Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade By Michael King

1. Quill and Musket Guest Lecturer Series Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade By Michael King

2. The TransAtlantic Slave Trade • It all started in the mid-fifteenth century, with Portuguese ships navigating down the West African coast in an effort to avoid the Muslim North Africans, who had a virtual monopoly on the trade of sub-Saharan gold, spices, and other commodities that Europe wanted. Out of these early Portuguese treks, new seafaring discoveries and shipbuilding technologies would propel Portuguese ships to master the Atlantic. It wasn’t long before Portuguese shippers adapted all of this to the transshipment of human cargo, African men, women and children to new world destinations, where their labor was desparately needed.

3. Slave ship cargo

4. Initially, only small numbers of Africans were transported to Europe, notably Portugal, where Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, experienced a rise in its African residents. Before the close of the fifteenth century, upwards of 10% of Lisdon’s population was of African descent. At the same time, Africans were being taken to the Portuguese West Atlantic islands of Madeira, Cape Verde and São Tomé. It was in places like these that Portuguese commercialists established their first sugar plantations, manned by African labor. The success of such ventures would serve as a model for slave plantations in the new world. Coincidentally, Africans were also subject to capture and enslavement and would wind up in places like North Africa, the Middle East, Persia, India, the Indian Ocean islands, and in Europe as far as Russia.

5. TransAtlantic slave trade routes

6. Ghana West Africa slave trade castle

7. Portuguese navigators were soon followed by British and Dutch trading vessels. Strict competition set in, as these rival British and Dutch ships would often attack and raid Portuguese ships, while at the same time exploring and seeking captives from the African mainland. During this initial period, European trade interest was mainly focused on the Senegal and Gambia areas of West Africa, with its rich Muslim history and heritage. To the East, stood the once great medieval empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, with famously rich interior regions of gold. Europeans found themselves in sharp demand for the twin commodities of gold and slaves. The result was the arrival of the Portuguese on the what would become known as the Gold Coast or modern Ghana in the 1470s, in order to capture inland sources for gold. Later, they developed commercial and political relations with several kingdoms of what is now present-day Nigeria. In Central Africa, The Kongo kingdom experienced European Christianization, but the persistence of the slave trade undermined the kingdom’s ability to effectively fulfill its modernization mission. By 1492, Africans were beginning to be transplanted throughout the Spanish New World colonies. Starting in the 16th century, one could find them growing sugar in Haiti as well as mining gold throughout that region known as Hispaniola. Many African slaves were utilized in draining the shallow lakes of the Mexican plateau, laying the ground work for the subjugation of the Aztec peoples. In was African labor which facilitated the latest conquest and subjugation of the Indians of the New World, a design long sought by the Europeans.

8. As the seventeenth century took form, The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade entered a super intensive phase with the establishment of large scale plantations, with such a wide array of ever expanding commodities such as sugar, indigo, rice, tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, and cotton. Ever greater numbers of Africans were needed between 1650 and 1807. Such an incessant demand labor ushered in countless innovations and fostered a new breed of speculators and entrepreneurs. The trade in human cargo led to a host of institutions and ideologies, religious and governmental, which became inherently corrupted and contradicted by the overriding need to pursue profit.

9. The third and final period of the transatlantic slave trade began with the ban on the importation of captives imposed by Britain and the United States in 1807 and lasted until the 1860s. Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were the principal destinations for Africans, since they could no longer legally be brought into North America, the British or French colonies in the Caribbean, or the independent countries of Spanish America. Despite this restricted market, the numbers of deported Africans did not decline until the late 1840s. Many were smuggled into the United States. At the same time, tens of thousands of Africans rescued from the slave ships were forcibly settled in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and several islands of the Caribbean.

10. Hope of Freedom

11. OlaudahEquino was captured by European slave traders, eventually freed and became a poster person for anti slavery activists, worldwide

12. Bibliography • The Transatlantic Slave Trade • Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. • Burnside, Madeleine and Rosemarie Robotham, ed. Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. • *Charles, Joan. Slave Ship Movement from 1744-1820: Compiled from Lloyd's List, London Times and Salem Mercury: In Narrative and Chart Form. Hampton, VA: Joan Charles, 1988. • Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave-Trade in the Nineteenth Century. London: Frank Cass, 1989. • Cottman, Michael H. The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie: An African American's Journey to Uncover a Sunken Slave Ship's Past. New York: Harmony Books, 1999. • Curtin, Philip D. and Paul E. Lovejoy, ed. Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. • Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. • Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. • Dow, George Francis. Slave Ships and Slaving. Cambridge, MA: Cornell Maritime Press, 1968. • *Eltis, David and James Walvin, eds. The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. • Eltis, David. Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. London: Frank Cass, 1997. • *Faber, Eli. Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York: New York University Press, 1998. • Farrant, Leda. Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975. • Hair, Paul Edward Hedley. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989. • Harms, Robert W. The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. New York: Basic Books, 2002. • Hogendorn, Jan S. The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. • Hogg, Peter C. The African Slave Trade and its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles. London: Frank Cass, 1973. • Inikori, Joseph E. and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. • Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the "Amistad.": The Saga of a Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. • Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. • Kromer, Helen. Amistad: the Slave Uprising Aboard the Spanish Schooner. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997. • Law, Robin, ed. The English in West Africa, 1681-1683: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681-1699. Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. • *Law, Robin, ed. The English in West Africa, 1685-1688: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company in England, 1681-1699. Volume 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. • Law, Robin. The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. • Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. • McMillan, Beverly. Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with The Mariners' Museum of Virginia, 2002. • Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. • Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society. A Slave Ship Speaks: the Wreck of the Henrietta Marie. Key West, FL: Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, 1995. • Postma, Johannes. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. • Svalesen, Leif. The Slave Ship Fredensborg. Trans. Pat Shaw and Selena Winsnes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. • Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. • Tibbles, Anthony, ed. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity. London: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1994. • Walvin, James. Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999. • Wells, Tom Henderson. The Slave Ship Wanderer. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1968.