Chapter 18

Songhai

A people, language, kingdom, and empire in western Sudan in West Africa. At its height in the sixteenth century, the Muslim Songhai Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the land of the Hausa and was a major player in the trans-Saharan trade

Bornu

A powerful West African kingdom at the southern edge of the Sahara in the Central Sudan, which was important in transSaharan trade and in the spread of Islam. Also known as Kanem-Bornu, it endured from the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth.

Bight of Bafara

In the eighteenth century the slave trade expanded eastward to the Bight (bite) of Biafra. In contrast to the Gold and Slave Coasts, where strong kingdoms predominated, the densely populated interior of the Bight of Biafra contained no large states. Even so, powerful merchant princes of the coastal ports made European traders give them rich presents.

Ottoman conquest

In the sixteenth century the new Islamic Ottoman Empire annexed all of North Africa except Morocco, while Ethiopia lost extensive territory to other Muslim conquerors

Tobacco

Tobacco, a New World leaf long used by Amerindians for recreation and medicine, was finding a new market among seventeenth-century Europeans. Despite the opposition of individuals like King James I of England, who condemned tobacco smoke as "dangerous to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs," the habit spread. By 1614 seven thousand shops in and around London sold tobacco

Who were slaves?

Unlike in the Americas, the majority of African slaves in the Islamic world were women who served wealthy households as concubines, servants, and entertainers. The trans-Saharan slave trade also included a much higher proportion of children than the Atlantic trade.

Oyo

regional power

Driver

A privileged male slave whose job was to ensure that a slave gang did its work on a plantation.

Maroons

A slave who ran away from his or her master. Often a member of a community of runaway slaves in the West Indies and South America.

Royal African Company

A trading company chartered by the English government in 1672 to conduct its merchants' trade on the Atlantic coast of Africa

Mercantilism

European government policies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and its colonies and accumulate precious metals by requiring colonies to trade only with their motherland country. The British system was defined by the Navigation Acts, the French system by laws known as the Exclusif.

Free blacks

There were almost as many free blacks as free whites.

Petit Blancs

Most served as colonial officials, retail merchants, or small-scale agriculturalists. Most members of both groups owned slaves

Cape Colony

Most the Cape Colony's 25,750 slaves in 1793 were from Madagascar, South Asia, and the East Indies, not Africa.

Exclusif

The French called their mercantilist legislation, codified in 1698, the Exclusif, highlighting its exclusionary intentions.

Importing of slaves

The expansion of sugar plantations in the West Indies required a sharp increase in the volume of the slave trade from Africa (see Figure 18.1). During the first half of the seventeenth century about ten thousand slaves a year had arrived from Africa. Most were destined for Brazil and the mainland Spanish colonies. In the second half of the century the trade averaged twenty thousand slaves, and more than half landed in the English, French, and Dutch West Indies. A century later, as sugar production increased and the Spanish colony of Cuba became a major importer of slaves, the volume of the Atlantic slave trade tripled.

Angola

The local context of the Atlantic trade was different south of the Congo estuary at Angola, the greatest source of slaves for the Atlantic trade. This was also the one place along the Atlantic coast where a single European nation, Portugal, controlled a significant amount of territory.

Dutch West India Company

Trading company chartered by the Dutch government to conduct its merchants' trade in the Americas and Africa.

Sundays

While slaves usually did not work in the fields on Sunday, they could not rest, but had to use this time to farm their own provisioning grounds to supplement meager rations, maintain their dwellings, and do other chores, such as washing and mending their rough clothes

Manumission

A grant of legal freedom to an individual slave.

Grass gang

A "grass gang," composed of children under the supervision of an elderly slave, was responsible for weeding and other simple work, such as collecting grass for the animals.

Great gang

A "great gang," made up of the strongest slaves in the prime of life, did the heaviest work, such as breaking up the soil at the beginning of the planting season.

Labor on plantations

A "great gang," made up of the strongest slaves in the prime of life, did the heaviest work, such as breaking up the soil at the beginning of the planting season. A second gang of youths, elders, and less fit slaves did somewhat lighter work. A "grass gang," composed of children under the supervision of an elderly slave, was responsible for weeding and other simple work, such as collecting grass for the animals. Women often formed the majority of the field laborers, even in the great gang. Nursing mothers took their babies with them to the fields. Slaves too old for field labor tended the toddlers

High-demand goods

Although African preferences for merchandise varied, textiles, hardware, and guns were in high demand

Hausa

An agricultural and trading people of central Sudan in West Africa. Aside from their brief incorporation into the Songhai Empire, the Hausa city-states remained autonomous until the Sokoto Caliphate conquered them in the early nineteenth century

Seasoning

An often difficult period of adjustment to new climates, disease environments, and work routines, such as that experienced by slaves newly arrived in the Americas.

Life expectancy

As a result of these conditions, along with disease and accidents from dangerous mill equipment, deaths heavily outnumbered births on West Indian plantations. Life expectancy for slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil was only 23 years of age for males and 25.5 years for females. The figures were probably similar for the eighteenth-century Caribbean. A callous opinion, common among slave owners in the Caribbean and in parts of Brazil, held that it was cheaper to import a youthful new slave from Africa than to raise one to the same age on a plantation

Profits of trade

Banks were crucial to this process. By the early seventeenth century Dutch banks had developed such a reputation for security that individuals and governments from all over western Europe entrusted them with large sums of money. To make a profit, Dutch and other European banks invested these funds in real estate, industries, loans to governments, and overseas trade.

African culture in new world

Because European planters believed that slaves with the strongest African heritage led rebellions, they tried to curtail African cultural traditions. They required slaves to learn the colonial language and discouraged the use of African languages by deliberately mixing slaves from different parts of Africa. In French and Portuguese colonies, slaves were encouraged to adopt Catholic religious practices, though African deities, beliefs, and practices survived, serving as the foundation for modern African-derived religions like candomblé. In the British West Indies, where only Quaker slave owners encouraged Christianity among their slaves before 1800, African herbal medicine remained strong, as did African beliefs concerning nature spirits and witchcraft.

Numbers of slaves traded with Islamic world

Between 1600 and 1800 slave traders sent about 850,000 slaves to Muslim North Africa

Absentee planters

Between 1730 and 1775 seventy absentee planters secured election to the British Parliament, where they formed an influential voting bloc.

Indentured Servants vs. Slaves

Cash-short tobacco planters in the seventeenth century preferred indentured Europeans to African slaves because they cost half as much. Poor European men and women were willing to work for little in order to get to the Americas, where they could acquire their own land cheaply at the end of their term of service. However, as the cultivation of sugar spread after 1750, speculators drove land prices in the West Indies so high that former indentured servants could no longer afford to buy land. As a result, poor Europeans chose to indenture themselves in Britain's North American colonies, where cheap land was still available. Rather than raise wages to attract European laborers, Caribbean sugar planters switched to slaves

African relationship with Islamic world

During the three and a half centuries of contact up to 1800, Africans ceded very little territory to Europeans. Local African rulers kept close tabs on the European trading posts they permitted along the Gold and Slave Coasts and collected lucrative rents and fees. Aside from some uninhabited islands off the Atlantic coast, Europeans established colonial beachheads in only two places, the Portuguese colony of Angola and the Dutch East India Company's Cape Colony at the southern tip of the continent. The Dutch colony was tied to Indian Ocean trade, not to the Atlantic trade, and, unlike Angola, did not export slaves. Most the Cape Colony's 25,750 slaves in 1793 were from Madagascar, South Asia, and the East Indies, not Africa.

Chartered companies

Groups of private investors who paid an annual fee to France and England in exchange for a monopoly over trade to the West Indies colonies.

Who became slaves?

How did African kings and merchants obtain slaves for sale? Bosman dismissed misconceptions prevailing in Europe in his day. "Not a few in our country," he wrote to a friend in 1700, "fondly imagine that parents here sell their children, men their wives, and one brother the other. But those who think so, do deceive themselves; for this never happens on any other account but that of necessity, or some great crime; but most of the slaves that are offered to us are prisoners of war, which are sold by the victors as their booty."1 His statement confirms other accounts claiming that prisoners of war were the most common source of slaves, but it is harder to prove that capturing slaves for export was a main cause of wars. "Here and there," conclude two respected

Dahomey

In 1727, Dahomey (dah-HOH-mee), strengthened militarily by firearms acquired in the slave trade, annexed Whydah.

Non-native plants and animals

In addition to soil exhaustion and deforestation, the introduction of nonnative animals and cultivated plants transformed the Caribbean region. The Spanish brought cattle, pigs, and horses, which multiplied rapidly. They also introduced new plants. Bananas and plantains from the Canary Islands were a valuable addition to the food supply, and sugar and rice formed the basis of plantation agriculture, along with native tobacco. Other food crops arrived with the slaves from Africa, including okra, black-eyed peas, yams, grains such as millet and sorghum, and mangoes. Many of these new animals and plants were useful additions to the islands, but they crowded out indigenous species. New World foods also found their way to Africa

Plantocracy

In the West Indian colonies, the rich men who owned most of the slaves and most of the land, especially in the eighteenth century.

Angolan Slave Trade

Many of the slaves sold at these markets were prisoners of war captured by expanding African states. By the late eighteenth century prisoners captured in wars fought as far away as 600 to 800 miles (1,000 to 1,300 kilometers) were carried to the ports for transportation. Many were victims of wars of expansion fought by the giant federation of Lunda kingdoms. As elsewhere in Africa, prisoners sold as slaves seem to have been a byproduct of African wars, rather than the objective of the warring parties.

Environmental effects

Sugar agriculture had a mixed environmental record. Some practices were not destructive. Planters powered their mills by water, wind, or animals and fueled their boilers by burning crushed cane. They fertilized their fields using manure from their cattle. Yet high profits led planters to exploit nature ruthlessly in other ways. Repeated cultivation of a single crop removes more nutrients from the soil than animal fertilizer and fallow periods can restore. In addition to soil exhaustion and deforestation, the introduction of nonnative animals and cultivated plants transformed the Caribbean region. The Spanish brought cattle, pigs, and horses, which multiplied rapidly. They also introduced new plants

Method of sugar production

Sugar production had both an agricultural and an industrial character. On both small farms and large plantations, growing and harvesting sugar cane required only simple tools like spades, hoes, and machetes. Once the cane was cut, however, a more complex and expensive process was needed to produce sugar. Slaves rushed the cane to mills, where it was crushed and the juice extracted. Lead-lined wooden troughs carried cane juice to a series of large copper kettles where excess water was boiled off, leaving thick syrup. Placed in conical clay molds, the syrup turned to crystallized sugar as it dried. The small refiners used crushing mills driven by animals or even laborers, while the large plantations used larger and more efficient mills that relied on wind or water power. These economies of scale meant that over time large producers had lower costs and greater profits.

Gold Coast

The Gold Coast was a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa from 1867 to its independence as the nation of Ghana in 1957.

Change in sugar trade

The Portuguese first developed sugar plantations that relied on African slaves on islands along the African coast. They later introduced this complex in Brazil (see Chapter 17). By 1600 Brazil was the Atlantic world's greatest sugar producer. The Dutch were early participants in the Brazilian sugar business as investors, merchants, and processors. Dutch independence from Spain early in the seventeenth century threatened this profitable commerce because the Spanish crown ruled Portugal and Brazil. As part of its struggle with Spain, the Dutch government chartered the Dutch West India Company in 1621. This powerful private trading company captured a Spanish treasure fleet in 1628 and used some of the windfall to finance an assault on Brazil's valuable sugar-producing areas. By 1635 the Dutch company controlled much of Brazil's sugar region. Over the next fifteen years the Dutch improved the efficiency of the Brazilian sugar industry and also profited from supplying African slaves and European goods.

Slave Coast

The Slave Coast is a historical name formerly used for parts of coastal West Africa along the Bight of Benin. The name is derived from the fact that it was a major source of African slaves during the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th century to the 19th century.

Capitalism

The economic system of large financial institutions—banks, stock exchanges, investment companies—that first developed in early modern Europe. Commercial capitalism, the trading system of the early modern economy, is often distinguished from industrial capitalism, the system based on machine production.

Atlantic slave trade

The flow of sugar to Europe depended on the flow of slaves from Africa (see Map 18.2). The rising volume of the Middle Passage is one measure of the expansion of the Atlantic system. During the 150 years following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the slave trade brought some 800,000 Africans across the Atlantic. Volume rose to nearly 7.5 million slaves during the boom in sugar production between 1650 and 1800. The West Indies, including Cuba, imported nearly 50 percent of this total, while Brazil received nearly a third and North America another 5 percent. The rest went to Spain's mainland colonies

Barbados

The infusion of Dutch expertise and money revived the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but the English colony of Barbados best illustrates the dramatic transformation that sugar brought to the seventeenth-century Caribbean. In 1640 Barbados's economy depended largely on tobacco, mostly grown by European settlers, both free and indentured. By the 1680s sugar had become the principal crop and enslaved Africans were three times as numerous as Europeans. Exporting up to 15,000 tons of sugar a year, Barbados had become the wealthiest and most populous of England's American colonies. By 1700 Barbados and other West Indian colonies had collectively surpassed Brazil as the world's principal source of sugar.

Atlantic circuit

The network of trade routes connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas that underlay the Atlantic system.

Atlantic System

The network of trading links after 1500 that moved goods, wealth, people, and cultures around the Atlantic Basin.

Similarities/Differences Islamic & Atlantic slave trade

The new Atlantic trading system had great importance in world history. In the first phase of their expansion Europeans conquered and colonized the Americas and captured major Indian Ocean trade routes. The development of the Atlantic system showed their ability to move beyond capturing the benefits of existing systems to create a major new trading network. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, and French created new colonies in the Caribbean to compete with earlier colonies created by the Spanish and Portuguese

Middle passage

The part of the Atlantic Circuit involving the transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

Economic impact

The slave trade had a mixed impact on sub-Saharan economies. Africans were very particular about what they received in exchange for slaves, and their imports reflected their tastes and needs. The limited volume of manufactured imports could not overwhelm established African weavers, metalworkers, and other producers, and some imported products like textiles and metal bars stimulated the local production of tools and clothing. However, while African as well as European states benefited by taxing this trade, most of the economic benefits went to European nations and to their American colonies.

Life for slaves

Time for family life was also inadequate. Although the large proportion of young adults in plantation colonies ought to have led to a high rate of natural increase, despite the sex imbalance that resulted from the slave trade, the opposite occurred. Poor nutrition and overwork lowered fertility. The continuation of heavy fieldwork made it difficult for a pregnant woman to carry a child to term or a mother to ensure an infant's survival.

Sugar plantations

To make the operation more efficient and profitable, investors sought to utilize the costly crushing and refining machinery intensively. As a result, West Indian plantations expanded from an average of around 100 acres (40 hectares) in the seventeenth century to at least twice that size in the eighteenth century. Some plantations were even larger. In 1774 Jamaica's 680 sugar plantations averaged 441 acres (178 hectares), with the largest over 2,000 acres (800 hectares). Jamaica specialized so heavily in sugar production that the island had to import most of its food. Saint Domingue had a comparable number of plantations of smaller average size but generally higher productivity. The French colony was also more diverse in its economy. Although sugar production was paramount, some planters raised provisions for local consumption and crops such as coffee and cacao for export.

Treatment on the middle passage

While the volume and duration of the slave trade indicate that it was profitable, the relative value of European goods and African slaves as well as slave prices in American ports determined the profit of individual voyages. Slave traders also had to deliver as many healthy slaves as possible for sale in the plantation colonies, but the terrible conditions on slave ships and a long and treacherous voyage lasting from six to ten weeks led to high mortalities. Some ships arrived with all of their slaves alive, but large, even catastrophic, losses of life were common . On average, however, slave traders succeeded in lowering mortality during the Middle Passage from about 23 percent on voyages before 1700 to half that in the last half of the eighteenth century.

Competition of European chartered companies

With Dutch competition in the Atlantic reduced, the French and English limited the privileges of their chartered companies. Such new mercantilist policies fostered competition among a nation's own citizens, while using high tariffs and restrictions to exclude foreigners. In the 1660s England passed a series of Navigation Acts that confined trade with its colonies to English ships and cargoes; it later opened trade in Africa to any English subject, claiming that competition would cut the cost of slaves to West Indian planters. The French called their mercantilist legislation, codified in 1698, the Exclusif (ek-skloo-SEEF), highlighting its exclusionary intentions. Other mercantilist laws sought to protect national manufacturing and agricultural interests from the competition of colonies, imposing prohibitively high taxes on their manufactured goods and products like refined sugar

Tacky

a slave named Tacky, who had been a chief on the Gold Coast of Africa, led a large rebellion in Jamaica in 1760. After his followers broke into a fort and armed themselves, slaves from nearby plantations joined them. This force attacked several plantations, setting them on fire and killing the planter families. Tacky died in the fighting, and three of his lieutenants stoically endured cruel deaths by torture meant to deter others from rebellion

Trade goods

caravans bringing textiles, hardware, and weapons across the Sahara. The goods the Hausa imported and distributed through their trading networks were similar to those that coastal African traders commanded from the Atlantic trade, except for the absence of alcohol, prohibited to Muslims. The goods they sent back in return also resembled the major African exports into the Atlantic: gold, textiles and leather goods, and slaves

Grand Blancs

dominated the economy and society of the island

1.

even at the peak of the trade in the 1700s, sub-Saharan Africa's overall population remained very large

Navigation Acts

that confined trade with its colonies to English ships and cargoes; it later opened trade in Africa to any English subject, claiming that competition would cut the cost of slaves to West Indian planters.

3.

the ability of a population to recover from losses was related to the proportion of fertile women who were shipped away

2.

localities that contributed heavily to the slave trade, such as lands near the Slave Coast, suffered acute losses

Role of slaves

most African slaves in the Islamic world were soldiers and servants

Saint Domingue

new French colony of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) became the greatest producer of sugar in the Atlantic world

Asante

regional power