Slave Trade

Latin America, including the Caribbean region, received more than 85 percent of the 10 million or so Africans brought to the New World between 1494 and sometime in the 1860s. Brazil took about 35 percent of the total, the Caribbean (including the British islands) somewhat more, and the mainland colonies of Spain only about 10 percent.

The leading slavers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the Portuguese. The Dutch joined them during the seventeenth century, and the British and French transported the majority of the captive humans taken across the Atlantic in the 1700s. Among the Americans, only Brazilians at Rio de Janeiro and Salvador became prominent as slavers, accounting for a major part of the trade to those ports in the eighteenth century. As the British withdrew from slaving starting in 1807, Brazilians and Portuguese became the major nineteenth-century purveyors, with the Spaniards joined by a few North Americans and, intermittently, the French in providing African labor to Cuba.

OUTLINE HISTORY

The slave trade began as a minor component in Portugal's fifteenth-century attempts to buy gold and commodities in West Africa. Africans at first tended to sell products, not people. But droughts there threw the region into violent conflict. Warlords seized captives and thrived on selling them to other Africans and to Europeans. Also, in western Africa there was an older trans-Saharan trade to Muslim lands with which European Atlantic traders competed.

New African mercantile sectors arose to broker this trade in labor and to import textiles and commodity currencies (particularly shells, copper rods, iron bars, and beads), along with smaller quantities of spirits and wines, firearms, and consumer luxuries. The growing cohort of Africans committed to selling refugees from drought and captives taken in wars thrived on the Europeans' willingness to pay higher and higher prices for labor.

Gradually, the dominant African political interests in the most densely inhabited portions of the continent became dependent on selling slaves. Most came from the Lower Guinea Coast between modern Ghana and Cameroon or from Angola, a vaguely defined region along the west-central shores of Africa on either side of the mouth of the Zaire River.

Demand for African slaves arose out of long-term shortages in American colonies. There, low-cost virgin lands and accessible deposits of precious metal ores—principally silver in Mexico and Peru and gold in Minas Gerais, Brazil—generated rapid economic growth. Already sparse Native American populations declined under the onslaught of European diseases, while an expanding economy in Europe absorbed the local working population there. With the demographic stage thus set, American specie, multiplied by early modern banking techniques, financed merchants in buying the refugees and captives of Africa to fill the labor deficit. American land, African labor, and European capital formed an economic triangle that generated lethally explosive growth.

Slavers delivered human cargoes in large numbers, first to the expanding sugar captaincies of the Brazilian Northeast at the end of the sixteenth century through Recife, in Pernambuco, and Salvador da Bahia. The Dutch then invested in and supplied labor for English cane plantations in the Caribbean, the main magnet for slavers about 1640. By 1700, the English West Indies, principally Jamaica, and French Saint Domingue drove the West Africa-Caribbean branch of the trade, with Bahian sugar and tobacco planters adding a second major, southern Atlantic, sector. Gold and diamonds in south-central Brazil propelled the trade from Angola to Rio de Janeiro until about 1760. Thereafter, diversifying exports of sugar, cotton, and coffee led Brazilian economic expansion into the nineteenth century. The African slaves headed to the New World thus formed one leg of an Atlantic commercial triangle completed by European manufactured goods sent to Africa and American minerals and agricultural commodities headed for Europe.

War in Europe from 1793 and British efforts at suppressing Atlantic slaving from 1807 gradually ended the trade from West Africa, with the Bahians among the last to give up there in the 1840s. Cuba, with Havana the main entry point, became the principal nineteenth-century Caribbean importer of African labor, increasingly from central Africa, to support the island's emergence as a major producer of sugar and, later, coffee. In southern Brazil, Rio slavers intensified their exploitation of Angola and expanded into Indian Ocean markets, particularly Mozambique. Brazil suppressed these last currents of slaving after 1850, and the Cuban trade finally died out in the 1860s. Thereafter, free immigrants from Europe replaced enslaved Africans in Brazil and Argentina, and indentured Asians supplemented French and British needs in the Caribbean region and the Guianas.

GOVERNMENT PARTICIPATION

The Spanish and Portuguese monarchies attempted to regulate and tax the trade in slaves to their American colonies, with decreasing success. Spain's famous Asiento contracts, begun in 1518, licensed royally favored Seville merchants to hire foreign traders to carry slaves to its mainland colonies, mostly through Cartagena and Buenos Aires, until the middle of the eighteenth century. These foreigners—Italians; then Portuguese; and eventually Dutch, French, and English, in a succession that reflected the rise of commercial bourgeoisies in Europe—exploited the privilege of delivering slaves by smuggling manufactured goods into the Spanish preserves and selling them there for silver.

The Portuguese concentrated their regulatory efforts on the Angolan coast, which they treated as a trading monopoly centered on a small colony at Luanda. They levied export taxes on slaves leaving the port and until 1769 subcontracted these duties out to Lisbon merchant interests, who dominated the trade financially. In Angola a community of resident colonials who intermarried with their African suppliers, along with exiled Portuguese criminals, Jews, and Gypsies, brought the slaves down to the coast, often owning them on through the point of sale in Brazil.

Brazil-based Portuguese merchants, who had married into American planting families, became the dominant shippers of slaves and supplied the sugarcane brandies that lubricated Angolan slaving and the sweetened tobacco that gave Bahians a secure niche in a separate "Mina" trade (named for a Portuguese post in Africa) between northeastern Brazil and the West African Lower Guinea coast. These varying commercial structures allowed Portuguese merchants to limit their involvement to the low-risk financial aspects of the trade until the late 1700s. Iberian merchants left the hazards of owning and carrying the slaves to foreigners within the Spanish sphere and, in Portugal's domains, to colonials.

COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATION

Private commercial interests gradually took over slaving, as early government-sponsored trade receded before the rising tides of mercantilism and, later, of liberal "free trade." In northern Europe only a few early ventures enjoyed royal patronage or participation. The precocious Dutch West India Company led Netherlands merchants in their assault on Iberian slaving beginning in the 1620s. By the 1670s and 1680s, companies of private merchants, though still aided by royal charters and grants of monopoly trading privileges, had emerged everywhere, even to buy up Spain's asiento—notably the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company in England, the Compagnie des Indes in France, and the Companhia da Guiné in Portugal. By 1700, smaller free traders that were intruding as smugglers or interlopers quickly overwhelmed the unwieldy corporate behemoths. The Brazilians in the southern Atlantic, British shipping interests from Bristol and Liverpool, French traders in Nantes and small Breton ports, private merchants in Holland, and Rhode Islanders from North America then pushed the trade to its eighteenth-century heights.

Portugal, which had lost the slave trade in its own empire to the colonials in Angola and Brazil, went against this tide of private entrepreneurship by floating two old-fashioned chartered companies of national merchants, active in the 1750s and 1760s. These commercial anachronisms, the Maranhão and Pernambuco companies, quickly failed. Spain finally loosened its antiquated restrictions on private trade in the empire during the 1780s, but too late. Its merchants had too small a market for slaves, too little capital, and only a toehold in Africa on the equatorial island of Fernando Po and so did not consolidate a Spanish slaving industry before American independence movements ended the mainland trade after 1810.

The nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba and Brazil depended on colonial capital in Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Bahia, supplemented by emigrant Portuguese merchants resident in Brazil. British manufacturers and merchants, though forbidden by Parliament from investing directly in slaving, drew profits from captive humans by financing the trade of the Iberians, safely protected by contracts from its primary risk—mortality. North Americans provided ships for the illegal trade of the 1840s. Thus, although the trade has sometimes been termed a "triangular" one because of the European goods, African slaves, and American commodities flowing clockwise with the winds of the North Atlantic, few individual ships or shippers completed all three of its legs. The institutions of slaving thus reflected the broad outlines of economic growth throughout the Atlantic economy, in Europe, America, and Africa.

Historians have inquired also into the economic contribution that slave trading may have made to the growth and transformation of the European economy, some claiming that it directly financed industrialization in Britain. Though exceptionally profitable voyages inspired many hopes, average returns did not exceed those common in other sectors of the economy. Slaving was a small component of all international trade flows and was minor in relation to domestic economies everywhere—including Africa and Brazil—except in the specialized sugar islands of the Caribbean.

On the other hand, slaving allowed new and still-fragile munitions and other manufacturing sectors in England and France to reach captive colonial and some African markets for their early, crude products. In Brazil the Africa trade sustained indebted planters unable otherwise to support the burden of Portuguese mercantilist taxes and monopolies. It restored the fortunes of a few of the Portuguese exiled and condemned to Angola and enabled even weak Portuguese merchants to compete with British-backed competitors in Brazil. For Portugal, too, it delayed the decline of national munitions and textile makers, as the country's economy fell steadily behind that of the rest of the continent. It animated commerce in the out-ports of northern Europe at a time when Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Rouen were moving ahead in finance and in continental trade. As trans-Atlantic economic diversification and specialization accelerated, Europe's weaker economic sectors, and disadvantaged colonial subjects, found markets in Africa and used the slaves acquired there to buy the American gold, silver, sugar, cotton, and coffee that they would otherwise have had to concede to stronger competitors.

DEMOGRAPHY

Slavers purchased enslaved Africans in ratios of about two males to each female, although sex ratios varied somewhat from one part of the African coast to another. American planters and miners may have preferred males because they found the costs of raising slave children—including high infant and child mortality—high so long as the price of African labor remained low. On the other hand, Africans may have preferred to retain women for themselves, to bear replacements for the people they lost to drought, war, disease, and enslaved exile abroad. Women worked in the fields on both continents, alone in Africa but alongside male slaves on American plantations. The high cost of raising children to an age of productivity reduced the number of youngsters in the trade to a small fraction. Slave prices rose steadily into the 1790s, however, and the differential between buying and training youngsters decreased so that the average age of the slaves carried across the Atlantic tended to fall through time. By the nineteenth century, the typical enslaved individual was an adolescent boy.

The European slavers refined their techniques over the centuries so that more slaves survived, at lower transport cost, though without significantly relieving the extreme discomfort of their captives. The earliest human cargoes rode in the holds of ships built for carrying commodities rather than people, with no special accommodation. Provision for food and, in particular, water while at sea was minimal. Slaves died in numbers averaging as much as 25 percent during crossings that ranged from 40 or 50 days in the South Atlantic upward toward 80 to 120 days between West Africa and the Caribbean. By the early eighteenth century, slavers had developed specialized vessels carrying 300 to 400 passengers, though smaller operators, particularly Americans, still used general cargo vessels of lesser capacity.

On African coasts, slavers established commercial contacts that reduced the highly lethal time spent loading slaves, and they could estimate the water and food requirements of their captives closely enough that mortality at sea dropped toward 10 percent. Captains under pressure from their employers, or novice sailors, still sometimes dangerously overloaded their ships. Calms or storms at sea, pirates, war, equipment failure, or other accidents could always strike the slaves with catastrophic losses. However, on balance slaving in the high-volume decades of the 1700s tended toward business as usual, risky but bearable—for the slavers.

As the British navy gradually drove the slavers from the seas after 1811, the traders dispersed to remote and concealed ports in both Africa and the Americas. Although abolition raised the costs and risks of slaving, African and European traders survived the challenge. Africans held slaves safely near the coast and Europeans loaded ships in shorter periods of time when they arrived. The ships themselves became faster, some of them adding copper plating on their hulls. The slaves, packed more closely than ever below decks, bore the burden of other cost efficiencies, such as reduced rations of water and food, but gross neglect was less common in the furtive, highly professional, last, illegal years of slaving. As a result mortality among the slaves dropped further toward 5 percent on average, and catastrophes occurred less often.

Medical conditions, though always deadly, moderated over time. Throughout the long years of the trade, most slaves entered the holds of the ships in marginal nutritional condition. Many boarded after weeks and months of forced and underfed marches over long distances to the coast and after lengthy confinement with inadequate food or water in overcrowded shoreside barracoons. Spoiled foodstuffs, contaminated water, and illnesses acquired in unfamiliar disease environments left many with uncontrollable diarrheas. The stench added horribly to the miseries of those confined below decks, and ships carrying slaves trailed their malodorous stigma for hundreds of meters downwind.

Slaves from the higher African elevations also suffered from fevers picked up on the low-lying coast, particularly malaria. Contagious afflictions, especially smallpox, surged through some vessels in waves that, from Angola at least, rose after extended periods of drought in Africa. Emotional trauma was severe. Slaves experienced the loss of family and home, extreme isolation and dependency, and utter terror at an experience many believed had delivered them into the hands of red cannibals from beyond unending waters of death. Diarrheas, the nausea of seasickness, and profuse sweating in the holds must have depleted the body fluids faster than scarce supplies of drinking water could replace them. Slaves appeared to grow despondent and die, and these morbid melancholies, or banzos, may have been symptoms of terminal dehydration and mineral imbalances as well as of the profound psychological shock of captivity. The multiple afflictions of the slaves are almost impossible to translate into precise modern medical diagnoses.

Slavers gradually stumbled into remedies for starvation, dehydration, and salt depletion. From the early eighteenth century, the British occasionally inoculated slaves against smallpox, and slavers in the nineteenth century sometimes used Jennerian vaccine to prevent epidemic outbreaks of the disease in Africa from coming on board the slave ships. However, European medical technology never became widely efficacious under the extreme conditions of the trade. Better care for slaves before they boarded the ships, faster crossings, and adequate water and food probably contributed more to the falling death rates over the long history of the trade.

Most slave males spent the passage crammed below decks, lying beneath low ceilings on rough planks in darkness, chained to hull, deck, or bulkhead, so close to companions that they could not move. Some captains brought small, heavily guarded groups of their captive passengers onto the deck once or twice a day to get a breath of fresh air, exercise a bit, and eat a ration of manioc or rice or other starchy porridge flavored with small quantities of cooking oil, peppers, or dried meat or fish. On some ships, women, some with infants, occupied cabins, where the crew surely subjected many to sexual assault.

In a tragic irony, the slaves' human frailty, their very susceptibility to death, gave them their principal—albeit passive—influence over the organization and history of the trade. Monetary investments in people led the slavers to adopt technological and financial refinements that gradually enhanced the chances of their human cargoes for survival. The presence of hundreds of resentful captives bound below decks, ill and weakened as they were, frightened crews into designing specialized slaving ships for security, with heavy bars and barriers, chains and irons. Some slaves somehow occasionally overcame these obstacles to seize or scuttle ships, though recorded instances of revolt at sea number only in the dozens out of tens of thousands of voyages.

See alsoCoffee Industry; Cotton; Sugar Industry; Tobacco Industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For bibliographic information, see the bibliography supplements in the historical journal Slavery and Abolition (1983–) and Joseph C. Miller, Slavery: A Worldwide Bibliography, 1900–1982 (1985).

See also Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969); Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (1979); Edward Reynolds, Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1985); Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (1986); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1987); Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (1987); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (1988); Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature," in Journal of African History 30 (1989): 365-394; Philip D. Curtain, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (1990); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Oriental, Occidental, and African Slave Trades (1990); and Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Andrés Gallego, José. La esclavitud en la América española. Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro; Fundación Ignacio Larramendi, 2005.

Cáceres Gómez, Rina. Rutas de la esclavitud en Africa y América Latina. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001.

Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. Aspectos sociales en América colonial: De extranjeros, contrabando y esclavos. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo: Universidad de Bogotá "Jorge Tadeo Lozano," 2001.

                                           Joseph C. Miller