Chapter 14: Section 2

The second part of this chapter mainly deals with the Atlantic slave trade.  Between 1500 and 1866, the trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them into the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves, with the other 1.8 million dying on the trip.  Beyond the individual tragedies that it spawned, the Atlantic slave trade transformed all of its participants.  Within Africa itself, the slave trade thoroughly disrupted several societies, strengthened others, and corrupted many, as elites often enriched themselves while the slaves were victimized almost beyond imagination.

In the Americas, meanwhile, the slave trade added a substantial African presence to the mix of European and Native American peoples, which also introduced into these new societies issues of race which still endure to this day, as well as adding elements of African culture into the making of American cultures.  Certainly the profits from the slave trade and force labor of African slaves enriched European and Euro-American societies, even as the practice contributed much to the racial stereotypes of European peoples.

However, this was only the most recent large-scale expression of what was a very widespread human practice, as slavery had been present in the world as far back as the early hunting-gathering societies, but was especially prevalent in civilizations where it was generally accepted as an enterprise and closely linked to war.  That being said, the slavery that emerged in the Americas was distinctive in several ways.  The most obvious distinct quality was simply the scale of slave trafficking and the central role it played to the economy of the Americas.  In addition, this New World slavery was based on plantation agriculture, treating slaves as a form of dehumanized property lacking any rights in the society of their owners, with slave status being inherited across generations.  Most significantly, Atlantic slavery came to be associated wholly with Africa and with "blackness."

The origins of Atlantic slavery largely came about due to the Europeans' introduction to sugar in the Mediterranean, where they first set up plantations.  Initially, they used Slavic-speaking peoples from the Black Sea to work on these plantations, which is where the term "slave" comes from.  However, when the Ottoman Turks seized Constantinople, this source of labor was cut off, at the same time that Portuguese mariners came across an alternative source of slaves in West Africa, which established links to this supply source.  Therefore, when the native peoples of the Americas were decimated by disease, Africans became the primary source of slave labor in the plantations largely through a process of elimination.

Within Africa itself, African rulers generally controlled the trade through negotiations and agreements with Europeans not unlike other forms of international trade at the time.  For the slaves themselves, it was anything but a commercial interaction, and some decided to commit suicide by jumping off the ships and drowning in the ocean rather than make the painful journey to the New World.  The vast majority of them ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean, where the labor demands were most intense.