ABSTRACT
The Atlantic slave trade, which lasted from the mid-fifteenth century until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was a distinctive event in both global history and the history of slavery. There have been, of course, other large coerced migrations in history, notably in the mid-twentieth century when millions of people in Europe and Asia were moved from place to place in a very short period of time. Moreover, voluntary migration has often exceeded the levels of migration recorded in the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1815 and 1930, 51.7 million people left Europe for other destinations, mostly in the New World, of whom the British alone contributed 18.7 million, or 36 per cent (Richards, 2004: 4-6). As Gwyn Campbell notes in Chapter 3 of this volume, the total volume of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean World probably equalled and perhaps exceeded the volume of captives in the Atlantic slave trade. Yet the Atlantic slave trade was distinctive in a number of important ways. As David
Eltis and David Richardson argue, the Atlantic slave trade was “a new phenomenon in the human experience”. It was “the largest transoceanic forced migration in history” whereby “relatively small improvements to the quality of life of a people on one continent [Europe] … were made possible by the removal of others from a second continent [Africa], and their draconian exploitation on yet a third[the Americas]” (Eltis and Richardson, 2008: 1, 2, 45). As other essays in this volume show, the Atlantic slave trade was the means whereby the Americas were repopulated by Africans, and made profitable to Europeans in the process. The repopulation process was demographically very significant. Before 1820, about four Africans arrived in the Americas for every single European. Between 1760 and 1820, this emigrating flow amounted to 5.6 Africans per one European. By the end of this period, nearly 8.7 million Africans had been taken against their will to the Americas, as opposed to just 2.6 million Europeans, only a small proportion of whom came to the Americas voluntarily (ibid.: 45). Without the Atlantic slave trade, and the continual inflow of forced labour that went
to the plantation societies of the American South, the Caribbean and Iberian America, the Americas would have been much less profitable, much less quickly than they were. As Barbara Solow (1991) notes, it was slavery that ensured colonial economic growth: those areas that had slaves prospered, those that were too poor to be able to exploit slaves languished. Through the Atlantic slave trade, African chattel slavery was made possible in the Americas and, in turn, the plantation system was able to succeed. The disease environment in tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Americas was malign,
and the work that labourers were forced to do, especially when required to cultivate sugar cane, proved very injurious to health. Before the nineteenth century, no sugarproducing region and few plantation areas outside the American South were able to have a self-sustaining labouring population. In order to keep the plantation system going, a system that, as Richard Follett argues in Chapter 7 of this volume, devoured human lives, fresh inputs of labour were always required. These inputs were achieved through the increasingly more economically efficient transportation of captive Africans from West and Central Africa in what became known as the triangular trade (ships coming from Europe, picking up slaves in Africa, and depositing them in the Americas before returning to Europe). The consequences of this trade were profound for all four continents involved. It was a primary way in which an Atlantic world was created in “one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the early modern era: the establishment of slave plantations” (ibid.; Osterhammel and Petersson, 2005: 47). Nevertheless, the Atlantic slave trade was more than just an economic event. It was
both a profound tragedy, one of the worst and most sustained crimes committed in history, and also an arena of dramatic social transformation. The Atlantic slave trade was the most visible indication in the Atlantic of how the Columbian encounter had opened up a virtually unconstrained form of capitalism, in which morality was placed below economic gain, and where slave traders devised new and ingenious ways in which to reduce everything, including people, to the status of commodities. The commodification of people was, as Stephanie Smallwood argues, an ultimate expression of the power of the market to alter social sensibility. The Atlantic slave trade, she suggests, was where “individual paths of misfortune merged into the commodifying Atlantic apparatus – the material, economic, and social mechanisms by which the market molded subjects into beings that more closely resembled objects – beings that existed solely for the use of those that claimed to hold them as possessions”. At bottom, the slave trade became a battle for souls, to use the religious language favoured by abolitionists in late-eighteenthcentury Britain, who saw in the slave trade a visible manifestation of original sin. Slavers tried to deny slaves’ full personhood through the commodification of Africans into slaves. Africans, as Smallwood states, “tried to restore through her unassisted agency the pulse of social integration that saltwater slavery threatened to extinguish”. The Atlantic slave trade, therefore, was crucial in helping to shape African diasporas in the New World (Smallwood, 2007a: 63, 182, 187).
