Hi there
Here is a summary of the salient points you asked for, with links for
further information.
Origin of the European Slave Trade
__________________________________
Throughout most of human history, slaves were drawn from conquered
populations and defeated armies, and many slaves were simply sold (or
sold themselves) into slavery by the rulers or their families. The
European trade in human goods begins right at the start of European
relations with Africa. Early forms of slavery were purely commercial
enterprises, and slavery was not racially based in most of human
history; racial slavery, that is, slavery that is predicated on race
as a way of separating slave from free, is an invention of the
seventeenth century.
Here is a quote from "The beginnings of the European Slave Trade"
(http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/DIASPORA/SLAVE.HTM )
"Such was the situation that the Europeans encountered and traded in.
When the Portugese forged contacts with the Islamic civilizations and
traders of North Africa, they diverted much of the slave trade to
Europe, including the Muslim traffic in black slaves. The Portugese,
however, were not content with trade with North Africa and pushed down
the western coast of Africa. In 1444, a group of Portugese stumbled on
a village of black Africans and, out of a desire to make some money,
attacked them and kidnapped as many as they could. Thus began the
European traffic in black slaves. "
The Portugese traffic, however, was far different from the character
of the later slave trade. Technically, the Africans were not slaves;
they were indentured servants. After a period of service they were
freed. It was not possible to be born a slave in Portugal. The
children of indentured servants were free. This would be the case
throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. Also,
slavery was not racially based. The Africans kidnapped by the
Portugese were baptized, many were educated, and they all integrated
into the lower classes of Portugese society. Africans and Europeans
intermarried; to this day, most Portugese are of mixed blood."
The impact of the discovery of the "New World" in 1492
______________________________________________________
The discovery and consequent development of the "New World" would
change everything. It marked the beginning of a transatlantic trading
system. Spanish adventurers arrived in the Americas hoping to trade
for riches but soon enslaved the Native American peoples in their
search for gold and silver. Disease, malnutrition, and Spanish
atrocities led to the deaths of millions of the Indians of the
Americas. By the 1520s the depopulation of the region prompted the
Spanish government to look for alternative sources of labor. Officials
contracted with Portuguese merchants to deliver Africans to Spanish
territories in the New World. The first transatlantic slave voyages
from Africa to the Americas occurred in the early 1520s on Portuguese
vessels sailing from West Africa to the large Caribbean island of
Hispaniola, the earliest European name for present-day Haiti and the
Dominican Republic.
The rationale to enslave Africans
_________________________________
Racial slavery did not happen all at once. Slowly, the Portugese and
Spanish model of involuntary servitude in America became the province
of black Africans and slowly that involuntary servitude evolved into
full-scale slavery.. In order to maintain their "working populations",
Europeans and European-Americans had to invent a new concept: race
To do this, two things were done.
- They concentrated involuntary servitude on only black Africans and
invented the concept of race to explain this concentration,
effectively designating Africans as a "lesser" species
- They developed indentured servitude into full-out slavery by
re-defining the involuntary servitude of Africans as indefinite in
time, i.e. once enslaved, a slave would remain with that status until
death. They also created an entire slave class based on descent: the
children of slaves became slaves themselves.
You will find details of the whole rationale here
(http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/DIASPORA/RACIAL.HTM )
The perpetrators, and the development of the Slave trade
________________________________________________________
At first, the Spanish and Portugese simply raided the coast and
carried people off. But exploitation of mines and plantations in
America required an ever larger workforce. In the early sixteenth
century the Spaniards began to issue "licences" (from 1513) and
asientos or "contracts" (from 1528) under which the state monopoly on
the import of Blacks passed into private hands.
Here’s a quote from "The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa"
( http://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa )
"The great slaving companies were formed in the second half of the
seventeenth century, when the Americas, and other parts of the world
which the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and various papal edicts had
reserved to the Spaniards and Portuguese, were redistributed among the
nations of Europe. The whole of Europe - France, England, Holland,
Portugal and Spain, and even Denmark and Sweden shared in the spoils,
establishing a chain of monopoly companies, forts, trading posts and
colonies that stretched from Senegal to Mozambique. Only distant
Russia and the Balkan countries were missing from the pack - and they
received their own small contingents of slaves via the Ottoman Empire.
"
African societies were drawn into the slavery system hoping that, once
inside it, they would be able to derive maximum benefit for themselves
and gain power over neighbouring tribes. In Angola, Mozambique and
certain parts of Guinea, Europeans got directly involved in the
African warfare and trade networks with the help of local black
accomplices or half-castes who were the offspring of white
adventurers. Scrupulous accounts were kept of the slaving ships'
outgoing cargo. Rifles, gunpowder, brandy, cloth, glassware, and
ironmongery were traded for slaves.
Again, quoting from "The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa"
"Nzinga Mbemba, ruler of the Kongo Kingdom, is a good example. He had
converted to Christianity in 1491 and referred to the king of Portugal
as his brother. When he came to power in 1506, he protested strongly
at the fact that the Portuguese, his brother's subjects, felt entitled
to rob his possessions and carry off his people into slavery. It was
to no avail. The African monarch gradually allowed himself to be
convinced that the slave trade was both useful and necessary. Among
the goods offered in exchange for human beings, rifles took pride of
place. And only states equipped with rifles, i.e. participating in the
slave trade, were able to resist attacks from their neighbours and
pursue expansionist policies. "
You’ll find a full run down of African and European collaboration in
the article at "The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa"
( http://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa )
The "Middle Passage"
____________________
The transport of slaves across the Atlantic became to be called "The
Middle Passage.
Here’s a quote from "The African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage"
(http://www.bigchalk.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/wa/HWCDA/file?fileid=109691&flt=CAB
)
"On the first leg of their trip, slave traders delivered goods from
European ports to West African ones. On the "middle" leg, ship
captains such as John Newton (who later became a foe of slavery),
loaded their then-empty holds with slaves and transported them to the
Americas and the Caribbean. A typical Atlantic crossing took 60-90
days but some lasted up to four months Upon arrival, captains sold the
slaves and purchased raw materials to be brought back to Europe on the
last leg of the trip. Roughly 54,000 voyages were made by Europeans to
buy and sell slaves."
You'll get a full run down on "The Middle passage" and conditions on
the ships at "The Middle Passage"
( http://www.bigchalk.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/wa/HWCDA/file?fileid=109691&flt=CAB
)
The impact of the slave trade on Europe
_______________________________________
The effect of slavery on the domestic life of Spain and Portugal was
profound: by 1550 Lisbon had a population of 100,000 of whom 10,000
were slaves: similarly by the year 1565 Seville had a population of
85,000 of whom 6,000 were slaves.
Northern European Protestant countries rapidly became drawn into the
business of slavery. The English, with the founding of the Royal
African Company in 1672, soon began to reap the greatest profits from
trading in human beings. Sugar, tobacco, coffee and other tropical
products, which were the natural by-products of the trade, soon became
central features of English social life, and questions as to their
origins were seldom posed.
Huge profits were being made, and the slave ports of Liverpool,
Bristol and London grew at a startling rate. In 1713, England won an
exclusive 30-year contract with the Spanish to supply slaves to the
vast "new world" empire. A new English company was formed, the South
Sea Company, and English complicity with the slave trade became an
"official" fact of life, with high society figures on the board of the
new company.
To quote from Hugh Thomas’ book "The Slave Trade: The History of the
Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870"
"Most of the House of Commons (462 members) and 100 members of the
House of Lords (out of a total of 200) were included. So were
Alexander Pope, Sir John Vanbrugh, John Gay, and all the royal
family.... The speaker of the House of Commons, Black Rod in the House
of Lords, and the Lord Chancellor were all on the lists."
Towards the end of the 18th century, voices began to be raised against
the slave trade in Britain and, as the clamor for the abolition of the
slave trade grew in volume so, the voices of black people became
increasingly important.
Black people such as Ignatius Sancho, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, or Ottobah
Cugoano, men who were former slaves and who resided in England, took
the trouble to write down their stories and played an active and vital
role in helping to create the climate which led to the abolition.
And around this time an article by John Wesley was instrumental in
abolitionist thought, and led, not only to the abolition of slavery,
but to a change in the way Europeans saw Africa. You can read a
transcript of the original text here.
(http://docsouth.unc.edu/wesley/wesley.html ).
But abolition was a slow process.
To quote from "Transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce"
( http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy9601law.html )
"The legal abolition of the slave trade by the European and American
nations involved in it occurred over a period of over thirty years,
from the banning of the trade by Denmark, effective in 1803, to the
eventual acceptance of abolition by Portugal in 1836; the critical
step being the outlawing of the trade by Britain, the principal
slave-trading nation, in 1807. Legal abolition was, of course, by no
means the same as effective suppression, and the trade continued
illegally well into the nineteenth century, as long as there remained
a market for slaves in the Americas (principally in Brazil and Cuba).
The trans-Atlantic slave trade did not come to a total end, therefore,
until the 1860s. "
The impact of the slave trade on Africa
_______________________________________
In Africa, there was loss of labor, and widespread depopulation in
places, and while some states flourished on trade, the frequency of
wars to fuel trade in slaves proved destructive, contributed to the
retardation of African development
However the impact was not uniform: up to 1600 - Senegambia provided
1/3 of all slaves.
It has been calculated through computerised projections that the
population in Africa in the mid 19th century would have been double
what it was had the slave trade not happened - that means that if
there had been no slave trade the population of Africa in 1850 would
have been 50 million instead of 25 million.
Alongside the impact on the population, there was also an economic
impact. To quote from "The Impact of the Slave Trade"
( http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/migrations/four5b.html
)
"The most significant imports into Africa during the trans-Atlantic
trade were money, firearms, alcohol, iron goods, and textiles in
exchange for slaves. Money could take the form of cowrie shells, iron
bars, or European coins, and textiles themselves could be used as
currency. Those African merchants and kings who were already rich
tended to accumulate more of this wealth, but the presence of such
artefacts at all levels of society testify to the wide-reaching
influence of the slave trade. Although this exchange provided
short-term wealth and prosperity for powerful coastal kingdoms, in the
long run, reliance on European capital and other imports was
detrimental to the African economy. Selling Africans meant a shortage
of labour, and European imports tended to undercut African industry,
fostering reliance on foreign goods which was compromised after the
abolition of slavery. The export of labour for manufactured goods in
an early form of colonial exchange had the effect of reducing Africa
to the subject part of the economic system of Europe and the New
World. With the abolition of the slave trade, monies entering Africa,
especially cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, were significantly
reduced. This was disruptive to the established kingdoms who relied on
the slave trade for cash, as there was no export yet extensively
developed to match the lost value of slave shipments. However, the
social gain achieved by no longer exporting labour to the New World,
as well as the later development of exports such as palm oil, cocoa,
and groundnuts offset the loss of imported currency."
By the 19th century Africa was very different from the continent which
Europeans had encountered four hundred years earlier, Africa had been
drawn by the slave trade down a dangerous path, and it was now well
and truly underdeveloped. European discourse on Africa now centred on
the "backwardness" and "savagery" of the continent. Colonialism and
imperialism cloaked themselves in humanitarian garb and invoked
"racial superiority" and the "White Man's burden". The former
slave-trading states now spoke only of liberating Africa from "Arab"
slavers and the black potentates who were also engaged in slavery.
This was used as a rationale for European expansion into Africa, the
continent becoming carved up amongst the European "superpowers" and
leading the way to the many wars of Imperialism and nationalism that
bedevilled the continent through the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Hope this fits the bill
willie-ga
This site will allow simulations to be run on what the demographics of
Africa might be today if slavery never happened
The Atlantic Slave Trade: Demographic Simulation
http://www.migrationsim.neu.edu/
Hugh Thomas book, "The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave
Trade: 1440-1870"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684835657/qid=1035638182/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-1996717-0199941?v=glance
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