Atlantic Slave Trade

• Slavery is an emotive issue, but it has been a constant throughout history and practiced by many civilizations and societies.
• The effects of slavery reach to the present day, particularly in the distribution of peoples and its relevance to modern debates over racism.
• History is the account we give today of the past and relates to present concerns.

Atlantic Slave Trade

• The Atlantic slave trade was significant for the composition and culture of the modern population of the USA, the West Indies, parts of Latin America, and Africa.
• It was important to the economics of the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and crucial to power and social dynamics.
• The slave trade provides a way to consider Western imperialism, power, culture, and civilization.
• It is particularly significant for Britain and the USA.
• About 11 million slaves were embarked from Africa to the Americas, with around 10.7 million arriving due to deaths during the passage.
• The African slave trade and slavery added a dimension of coercion on a great scale and a new economic and racial geography to Europe's conduct in the Americas.
• Slavery cannot be divorced from the geopolitics of the New World and the Atlantic.
• The prominent role of slavery in divisions within the USA from the 1820s cemented a sense of separate Southern identity and gave it an expansionist dynamic.
• The concentration on the Atlantic slave trade can lead to neglect of other such trades.

Definitions of Slavery

• Varied definitions of slavery are significant for the account of the slave trade.
• The International Convention with the Object of Securing the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade defined slavery as "the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised."
• The definition of slavery emerged after debate and political bargaining designed to protect vested interests and cultural practices.
• The definition excluded forced labor and concubinage, both of which involved many people in conditions of slavery.
• In 2000, the International Association Against Slavery decided to include debt bondage, forced work, forced prostitution, and forced marriage in the scope of slavery.
• Many who are not formally seen as slaves have had little or no choice about work and its character and context, not least in terms of subservience and remuneration.
• During the nineteenth century, comparisons were drawn between black slaves in the American South and the white workers in many Northern company towns.
• Free laborers generally did not have to face the threats of physical abuse and of separation from family that slaves frequently confronted.
• Slavery can be compared to the serfdom seen in medieval Europe and also with many East European peasants in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
• The compulsory movement for work seen with slaves distinguishes it from serfdom.
• However, those who were not slaves included many people subject to such movement - for example, transported convicts, others sent to colonies or into internal exile against their will.
• People smuggling is not the same as trafficking because the latter creates a dependency on the part of those trafficked, who have to work, and usually in onerous conditions.
• Complex issues of definition and the problems of judgment that thereby follow, are not only pertinent for the Western world, but also arise for non-Western societies.

Types of Slavery

• There are societies with slaves, in which slavery, while sanctioned by society, was largely a domestic institution providing labor in the household.
• There are slave societies, in which slavery was the mode of production on which the dominant group depended for its position.
• Slavery at the disposal of the state and slavery within a private enterprise system are both types of slave societies.
• Individual slaves could move from one type to the other.
• In the Roman world, the state created slaves from defeated peoples, both noncombatants and serving troops, who could then be moved into the domestic sphere of usage within the empire.
• State slaves of various types were important in many pre-modern countries.
• In some cases, state slaves were key elements in the governmental system - most obviously with the janissary units in the Ottoman (Turkish) army.
• Slaves were also important in the Ottoman navy.
• The galleys of Mediterranean navies depended on slaves, and they were frequently shackled to the oars.
• Slave soldiers were important in other Islamic societies, for example, Morocco, Persia (Iran), the sultanate of Delhi in northern India, Achin in Sumatra, and the Islamic states of sub-Saharan Africa and Spain.

State/Public Slavery and Liberty

• The concept of state or public slavery can be expanded to consider entire populations.
• Certain modern governments deny so many freedoms to the people, including that of movement, that their entire population can be regarded as slaves.
• European political rhetoric in the early modern period employed the juxtaposition of liberty and slavery, typecasting the subjects of political systems judged unacceptable as slaves.
• When the British joined commercial expansion with the liberty promoted by their government in their understanding of the character of their empire, they were not thinking of the slaves they themselves transported and controlled.
• Radicals who criticized their own system of government, or even just its position and policies, also repeatedly made reference to slavery.
• A characteristic of Western slavery was that it was not a description of the system of government and certainly not within Europe, but, instead, predominantly part of the commercial economy.
• Western slavery was overwhelmingly practiced in colonies outside Europe, and particularly by the early nineteenth century.
• Slavery in the Western world was a system of servitude driven essentially by free enterprise; it was a response to economic need and a product of the competitive search for economic opportunity and profit.

Slavery and Racism

• The Western world, Europeans, their colonies, and their former colonies, were far from alone in the slave trade.
• It is necessary to qualify the commonplace identification of slavery with racism, as there was no necessary or inevitable relationship between them.
• In practice, the origins and early history of both slavery and the slave trade are unclear, and the "pre-history" of slavery is best approached from the perspective of anthropology.
• Slavery probably proved a means to structure society and to treat outsiders.
• Origin myths suggest such a pattern. Both such structuring and such treatment involved control: control as goal and control as means.
• Racism was a key element in slavery, which became a response to the "other"-in short, to different people.
• Control over people served to forward a variety of purposes, including household service, sex, and other forms of work.
• The development of large-scale agricultural systems and of mining for minerals greatly increased labor needs, and slavery was a central element of the Ancient world where it also provided household service.
• Egypt obtained slaves from both warfare and trade and this was notably so in obtaining slaves from the south in modern Sudan.
• It is nècessary to appreciate that the attempts to create at a global scale separate categories and rights for prisoners of war and for civilians are essentially modern.
• Aristotle criticized the practice of Greeks enslaving conquered Greeks.
• Aristotle's support, as natural, for the enslavement of "barbarians" and those with a limited rational faculty was to be influential among Christian jurists and comunentators, and up until the nineteenth century.
• The scale of the slave trade was considerable, reflecting the large-scale demand for labor and the plentiful opportunities from war.
• Roman general Scipio Africanus turned the working men of the city of New Carthage into slaves.
• Another Roman general, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, reportedly sold 150,000 people from the region of Epirus into slavery, while Julius Caesar claimed to have sold tens of thousands of conquered Transalpine Celts into slavery.
• The numbers of slaves passing through the great slave marts was formidable.
• Delos in the Aegean Sea was made a free port and 10,000 slaves could be sold in a single day.
• Alexander the Great enslaved those in the city of Tyre who were not killed.
• The Phoenicians acquired slaves from across the Mediterranean, notably North Africa and Spain.
• Slave trade was a source for about 20 percent of the population in Rome were slaves.
• Roman trade required cooperation with African nations
• By the New World in the 19th century, the slave trade was increasingly maintained by reproduction among the population.
• Slavery was frequent in Post-Roman Medieval Europe.
• Many slaves were obtained by raiding peoples of a similar racial background.

Slavery in England

• Slavery in England declined because of a reduction in availability of ensavable people after the royal house of Wessex established control.
• Slavery in England was linked to changing patterns of land use, particularly an increase in rented land, as well as to the influence of Christianity.
• The number of slaves in England probably declined from the early tenth century.
• Church institutions had long had slaves but this became much less common with the Church reform movement of the eleventh century.
• Serfdom, instead, was the key form of labor control in England by the twelfth century, which is a reminder of the extent to which slavery was an alternative among a number of forms of labor direction.
• Western slavery also reflected particular sociocultural assumptions and practices.
• Enslavement was frequently the response to the "other": to other peoples (irrespective of their skin color), and other creatures.
• The island of Ischia off Naples was devastated by Algerian raiders when it refused to provide tribute in the shape of slaves and money.
• The Portuguese were the first of the Western Europeans trading slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
• Nevertheless, in many respects they had less of an impact than Moroccan expansionism.

The Range of African Slave Trades

• The search for slaves was not restricted to Europeans.
• The slave trade from Africa, both across the Sahara Desert and by sea, and across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, was more longstanding than the European trade in the Atlantic world.
• The slave trade across the Sahara was different from that across the Atlantic for a number of reasons, including the role of Islam in the former.
• In Jamaica in the late eighteenth century, buyers preferred young women and children as much, in part because they were easier to control, and in part because of higher taxes on those over 25.
• East Africa was a major source of slaves.
• By the Mughal conquerors in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and the Manchus in the seventeenth acquired slaves by warfare in the areas they conquered.
• The Atlantic slave trade was more necessary by the extent to which labor that could be enslaved or controlled was not obtained in the Americas by Western Europeans in sufficient quantities by conquest, but was bought in Africa and brought from there.
• Labor was a key economic requirement in a world that by modern standards was underpopulated.
• Coterminous with the establishment of Western slavery in the New World and throwing light on it, rural society in Eastern Europe was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries towards a "second serfdom," with heavy labor services provided by the peasantry.

Origins of Western Expansion into Africa

• The historical tradition of slavery that was to be directly relevant to the initial development of the Atlantic slave trade was that in Portugal and Spain.
• The city of Ceuta in Morocco fell to the Portuguese in 1415.
• The expansionism against the Moors was to provide a context within which the opportunities were grasped by the Portuguese and Spaniards for enslavement from sub-Saharan Africa.
• Some of the slaves were Muslims, for Islam had spread south of the Sahara, notably into Senegambia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Portugal led the way in acquiring African slaves in West Africa in the 1440s, but Castile, the foremost Spanish kingdom, followed from 1453, until, in 1479, by the Treaty of Alcáçovas, Castile surrendered claims to trading rights in Guinea and the Gold Coast in West Africa to Portugal. A major source for slaves had been established. The expansion of Europe's Atlantic world to include the Americas was to add unprecedented demand for slaves.