Sept 4 The Atlantic Slave Trade
I. Atlantic history
units of analysis
"the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer
of Europeans onto American shores. Instead of a European
discovery
of a new world, we might better consider it as a sudden and harsh
encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated
them
into a single New World. Our focus is upon the creation of new
human geographies resulting from this interaction, and that means
those
developing not only westward upon the body of America but eastward upon
the body of Europe, and inward upon and laterally along the body of
Africa.
For it is certain that the geography of each was changed: radically on
the American side. . . more subtly on the European side, with new
movements of people, goods, capital, and information flowing through an
established spatial system and slowly altering its proportions and
directions;
slowly and unevenly on the African side, making connections with
existing
commercial systems but eventually grotesquely altering the scale and
meaning
of old institutions" (Meinig, Atlantic America (1986), 4, 65).
migration spectrum: voluntary > involuntary
II. Precedents
“Europeans simply tapped this existing market, and Africans responded to the increased demand over the centuries by providing more slaves. . . . The Atlantic slave trade was the outgrowth of this internal slavery” [Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 73-74 ]
"the European demand for slaves effectively transformed what had been a local commercial practice into the greatest forced migration in human history" [Pagden, Peoples and Empires ]
the New World plantation complex: an economic model designed to produce exports for European consumption and dependent on African slaves for labor
III. Overview
1440-1867 12,000,000 slaves survived shipment to Atlantic ports
mortality rate: 10-20%
Migration to British America [source: Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 41]
| |
Britons |
Africans |
| 1600-1800 |
1,042,100 |
2,333,150 |
David Eltis, et al, The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade,
1527-1867: A Database on CD Rom
IV. Enter the British
A. early involvement
John Hawkins (1562)
Luso-Dutch rivalry
the sugar revolution
Barbados
Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa (1663)
Royal African Company (1672)
The Zong
B. phases
1650-1683
1708-1725 (asiento)
“No African Trade, no Negroes, no Negroes, no sugar; no Sugar, no Islands, no Islands, no Continent, no Continent, no Trade; that is to say farewell to your American Trade, your West Indian Trade.” –Daniel Defoe, 1713
1746-1771
height: 1763-1793
1562-1807 3.4 million slaves
C. geography
London, Bristol, Liverpool [map -- see west coast]
regional sources of slaves [notes especially the Bight of Biafra]
[source: Oxford History of the British Empire]
