Consul in Havana amid allegations he connived to sell U. But legal abolition did not end the still profitable trade. It continued illegally well into the 19th century. As long as there remained a market for slaves in the Americas, mostly in Brazil and Cuba, the trade would continue until the s.
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One possible answer draws on the different values of societies around the Atlantic and, more particularly, the way groups of people involved in creating a trans-Atlantic community saw themselves in relation to others — in short, how they defined their identity. Ocean-going technology brought Europeans into large-scale face-to-face contact with peoples who were culturally and physically more different from themselves than any others with whom they had interacted in the previous millennium. In neither Africa nor Asia could Europeans initially threaten territorial control, with the single and limited exception of western Angola.
African capacity to resist Europeans ensured that sugar plantations were established in the Americas rather than in Africa.
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But if Africans, aided by tropical pathogens, were able to resist the potential invaders, some Africans were prepared to sell slaves to Europeans for use in the Americas. As this suggests, European domination of Amerindians was complete. Indeed, from the European perspective it was much too complete. The epidemiological impact of the Old World destroyed not only native American societies, but also a potential labor supply. Every society in history before provided at least an unthinking answer to the question of which groups are to be considered eligible for enslavement, and normally they did not recruit heavily from their own community.
A revolution in ocean-going technology gave Europeans the ability to get continuous access to remote peoples and move them against their will over very long distances. Strikingly, it was much cheaper to obtain slaves in Europe than to send a vessel to an epidemiologically coast in Africa without proper harbors and remote from European political, financial, and military power.
That this option was never seriously considered suggests a European inability to enslave other Europeans. Except for a few social deviants, neither Africans nor Europeans would enslave members of their own societies, but in the early modern period, Africans had a somewhat narrower conception of who was eligible for enslavement than had Europeans.
It was this difference in definitions of eligibility for enslavement which explains the dramatic rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery, which had disappeared from northwest Europe long before this point, exploded into a far greater significance and intensity than it had possessed at any point in human history.
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The major cause was a dissonance in African and European ideas of eligibility for enslavement at the root of which lies culture or societal norms, not easily tied to economics. Without this dissonance, there would have been no African slavery in the Americas. The slave trade was thus a product of differing constructions of social identity and the ocean-going technology that brought Atlantic societies into sudden contact with each other. The trans-Atlantic slave trade therefore grew from a strong demand for labor in the Americas, driven by consumers of plantation produce and precious metals, initially in Europe.
Because Amerindians died in large numbers, and insufficient numbers of Europeans were prepared to cross the Atlantic, the form that this demand took was shaped by conceptions of social identity on four continents, which ensured that the labor would comprise mainly slaves from Africa.
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But the central question of which peoples from Africa went to a given region of the Americas, and which group of Europeans or their descendants organized such a movement cannot be answered without an understanding of the wind and ocean currents of the North and South Atlantics. There are two systems of wind and ocean currents in the North and South Atlantic that follow the pattern of giant wheels — one lies north of the equator turns clockwise, while its counterpart to the south turns counterclockwise. The northern wheel largely shaped the north European slave trade and was dominated by the English.
The southern wheel shaped the huge traffic to Brazil which for three centuries was almost the almost exclusive preserve of the largest slave traders of all, the Portuguese. Winds and currents thus ensured two major slave trades — the first rooted in Europe, the second in Brazil.
Winds and currents also ensured that Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola, with south-east Africa and the Bight of Benin playing smaller roles, and that Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left from mainly West Africa, with the Bights of Biafra and Benin and the Gold Coast predominating. Just as Brazil overlapped on the northern system by drawing on the Bight of Benin, the English, French, and Dutch carried some slaves from northern Angola into the Caribbean.
If demand for slave-grown produce, social identity, and the Atlantic environment were three key factors shaping the traffic, the agency of Africans comprised a fourth major influence, but one which has received less attention from historians. The merchants who traded slaves on the coast to European ship captains — for example the Vili traders north of the Congo, the Efik in the Bight of Biafra — and behind them the groups that supplied the slaves, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Aro network, and further south, the Imbangala, all had strict conceptions of what made an individual eligible for enslavement.
Among such criteria were constructions of gender, definitions of criminal behavior, and conventions for dealing with prisoners of war. The make up of slaves purchased on the Atlantic coast thus reflected whom Africans were prepared to sell as much as whom Euro-American plantation owners wanted to buy. But the victims of the slave trade also had a major impact on the trade. Probably about one in ten slaving voyages experienced major rebellions, of which the attempts to control increased the costs of a slave voyage to the point where far fewer slaves entered the traffic than would have been the case without resistance.
In addition, vessels from some regions on the coast appear to have been more prone to experience slave uprisings than those from other regions. The rebellion-prone areas were precisely those regions, broadly comprising Upper Guinea Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast which had the least participation in the slave trade. The strong inference is that European slave traders avoided this part of the African coast except in those years when demand for slaves, and their prices, were particularly high.
With the key forces shaping the traffic briefly described, we can now turn to a short narrative of the slave trade. The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa.
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There were few vessels that carried only slaves on this early route, so that most would have crossed the Atlantic in smaller groups on vessels carrying many other commodities, rather than dedicated slave ships. Such a slave route was possible because an extensive traffic in African slaves from Africa to Europe and the Atlantic islands had existed for half a century before Columbian contact, such that ten percent of the population of Lisbon was black in , 2 and black slaves were common on large estates in the Portuguese Algarve.
The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in Before mid-century, all trans-Atlantic slave ships sold their slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, with the gold mines in Cibao on Hispaniola emerging as a major purchaser. Cartagena , in modern Columbia, appears as the first mainland Spanish American destination for a slave vessel — in the year On the African side, the great majority of people entering the early slave trade came from the Upper Guinea coast, and moved through Portuguese factories initially in Arguim, and later the Cape Verde islands.
Nevertheless, the voyage set out from the other major Portuguese factory in West Africa — Sao Tome in the Bight of Biafra — though the slaves almost certainly originated in the Congo. The slave traffic to Brazil, eventually accounting for about forty percent of the trade, got underway around Sugar drove this traffic, as Africans gradually replaced the Amerindian labor force on which the early sugar mills called engenhos had drawn over the period to By the time the Dutch invaded Brazil in , Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro were supplying almost all of the sugar consumed in Europe, and almost all the slaves producing it were African.
Consistent with the earlier discussion of Atlantic wind and ocean currents, there were by two major branches of the trans-Atlantic slave trade operating, one to Brazil, and the other to the mainland Spanish Americas, but together they accounted for less 7, departures a year from the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, almost all of them by from west-central Africa.
The sugar complex spread to the eastern Caribbean from the beginning of the s. Sugar consumption steadily increased in Europe, and the slave system began two centuries of westward expansion across tropical and sub-tropical North America. At the end of the seventeenth century, gold discoveries in first Minas Gerais, and later in Goias and other parts of Brazil, began a transformation of the slave trade which triggered further expansion of the business.
In Africa, the Bights of Benin and Biafra became major sources of supply, in addition to Angola, and were joined later by the more marginal provenance zones of Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, and South-east Africa. The volume of slaves carried off reached thirty thousand per annum in the s and eighty-five thousand a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans pulled into the traffic in the era of the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after In the second half of the eighteenth century six imperial systems straddled the Atlantic each one sustained by a slave trade.
The English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish all operated behind trade barriers termed mercantilistic restrictions and produced a range of plantation produce — sugar, rice, indigo, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and some precious metals — though with sugar usually the most valuable.
Timeline of Atlantic Slave Trade
Given the dominance of Portuguese and British slave traders, it is not surprising that Brazil and the British Americas received the most Africans, though both nations became adept at supplying foreign slave systems as well. Throughout the slave trade, more than seven out of every ten slaves went to these regions. The French Americas imported about half the slaves that the British did, with the majority going to Saint-Domingue. The Spanish flag, which dominated in the earliest phase of the trade before retreating in the face of competition, began to expand again in the late nineteenth century with the growth of the Cuban sugar economy.
Yet, in the next century — between and — every one of these empires had either disappeared or become severely truncated. A massive shift to freer trade meant that instead of six plantation empires controlled from Europe, there were now only three plantation complexes, two of which—Brazil and the United States—were independent, and the third, Cuba, was far wealthier and more dynamic than its European owner. Slaves thus might disembark in six separate jurisdictions in the Americas in the eighteenth century, but by they went overwhelmingly to only two areas, Brazil and Cuba, given that American cotton planters drew on Africa for almost none of their labor needs, relying instead on natural population growth and a domestic slave trade.
Indeed, overall the United States absorbed only 5 percent of the slaves arriving in the Americas. This massive reorganization of the traffic and the rapid natural growth of the US slave population had little immediate impact on the size of the slave trade. The British, Americans, Danish, and Dutch dropped out of the slave trade, but the decade to still saw over 80, people a year leaving Africa in slave ships.
Well over a million more — one tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade era — followed in the next twenty years. On the African side, the sheer human and environmental diversity of the continent makes it difficult to examine the trade from Africa as a whole.
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The slave trade did not expand, nor, indeed, decline, in all areas of Africa at the same time. Rather, a series of marked expansions and declines in individual regions contributed to a more gradual composite trend for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Each region that exported slaves experienced a marked upswing in the amount of slaves it supplied for the trans-Atlantic trade and, from that point, the normal pattern was for a region to continue to export large numbers of slaves for a century or more. The three regions that provided the fewest slaves — Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast — reached these higher levels for much shorter periods.
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, all regions had undergone an intense expansion of slave exports. A cargo of slaves could be sought at particular points along the entire Western African coast.