chapter 15
In what different ways did the Atlantic slave trade transform African societies?
• Africa became a permanent part of an interacting Atlantic world, both commercially and demographically. • The Atlantic slave trade slowed Africa's population growth at a time when the populations of Europe, China, and other regions were expanding. • The slave trade in general stimulated little positive economic change in Africa and led to economic stagnation. • It also led to considerable political disruption, particularly for small-scale societies with little central authority that were frequently subject to slave raids. • Some larger kingdoms, such as Kongo and Oyo, also slowly disintegrated because of the slave trade. • But in other regions, like Benin and Dahomey, African authorities sought to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities to manage the slave trade in their own interests.
How did the North American and Siberian fur trades differ from each other? What did they have in common?
• Both trades were driven by the demands of the world market. • Both had similar consequences for the native populations that participated in them, as both native Siberians and Native Americans suffered from new diseases and became dependent on the goods for which they traded furs. • However, the trades also differed in that Native Americans dealt with several competing European nations who generally obtained their furs through commercial negotiations. No such competition existed in Siberia, where Russian authorities imposed a tax or tribute, payable in furs, on every able-bodied Siberian male between eighteen and fifty years of age. • A further difference lay in the large-scale presence of private Russian hunters and trappers, who competed directly with their Siberian counterparts.
What roles did Europeans and Africans play in the unfolding of the Atlantic slave trade?
• European demand for slaves was clearly the chief cause of the trade. • From the point of sale on the African coast to the massive use of slave labor on American plantations, the entire enterprise was in European hands. • Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves at the lowest possible cost, and the firearms that they funneled into West Africa may well have increased the warfare from which so many slaves were derived. • From the point of initial capture to sale on the coast, the slave trade was normally in African hands. African elites and merchants secured slaves and brought them to the coast for sale to Europeans waiting on ships or in fortified settlements. • Africans who were transported as slaves also played a critical, if unwilling and tragic, role in the trade.
What drove European involvement in the world of Asian commerce?
• European involvement in Asian commerce was motivated by a number of factors, including the desire for tropical spices, Chinese silk, Indian cottons, rhubarb, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. • The general recovery of European civilization following the disaster of the Black Death was a factor. • Europeans were also driven by a resentment of the Muslim monopoly on the flow of Indian Ocean products to Europe, and the dislike that many European powers had for Venice's role as intermediary in the trade. • They hoped to discover and ally with the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John to continue the Crusades and combat a common Islamic enemy. • The need to secure gold and silver to pay for Asian spices and textiles also played a role.
To what extent did Europeans transform earlier patterns of commerce, and in what ways did they assimilate into those older patterns?
• Europeans for the first time operated on a global scale, forging new trade networks across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. • They also facilitated the full integration of fur-supplying regions into wider trade networks. • But in other ways, the Europeans assimilated older patterns, as in the Indian Ocean, where they sought to dominate previously established trade routes, and they continued to trade many of the same products. 14. Describe and account for the differing outcomes of European expansion in the Americas (see Chapter 14), Africa, and Asia. • In the Americas, Europeans conquered the region politically and dominated it economically. The primary reasons for this were the devastation caused to Native American populations by European diseases and the technological advantages that Europeans possessed when they arrived. • In Africa, Europeans established much stronger trade relationships and set up several trading posts on the east coast of Africa. However, they made no effort to conquer large territories, in large part because the most attractive regions for European conquest, such as West Africa, possessed too many deadly tropical diseases against which Europeans had little immunity. • In Asia, Europeans (aside from the Spanish, who succeeded in establishing a colonial state in the Philippines) sought to found trading post empires, with mixed success. The Dutch were able to dominate several Spice Islands, and both the British and the Portuguese were able to set up fortified trading posts along the Indian Ocean coast. But none of these powers ever tried to conquer large territories, and in some cases, such as in Japan, the Europeans were only able to trade under conditions set by the local authorities. These developments show that, while the Spanish and Dutch were able to dominate relatively small regions, the larger established civilizations of Asia were too powerful for the Europeans to hope to rule, and in any case the great distances between Asia and Europe made such a colonial empire impractical.
In what specific ways did trade foster change in the world of the early modern era?
• It created completely new trade networks across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. • The slave trade brought large numbers of Africans to the Americas. • It drew the remote peoples of Siberia and North America into global trade networks through the fur trade. • It slowed population growth, disrupted the economy, and sometimes shaped the political system in West Africa. • It was the driving force behind the large-scale slave economy that emerged in the Americas. • It further commercialized the economies of the world, especially that of China, through inflows of silver from South America and Japan.
What was distinctive about the Atlantic slave trade? What did it share with other patterns of slave owning and slave trading?
• The Atlantic slave trade had many distinctive features, including the immense size of the traffic in slaves; the centrality of slavery to the economies of colonial America; and the prominence of slave labor in plantation agriculture. • There was a distinctive racial dimension, as Atlantic slavery came to be identified wholly with Africa and with "blackness." • Also distinctive was the treatment of slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking any rights in the society of their owners; and the practice of slave status being inherited across the generations, with little hope of eventual freedom for the vast majority. • Particularly ironic is the fact that American slaveholding took place in the only society, with the possible exception of ancient Greece, that affirmed values of human freedom and equality while permitting widespread slavery. • But the Atlantic slave trade did possess some similarities with other patterns of slave owning, including the acquisition of slaves from Africa; the enslavement of outsiders and other vulnerable people; and the fact that slavery was a common practice since the earliest civilizations.
To what extent did the British and Dutch trading companies change the societies they encountered in Asia?
• The Dutch acted to control not only the shipping but also the production of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace. With much bloodshed, the Dutch seized control of a number of small spice-producing islands, forcing their people to sell only to the Dutch. • On the Banda Islands, the Dutch killed, enslaved, or left to starve virtually the entire population and then replaced them with Dutch planters, using a slave labor force to produce the nutmeg crop. •Ultimately, the local economy of the Spice Islands was shattered by Dutch policies, and the people there were impoverished. • The British established three major trading settlements in India during the seventeenth century: Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. They secured their trading bases with the permission of Mughal authorities or local rulers. • British traders came to specialize in Indian cotton textiles, and hundreds of villages in the interior of southern India became specialized producers for the British market.
How did the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British initiatives in Asia differ from one another?
• The Portuguese sought to set up a trading post empire that controlled the trade routes of the Indian Ocean. • The Spanish established colonial rule over the Philippine Islands. In doing so, they drew on their experience in the Americas, converting most of the population to Christianity, ruling over the islands directly, and setting up large landed estates owned by Spanish settlers. • The Dutch and British organized their Indian Ocean ventures through private trading companies, which were able to raise money and share risks among a substantial number of merchant investors. These trading companies obtained government charters granting them trading monopolies, the power to make war, and the right to govern conquered peoples. They established their own parallel and competing trading post empires; the Dutch seized control of some of the Spice Islands, while the British set up trading centers in India by securing the support of the Mughal Empire or of local authorities.
Describe the impact of the fur trade on North American native societies.
• The fur trade did bring some benefits, including the trade of pelts for goods of real value. • It enhanced influence and authority for some Native American leaders. • It ensured the protection of Native Americans involved in the fur trade, at least for a time, from the kind of extermination, enslavement, or displacement that was the fate of some native peoples elsewhere in the Americas. • But the fur trade also had a negative impact, such as in exposing Native Americans to European diseases and generating warfare beyond anything previously known. • It left Native Americans dependent on European goods without a corresponding ability to manufacture the goods themselves. • It brought alcohol into Indian societies, often with deeply destructive effects.
What explains the rise of the Atlantic slave trade?
• The immense difficulty and danger of the work, the limitations attached to serf labor, and the general absence of wage workers all pointed to slavery as the only source of labor for sugar-producing plantations. • The cutting off of the supply of Slavic slaves, the demographic collapse of Native American populations, and the Christian faith of marginal Europeans left Africans as the only viable source of slaves for the plantation economies of the Americas.
What was the world historical importance of the silver trade?
• The silver trade was the first direct and sustained link between the Americas and Asia, and it initiated a web of Pacific commerce that grew steadily over the centuries. • It transformed Spain and Japan, the two states that controlled the principal new sources of silver. • It deepened the already substantial commercialization of China's economy, which fueled global commerce. • It became a key commodity driving long-distance trade and offered the Europeans a product that they could produce that was also in demand elsewhere in the world.
To what extent did the Portuguese realize their own goals in the Indian Ocean?
• Their original goal of creating a trading post empire that controlled the commerce of the Indian Ocean was at best only partially realized. They never succeeded in controlling much more than half the spice trade to Europe, and by 1600, their trading post empire was in steep decline.
How should we distribute the moral responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade? Is this a task appropriate for historians?
• This is obviously a question intended to encourage student thought, without a simple or clear-cut answer. • It is evident that Europeans played an important role both in stimulating the slave trade and in developing a slave system that was unusually dehumanizing, degrading, and dangerous for those forced to participate as slaves. • It is also clear that some Africans willingly participated in the trade, capturing and selling slaves to the Europeans. • Whether assessing moral responsibility or blame is a task appropriate for historians is debatable. One could reasonably make a case for or against this idea. • Students should be encouraged to think about historical context, rather than judging by the standards of our own era. • Students should be encouraged not to think in all-or-nothing terms, such as assertions that all Europeans were (and are) morally guilty for the slave trade, when the vast majority of Europeans had nothing to do with it. • Similarly, students should be encouraged to recognize that the fact that some African rulers and individuals participated in the slave trade does not imply moral guilt for all.
What lasting legacies of early modern globalization are evident in the early twenty-first century? Pay particular attention to the legacies of the slave trade.
• the Atlantic trading network • the Pacific trading network between the Americas and East Asia • the influence of European civilizations, especially in the Americas and the Philippines • the engagement of even remote peoples, such as those of Siberia, in world trade networks • the large populations in the Americas of peoples of African and European origins; • African cultural influences in the Americas • ideas of race, particularly of "blackness" • the demographic and economic legacy of the slave trade in West Africa
