taken from British reports that were submitted to the League of Nations and published in the League of Nations Council Documents in 1936 and 1937, respectively. The sample from India is taken from Harris' The African Presence in Asia.24The samples contain data on 67 slaves overall, representing 32 different racial groups. There are two samples available for the trans-Saharan slave trade, one from Central Sudan and the other from Western Sudan. 5,385 slaves' origins are revealed through the samples, and 23 different nationalities are identified. The Saharan ethnicity data's primary flaw is that they carried slaves on caravans when shipping them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed. 26 The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia. 27 Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23
       
      The estimates for the trans-Saharan slave trade are, admittedly, rather weak. The Red Sea slave trade is an example of this. It will be demonstrated, nevertheless, that these statistical findings hold true whether or not the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave exchanges are included. In other words, the statistical results hold true even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave markets are entirely disregarded due to the poor quality of their data. Estimates of the number of slaves taken from each African nation are created by fusing the shipping statistics with the ethnicity data.26The construction process follows the reasoning shown below. The number of slaves sent from each coastline nation in Africa is first determined using the shipping information. As previously stated, the issue with these figures is that slaves shipped from the ports are first estimated.
  • Admittedly, the final estimates for the Saharan slave trade are very poor. This is also true for the Red Sea slave trade. However, it will be shown that all of the statistical results are completely robust with or without the estimates of slaves shipped during these two slave trades. That is, the statistical findings remain even if the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades are completely ignored because of the poor quality of their data. Combining the ethnicity data with the shipping data, estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in Africa are constructed.The construction procedure follows the following logic. Using the shipping data, the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country in Africa is first calculated. As mentioned, the problem with these numbers is that slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may not have come from that country, but from inland countries that lie landlocked behind the coastal country. To estimate the number of slaves shipped from the coast that would have come from these inland countries, the sample of slaves from the ethnicity data is used. Each ethnicity is first mapped to modern country boundaries. This step relies on a great amount of past research by African historians. The authors of the secondary sources, from which the data were taken, generally also provide a detailed analysis of the meaning and locations of the ethnicities appearing in the historical records. In many of the publications, the authors created maps showing the locations of the ethnic groups recorded in the documents. For example, detailed maps are provided in Higman’s samples from the British Caribbean, Koelle’s linguistic inventory of free slaves in Sierra Leone, Mary Karasch’s samples from Rio de Janeiro, Aguirre Beltran’s sample from plantation and sales records from Mexico, Adam Jones’ sample of liberated child slaves from Sierra Leone, and David Pavy’s sample of slaves from Colombia.Other sources also provide excellent summaries of the most common ethnic designations used during the slave trades. These include Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, ethnographer George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Many of the ethnic groups in the ethnicity sample do not map cleanly into one country. The quantitatively most important ethnic groups that fall into this category include: the Ana, Ewe, Fon, Kabre, and Popo, who occupied land in modern Benin and Togo; the Kongo, who resided in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola; the Makonde, localized within Mozambique and Tanzania; the Malinke, who occupied lived within Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Guinea Bissau; the Nalu, from Guinea Bissau and Guinea; the Teke, living in land within Gabon, Congo, and Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Yao from Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. In cases such as these, the total number of slaves from each ethnic group was divided between the countries using information from George Peter Murdock’s Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. Ethnic groups were first mapped to his classification of over 800 ethnic groups for Africa. Using a digitized version of a map provided in his book and GIS software, the proportion of land area in each country occupied by the ethnic group was calculated. These proportions were then used as weights to disaggregate the total number of slaves of an ethnicity between the countries. Using the ethnicity sample, an estimate of the number of slaves shipped from each coastal country that would have come from each inland country is calculated. Using these figures, the number of slaves that came from all countries in Africa, both coastal and inland, is then calculated. Because over time, slaves were increasingly being taken from further inland, the estimation procedure is performed separately for each of the following four time periods: 14001599, 1600-1699, 1700-1799, 1800-1900. In other words, for each time period, the shipping data and ethnicity data from that time period only is used in the calculations. In the end, the procedure yields estimates of the number of slaves taken from each country in each of the four slave trades for each of the four time periods listed above.
  • mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23
     
    Non-academic source
mbalenhle2003

jstor.pdf - 1 views

Mbalenhle Magagula

shared by mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • The arguments of this article are several. I begin by pointing out that, when the United States is compared to Brazil, it is clear that, far from being a backward and underdeveloped area, the South surged far ahead.4 Brazil's developmental sluggishness in comparison with the South cannot be attributed to the presence of slavery, since even with slavery the South experienced a much greater degree of development than did Brazil.5 Next, I suggest that the
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      This article begins with the outcomes of the comparison made between Brazil and United States and it's obvious that even though it's far from being a disadvantaged area, the South increased powerfully and upward. it also states that Brazil's development heavily in comparison with the south can't be assigned to the Slavery's presence since even with slavery the south went through a greater stage of development compared to Brazil.
  • Those qualities that Douglass North once identified as "salient features of the South's economic structure"7 could better have been applied to Brazil: the production for an international market of a single major staple, a tropical or semitropical crop; the plantation system based on the labor of slaves on large estates; the geographical shift of the crop associated with allegedly worn-out soils and impelled by surging prices; the presence of a large and relatively forgotten segment of the population that was neither slave nor planter; low investment in human capital; few large cities; a small local market for industrial goods; a lack of industrialization; and the location outside its borders of both the principal sources of capital and the controlling centers of its commercial life, insurance business, and carrying trade. The presence of slavery in both areas may seem, I think erroneously, to explain the other features they had in common.
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      This source suggests that Douglass's qualities that he once identified as "salient" features of the South's structure of economy could've been better put in Brazil and also that the plantation system ,geographical shifts of crops associated with worn out soil and escalated prices was neither slave nor laborer. The slavery's presence seem to give more information of the features that they commonly had.
  • Both Brazilians and North Americans had used slaves to produce export products since colonial times, most notably sugar in Pernambuco and Bahia, tobacco in Virginia and Maryland. Cotton first gained importance in South Carolina and Georgia, while later its production centered in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      North America and Brazil both used slaves for the exports production of products from colonial times, products such as tobacco in Virginia and Maryland as well as sugar in Bahia and Pernambuco. that was when cotton first gained its relevance in South Carolina and Georgia
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  • o explain why the South was less seigneurial than Brazil the historian cannot point only to slave relations of production. He must look much further into the pa
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      this source suggests that for the explanation of South Africa being less feudal lordship than Brazil cannot only blame slave relation of production but must also search for more details in the past. seigneurial refers to the territory that is under the government.
  • views
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      rigid refers to being unable to change or adapt.
  • even
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      cursory means to be hasty and therefore not looked into thoroughly.
  • hierarchically
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      hierarchical refers to somethings that has clear4 levels of power and importance.
  • derived
    • mbalenhle2003
      mbalenhle2003 on 22 Apr 23
       
      derive means to obtain something
mbalenhle2003

Slavery image - 4 views

Mbalenhle Magagula

shared by mbalenhle2003 on 21 Apr 23 - No Cached
mbalenhle2003

Slavery | Encyclopedia.com - 2 views

www.encyclopedia.com/...slavery

Mbalenhle Magagula History 2A

shared by mbalenhle2003 on 23 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Slavery is the unconditional servitude of one individual to another. A slave is usually acquired by purchase and legally described as chattel or a tangible form of movable property. For much of human history, slavery has constituted an important dimension of social and occupational organization. The word slavery originated with the sale of Slavs to the Black Sea region during the ninth century. Slavery existed in European society until the nineteenth century, and it was the principal source of labor during the process of European colonization.
  • Some forms of slavery existed among the indigenous societies in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. However, the reconstruction of the Americas after 1492 led to a system of slavery quite unprecedented in human experience. Slavery in the Americas was a patently artificial social and political construct, not a natural condition. It was a specific organizational response to a specific labor scarcity. African slavery in the Americas, then, was a relatively recent development in the course of human history—and quite exceptional in the universal history of slave societies.
  • Nevertheless, the first Africans who accompanied the early Spanish explorers were not all slaves. Some were free (such as Pedro Alonso Niño, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his third voyage); and others were servants.Nuflo de Olano, who accompanied Vasco Nuñez de Balboa across the Isthmus of Panama was, however, a slave. So were Juan Valiente and several others who traveled and fought with Hernán Cortés in Mexico, or the Pizarro brothers in Peru, or Pánfilo de Narváez in Florida. Those blacks who sailed with Columbus on his first voyage to the Americas in 1492 were free men, and their descendants presumably were as free as any other Spanish colonist in the Americas. Other blacks who accompanied the early Spanish conquistadores might have been servile, but they were not true slaves as the term was later understood. Estebanico—described as "Andrés Dorantes' black Moorish slave"—accompanied Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca in his amazing journey around the Gulf of Mexico and overland across the Southwest to Mexico City in the late 1520s and 1530s. Estebanico learned several local Indian languages with consummate ease, and he posed, along with his companions, as holy men gifted with healing powers (Weber, p. 44). The chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes several "blacks" who accompanied Hernán Cortés to Mexico—one of whom brought wheat to the New World, and another (a follower of Pánfilo de Narváez) who introduced smallpox among the Indians, with lethal results (Castillo, 1979). Of the 168 men who followed Francisco Pizarro to Peru in 1532 and captured the Inca at Cajamarca, at least two were black: Juan García, born in Old Castile, served the expedition as a piper and crier, and Miguel Ruiz, born in Seville, was a part of the cavalry and probably received a double portion of the spoils, as did all those who had horses.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Slavery was also a form of power relations, so slaves by and large did not have an equal voice in articulating a view of their condition. Their actions, however, spoke loudly of their innermost thoughts and represented their reflections on, and reactions to, the world in which they found themselves. Columbus thought the people he encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 might make good slaves, as he seemed to infer in his log of October 10, 1492, when he wrote: "They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think that they can easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases Our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highness when I depart, in order that they may learn our language" (Columbus, p. 77).
  • The transatlantic slave trade formally began in 1518, when King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct importation of Africans to his colonies in the Americas, finally acknowledging that the potential supply of indigenous slaves was inadequate to maintain the economic viability of his fledgling overseas colonies. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese started to import Africans to Brazil to create a plantation society and establish an Atlantic bulwark against other Europeans intruding along the coast. As the demand for labor grew, the number of Africans imported as slaves increased, and manual labor throughout the Americas eventually became virtually synonymous with the enslavement of Africans. The transatlantic slave trade became a lucrative international enterprise, and by the time it ended, around 1870, more than ten million Africans had been forcibly transported and made slaves in the Americas. Many millions more died in Africa or at sea in transit to the Americas.
  • The slave trade responded to an interrelated series of factors operating across Africa, at the supply side, and also in the Americas, at the market level. The trade can be divided into four phases, strongly influenced by the development of colonialism throughout the hemisphere. In the first phase, lasting to about 1620, the Americas were the domain of the Spanish and the Portuguese. These Iberian powers introduced about 125,000 slaves to the Americas, with some 75,000 (or 27 percent of African slave exports of the period) to the Spanish colonies, and about 50,000 (18 percent of the trade) to Brazil. This was a relatively small flow of about 1,000 slaves per year, most of whom were supplied from Portuguese forts along the West African coast. But slavery in the towns, farms, and mines of the Americas then employed less African slaves (about 45 percent of the total Atlantic trade) than in the tropical African islands of Fernando Po and Sâo Tomé, Europe proper, or the islands of the Madeiras, Cape Verdes, and the Azores (about 55 percent of trade). Indeed, the small island of Sâo Tomé alone received more than 76,000 African slaves during the period, exceeding the entire American market.
  • The second phase of the transatlantic slave trade lasted from 1620 to about 1700 and saw the distribution of approximately 1,350,000 slaves throughout the Americas, with an additional 25,000 or so going to Europe. During this phase, the Americas became the main destination of enslaved Africans. The trade was marked by greater geographical distribution and the development of a more varied supply pattern. The European component of the trade eventually dwindled to less than 2 percent. Instead, Brazil assumed the premier position as a slave destination, receiving nearly 42 percent of all Africans sold on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. Spanish America received about 22 percent, distributed principally in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Central America, and the Andean regions of South America. The English Caribbean colonies bought more than 263,000 slaves, or 20 percent of the volume sold in the Americas. The French Caribbean imported about 156,000 slaves, or 12 percent; and the small islands of the Dutch Caribbean bought another 40,000 slaves, or 3 percent of slaves sold throughout the Americas.
  • Even more important, slavery evolved into a complex system of labor, commerce, and society that was legally, socially, and ethnically distinct from other forms of servitude, and that was almost always applied to the condition of nonfree Africans. Two patterns of colonies developed throughout the western hemisphere: colonies designed as microcosms of European societies and colonies designed primarily for the efficient production of export commodities. The first group of colonies constituted the settler colonies. In these colonies, slaves constituted a minority of the population and did not necessarily represent the dominant labor sector. In the second group were exploitation plantation colonies, marked by their overwhelming proportion of nonfree members, and in which slavery formed the dominant labor system.
  • The period between 1701 and 1810 represented the maturation of the slave system in the Americas. This third phase witnessed the apogee of both the transatlantic slave trade and the system of American slavery. Altogether, nearly six million Africans—amounting to nearly 60 percent of the entire transatlantic slave trade—arrived in American ports. Brazil continued to be the dominant recipient country, accounting for nearly two million Africans, or 31 percent, of the trade during this period. The British Caribbean plantations (mainly on Barbados and Jamaica) received almost a million and a half slaves, accounting for 23 percent of the trade. The French Antilles (mainly Saint-Domingue on western Hispaniola, Martinique, and Guadeloupe) imported almost as many, accounting for 22 percent of the trade. The Spanish Caribbean (mainly Cuba) imported more than 500,000 slaves, or 9.6 percent of the trade. The Dutch Caribbean accounted for nearly 8 percent of the trade, but most of those slaves were re-exported to other areas of the New World. The British North American colonies imported slightly more than 300,000, or slightly less than 6 percent of the trade, while the small Danish colonies of the Caribbean bought about 25,000 slaves, a rather minuscule proportion of the slaves sold in the Americas during this period.
  • The system of slavery in the Americas was generally restrictive and harsh, but significant variations characterized the daily lives of slaves. The exhaustive demands of the plantation societies in parts of the Caribbean and Brazil, combined with skewed sexual balances among the slaves, resulted in excessively high mortality rates, unusually low fertility rates, and, consequently, a steady demand for imported Africans to maintain the required labor forces. The recovery of the indigenous populations in places such as Mexico and the Andean highlands led to the use of other systems of coerced labor, somewhat reducing the reliance on African slaves in these areas. Frontiers of grazing economies such as the llanos of Venezuela, the southern parts of Brazil, and the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay required only modest supplies of labor, so that African slaves constituted a small proportion of the local population. Only in the United States did the slave population reproduce itself dramatically over the years, supplying most of the internal demand for slave labor during the nineteenth century.In general, death rates were highest for slaves engaged in sugar production, especially on newly opened areas of the tropics, and lowest among domestic urban workers, except during periodical outbreaks of epidemic diseases.
  • The attack on the slave trade paralleled growing attacks on the system of slavery throughout the Americas. The selfdirected abolition from below that occurred in Saint-Domingue in 1793 was not repeated elsewhere, however. Instead, a combination of internal and external events eventually determined the course of abolition throughout the region. The issue of slavery became a part of the struggle for political independence for the mainland Spanish American colonies. Chile (1823), Mexico, and the new Central America States (1824), abolished slavery immediately after their wars of independence from Spain. The British government abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1834, effectively ending the institution in 1838. Uruguay legally emancipated its few remaining slaves in 1842. The French government ended slavery in the French Antilles in 1848. Colombia effectively abolished slavery in 1851, with Ecuador following in 1852, Argentina in 1853, and Peru and Venezuela in 1854. The United States of America abolished slavery after the U.S. Civil War in 1865. Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886. Finally, Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.
  • Opposition to SlaveryThe eighteenth century formed the watershed in the system of American slavery. Although individuals, and even groups such as the Quakers, had always opposed slavery and the slave trade, general disapproval to the system gained strength during the later eighteenth century, primarily due to the growth of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, and British Evangelical Protestantism. Opposition to slavery became increasingly more coordinated in England, and it eventually had a profound impact, with the abolition of the English slave trade in 1807. Before that, prodded by Granville Sharp and other abolitionists, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared slavery illegal in Great Britain in 1772, giving enormous impetus to the British antislavery movement. The British legal ruling, in time, freed about 15,000 slaves who were then in Britain with their colonial masters, who estimated their "property loss" at approximately £700,000.
  • In 1776 the British philosopher and economist Adam Smith declared in his classic study The Wealth of Nations that the system of slavery represented an uneconomical use of land and resources, since slaves cost more to maintain than free workers. By the 1780s the British Parliament was considering a series of bills dealing with the legality of the slave trade, and several of the recently independent former North American colonies—then part of the United States of America—began to abolish slavery within their local jurisdictions. After 1808—when Great Britain and the United States legally abolished their component of the transatlantic slave trade—the English initiated a campaign to end all slave trading across the Atlantic, and to replace slave trading within Africa with other forms of legal trade. Through a series of outright bribes, diplomatic pressure, and naval blockades, the trade gradually came to an end around 1870.
  • Slavery Scholarship and the Place of the Slave in the WorldThe topic of slavery has attracted the attention of a very large number of writers. Before the 1950s, writers tended to view slavery as a monolithic institution. Then, as now, there was much discussion of slavery, and less of the slaves themselves. Standard influential American studies, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Kenneth M. Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956), and Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), misleadingly described slaves as passive participants to their own cruel denigration and outrageous exploitation. In Phillips's world, everyone was sublimely happy. In the world of Stampp and Elkins, they were not happy—but neither could they help themselves. Apparently neither Stampp nor Elkins read much outside their narrow field—or if they did, they discounted it. Certainly the then available scholarship of Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, or Elsa V. Goveia is not evident in their works. Herbert Aptheker in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944), and Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen (1946) had tried, in those three intellectually stimulating works, to modify the overall picture, but without much success.
  • Conditions of Slavery
  • Then, in 1956, Goveia published an outstanding book, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. As Francisco Scarano notes of Goveia's work: "Goveia's sensitive and profound study of slave society in the British Leewards … is doubtless one of the great works of Caribbean history in any language. The Guyanese historian revealed the ways in which, in a racialized slave society, the imperative of slave subordination permeated all contexts of social interaction, from legal system to education and from religion to leisure. Everything was predicated on the violence necessary to maintain slavocratic order" (Scarano, p. 260). Goveia's approach inculcated the slaves with agency, a fundamental quality of which earlier writers seemed incredibly unaware. Slaves continuously acted in, as well as reacted to, the world in which they existed.
  • But slavery was not only attacked from above. At the same time that European governments contemplated administrative measures against slavery and the slave trade, the implacable opposition of the enslaved in the overseas colonies increased the overall costs of maintaining the system of slavery. Slave revolts, conspiracies, and rumors of revolts engendered widespread fear among owners and administrators. Small bands of runaway slaves formed stable black communities, legally recognized by their imperial powers in difficult geographical locations such as Esmeraldas in Ecuador, the Colombian coastal areas, Palmares in Brazil, and in the impenetrable mountains of Jamaica. Then, in 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, taking their cue somewhat from the French Revolution, staged a successful revolt under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) and a number of other local leaders. The radical French commissioner in the colony, Léger Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) saw the futility of trying to defeat the local revolt and declared the emancipation of all slaves and their immediate admission to full citizenship (1793), a move ratified the following year by
  • French colonies. Napoleon Bonaparte revoked the decree of emancipation in 1802, but he failed to make it stick in Saint-Domingue, where the former slaves and their free colored allies declared the independence of Haiti—the second free state in the Americas—in 1804.The fourth and final phase of the transatlantic trade lasted from about 1810 to 1870. During that phase approximately two million Africans were sold as slaves in a greatly reduced area of the Americas. With its trade legal until 1850, Brazil imported some 1,145,400 Africans, or about 60 percent of all slaves sold in the Americas after 1810. The Spanish Antilles—mainly Cuba and Puerto Rico—imported more than 600,000 Africans (32 percent), the great majority of them illegally introduced to Cuba after an Anglo-Spanish treaty to abolish the Spanish
  • he revolutionary government in Paris, which extended the emancipation to all
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