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03x03 - Slave Trade
03x03 - Slave Trade
Atlantic System
• Atlantic History
o Destination of most European settlers
Most of the immigration was across the Atlantic
o The sight of production for most of the important commodities
Sugar, tobacco and such
o Manufactured goods go across the Atlantic
• Overview
o Iberian trading colonies (Spain and Portugal)
Very much alive and well into the 18th century
The Spanish was still receiving tons of silver every year
The Portuguese start to turn to the western side of the
Atlantic
o Dutch trading colonies
Very active in Atlantic colonization
Traded furs with the Iroquois
Coveted the riches of the Iberian empires
They take over St. Eustatius, Curacao, Aruba, St.
martin from the Portuguese
They were really interest in shipping
They were able to make considerable money by
providing a transport for the other nations
Universal carrier
o France’s fur-trading empire
The French were primarily explorers of Canada
The first colony they founded new France
Contemporary Québec 1608
They were after beaver skins for hats
They wanted to keep the Indian system because they
use to buy the skins from them. They did not have to
get the skins themselves
Many French married with natives and the Métis
population grows
o England’s landed empire
Relations with the natives was much different than the
French
Many different colonies
All English settlers shared a hunger for lands and they
took it from the native populations
They built fences to marked their lands
On the lands they wanted to create profit and start
growing tobacco and other cash crops
By 1700 there are 250k people in north America and
33k in their Caribbean colonies
Bermuda, Bahamas, St. Kitts, Barbados, Nevis,
Montserrat, Antigua, Jamaica)
o The New World plantation complex
The Portuguese start making plantations in brazil with
slaves as their primary workers
The Atlantic Slave Trade
• Definition of a slave
o A human being that is traded or sold as a commodity
• The slave trade was perpetrated by many European nations and
African nations
• Slavery was standard before, it did not come out of nowhere
• Slavery was widespread in Africa and was the only form of private
property that produced revenue
• Slaves became the most important form of making money in Africa
• Because of the slave trade in Africa there is already a slave market
and Europeans just tap into it
o The Atlantic slavery was just an outward growth of the
internal African slavery
o They transform the scale of the slave trade and the form of
slavery
• The Portuguese control the slave trade at first
o The Portuguese set up factories
Slave trading posts. The factor was the resident
merchant trading the slaves
o The Portuguese try to capture slaves at first, but could not do
so, and they then tapped into the current African slave market
for their slaves
o The factories were set up in Africa with the permission of the
African rulers
• Overview
o 1440 – 1867 12 million slaves made it across the Atlantic
mortality rate was about 10%-20%
o more Africans than Europeans traveled across the Atlantic
for every 2 Africans 1 European came across the
Atlantic
o Atlantic slavery
Most of them were adult male
1/3 women and 10% children
the high mortality rate and the gender ratio made it
difficult to grow the slave population through children in
the Americas
unlocking the economic potential of the Americas for
the Europeans
o David Eltis, et al, The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, 1527 – 1867:
A Database on CD Rom
Thousands of records for slave shipping
Slave owners, shipping dates, number of slaves,
characteristic of ships, destinations
o Multinational enterprise and that Africans were also involved
• The British
o Most productive slavers in the Atlantic ever
o Luso-Dutch rivalry
Portuguese / Dutch
In 1637 the Dutch cease lands from the
Portuguese in the Caribbean
They also ceased brazil briefly
Once the Portuguese took over brazil again they
convince English planters to cultivate sugar
• The Dutch made their money in the shipping
This created a shift from tobacco to sugar for
many Caribbean nations
o Now that the English are heavily into sugar they need more
and more slaves
o In 1670’s the English were transporting more slaves than the
Dutch and Portuguese
o In 1807 is when the English stop trading slaves, however, the
English alone transferred about 3.4 million slaves
More than the Portuguese and Dutch combined
o Company of Royal Adventures (1663)
They gave the company an exclusive right to trade
slaves for 1,000 years
They soon encountered financial problems and closed
down
o Royal African Company (1672)
They were interlopers, pirates so the monopoly was
hard to make it enforceable
The company could not provide enough slaves and the
competition made it difficult to stay alive
In 1698 the company loses its monopoly rights
At that point the British government opens the slave
trade to anybody
Expansionary phases
1650-1683
1708-1725
• supplying not only slaves for their own
colonies but for also other nations
• they gained slave trade contract from the
Spanish government
• tobacco, sugar, rice, all depend in slaves
1746 – 1771
• height: 1763 – 1793
• after the 7 years wars the British empire
was the most powerful European power and
slave trade was a key in their growth.
• Captivity and the Middle Passage
o The journey slaves had to make from Africa
o Slaves moved a lot within Africa, and then they moved a lot
within the colonies where they landed
o Once they got to the coast of Africa they cleaned them and
made them look at best as possible for the buyers
o 2 to 3 sq. ft. per person on the ships
o no circulation of air in some holds
o the journeys were at least 5 weeks
o over 10% died at sea, high mortality rate
o the loading of the slaves took longer than the middle passage
18/07/2007 07:29:00
18/07/2007 07:29:00