8.4: 8.4 Britain and the Slave Trade

The British were the most successful at imitating the Dutch. In 1667, King Charles II officially designated the royal treasury as the coordinating body of British state finances and made sure that officials trained in the Dutch style of political economy ran it. The British parliament grew increasingly savvy with financial issues as well, with numerous debates emerging about the best and most profitable use of state funds.

In 1651, in an effort to seize trade from the Dutch and to fend off Britain's traditional enemies, France and Spain, parliament passed the English Navigation Acts, which reserved commerce with English colonies to English ships. As a result, extensive piracy and conflict between the powers of Europe in their colonial territories emerged, as they tried to seize profitable lands and enforce their respective monopolies. The British fought and defeated the Dutch in three wars, and seized the Dutch port of New Amsterdam in North America (which the English promptly renamed New York). Britain also fought Spain, ultimately acquiring Jamaica and Florida as colonies.

Due to its suitability for growing sugar, the major prize was the Caribbean. Sugar quickly became the colonial product, hugely valuable in Europe, and relatively easy to cultivate (compared to exotic products like spices, which were only available from Asian sources). In Europe, sugar consumption doubled every 25 years. It was the profits of sugar that helped bankroll the British growth in power in the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries. Growing sugar efficiently required proto-industrialized plantations with rendering facilities built to extract the raw sugar from sugar cane. That, in turn, required an enormous amount of back-breaking, dangerous labor. Most Native American slaves quickly died off or escaped. Hence, in the early 17th Century, the Atlantic Slave Trade between Africa and the New World began in earnest.

The Slave Trade between Africa and the New World ripped millions of people from their homeland, transporting them to a foreign continent in atrocious conditions where many were either worked to death or murdered by their owners in the name of "discipline.” The immense majority of slaves were sent to the Caribbean or Brazil, both areas in which working conditions were far worse than the (still abysmal) working conditions present in North America. The average life of a slave once introduced to sugar cultivation was seven years before he or she died from exhaustion or injury.

The slave trade was part of what historians have described as the “triangle trade” between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Slaves from Africa were shipped to the New World to work on plantations. Raw goods (e.g. sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, etc.). were processed and shipped to Europe. Then, finished and manufactured goods were shipped to Africa to exchange for slaves. This cycle of exchange grew decade-by-decade over the course of two centuries.

Figure 8.4.1: The “triangle trade” led to tremendous profits in Europe, horrendous human suffering, and the eventual depopulation of much of West Africa over the centuries.

The Middle Passage connected Africa and the Americas, and mostly involved Brazil or the Caribbean. Slaves on board ships were packed in so tightly they could not move for most of the voyage. Historians estimate that over a million slaves died during the Middle Passage.

Figure 11.4.2: Illustration of a slave ship’s human cargo under conditions that often saw more than 10% of the slaves on board perish.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database suggests that well over twelve million people were enslaved and transported to the new world from the 16th to early 19th Centuries. That number is lower than the actual total since roughly 20% of transported slaves were undocumented (i.e. smuggled and technically "illegal" from the standpoint of the slave-trading states) voyages. Thus, the real number is probably closer to fifteen million. In turn, over 90% of slaves were sent to the Caribbean or Brazil, because the sugar crop, as well as coffee cultivation and mining in Brazil, demanded constant replacements as slaves perished from exhaustion or injury.

Slavery was a huge economic engine and a major part of life in the entire New World. It shaped the demography and the culture of every American society. Unlike other episodes of European slavery, the Atlantic Slave Trade was specifically racial in character. Because it was Africans who were enslaved to work in the Americas under the control of Europeans, Europeans developed a range of racist theories to excuse the practice. In fact, the whole idea of a human "race" is largely derived from the Slave Trade.