Download Quick Lists Atlantic Slave Trade Middle Passage Triangular Trade

Reasons for the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
 Several factors increased the demand for African slaves.
 One was the labor-intensive nature of planting, harvesting, and refining
sugar.
 As sugar cultivation became more important to European colonial
economies, the need for labor became more urgent.
 In 1490, the Portuguese began using slaves on the sugar plantations of São
Tomé, an island off the West African coast.
 During the 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Brazil and the
Caribbean became major centers of sugar production, and the desire for
slave labor there became more intense.
 Also during the early 1500s, it became clear to the Spanish and Portuguese
that, in the New World, Native Americans were not well suited as slaves.
 In addition, the Catholic Church had managed by 1542 to abolish the
Encomienda system that had allowed the Spanish to place Native Americans
in servitude.
 If the Spanish and Portuguese wanted a source of slave labor – not just for
sugar cultivation, but also mining, agricultural work of all kinds, and menial
labor in general – they had to turn elsewhere.
 Africa seemed to them to be the ideal source.
The Growing Scope of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
 A small trickle of slaves had already been brought from Portugal and Europe
to the Americas during the late 1400s.
 It was in 1518, however, that the Portuguese brought the first recorded
shipment of slaves directly from Africa to the New World.
 If almost 1,000 slaves per year had been taken from Africa to Europe during
the last half of the 1400s, the number of slaves taken from Africa – now to
the Americas – more than doubled during the 1500s, to more than 2,000 per
year.
 At least 275,000 slaves were brought to the New World over the course of the
century.
 The slave trade mushroomed in scale during the 1600s and 1700s.
 First, the Spanish and Portuguese appetite for slaves increased dramatically.
 Roughly 37 percent of all slaves ever brought to the New World went to
Brazil, while 15 percent to Spanish America.
 Second, as other European nations founded colonies in the Caribbean and
North America, they wanted slaves as well.
 The non-Spanish Caribbean was the destination for fully 41 percent of all
slaves taken from Africa.
 The southern colonies of British North America, where slaves were used to
grow crops such as cotton and tobacco, became home to approximately 5
percent.
 More than a million slaves were transported from Africa during the 1600s.
 At least 6 million were shipped during the 1700s, the Atlantic slave trade’s
peak century.

All told, perhaps 12 million Africans were enslaved from the late 1400s
through the late 1800s.
The Middle Passage:
 The conditions under which slaves were captured and shipped to the
Americas were notoriously appalling.
 Many slaves were captives or prisoners of war, herded like animals to the
coast and sold to European slavers by other Africans.
 Most slaves were separated from their families; many were mixed in with
members of other tribes, who spoke different languages and followed
different customs.
 At ports on the West African shoreline, slaves were loaded onto ships to
make the infamous “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic.
 The more slaves a ship could carry, the greater its profits, so slaves were
packed into boats as tightly as possible.
 Typically chained, lying on their backs, surrounded by hundreds of other
bodies, all in darkness, slaves endured a nightmarish sea journey for weeks.
 Upon arrival in the New World, they would be taken to slave markets and
sold to their new masters.
 During the early years of the slave trade, up to 25 percent of slaves perished
during the Middle Passage.
 By the 1700s, slavers had become more efficient at keeping slaves alive
during the journey (not for humane reasons, but to cut down on the financial
loss that every dead slave represented).
 During the 1700s and 1800s, the average death rate had been reduced to 10
percent or under.
Atlantic Slavery, the Triangular Trade, and the World Economy:
 By the 1700s, African slavery had become a crucial element in European
economic life and global trade.
 Not until the early 1800s, not a single major nation made slavery of the trade
in slaves illegal.
 Slave trade was an integral part of exchange known as triangular trade.
 Although European home countries also traded directly with their New
World colonies, exchanging colonial raw materials for European
manufactured goods, triangular trade was most common during the 1600s
and 1700s.
 Typically, European manufactured goods (metalware, cotton textiles,
processed alcohol such as gin and rum, firearms) would be brought to Africa
and exchanged for gold, ivory, timber, and slaves.
 While the gold, ivory, and timber would eventually be brought back to
Europe, the slaves were taken to the Americas and sold for hard cash or
traded for goods.
 The Middle Passage was, therefore, the second leg of the triangular trade. In
the Americas, slaves would be traded for raw materials, such as furs,
tobacco, raw cotton, sugar products, and silver.
 The raw materials would be brought back to Europe.
A Far Cry from Africa (1962)
Derek Walcott
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?