The Atlantic Slave Trade (crash Course)

From 1500 to 1880 CE somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas. About 15 percent of those people died during the journey. Those who did not die became property and were bought and sold like any commodity.

Where Africans came from and went to changed over time, but in all 48% of slaves went to the Caribbean and 41% went to Brazil. It is hardly recognized, but few slaves actually came to America in the grand scheme of things. Only about 5% of the total slaves were imported to the US. Many slaves died in Brazil and the Caribbean due to the incredibly harsh conditions. Therefore, more and more slaves had to be imported to these countries to sustain the slave population. However, slavery in america started to perpetuate itself naturally by birth.

None of the primary crops grown by slaves — sugar, tobacco, and coffee — are necessary to sustain human life. So in a way, slavery is a very early by-product of a consumer culture that revolves around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure, but not sustenance.

One big misconception about slavery is that Europeans somehow captured Africans, put them in chains, stuffed them onto boats, and then took them to the Americas. However Africans were living in all types of living conditions such as small villages, city states, and empires. The Africans were too powerful for the Europeans to simply subjugate. The Europeans obtained African slaves by trading for them. Africans were captured by other Africans and then traded to Europeans for goods. These goods were usually metal tools, fine textiles, or guns. Slaves were a form of property to the Africans who were trading them, a very valuable one. In many places slaves were the only source of private wealth because land was owned by the state.

The largest slave ships could hold 400 people. The slaves were back to back in endless claustrophobic rows. Slaves often got less space then they would have in a coffin. Each slave had an average of four square feet of space.

Slaves would be sold in a market once they arrived in the americas. They were sold very similarly to the way that cattle would be sold. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, just like an animal. The lives of slaves were dominated by work and terror.

Slaves did all types of work from housework to skilled crafts work. Some slaves even worked as sailors. However, the majority of slaves worked as agricultural laborers.

In the Caribbean (and brazil), most of the slaves planted, harvested, and processed sugar. They worked ten months out of the year, dawn until dusk. One of the worst parts of the job was fertilizing the sugar cane. This required slaves to carry 80 lb baskets of manure on their heads up and down hilly terrain. When it came time to harvest and process the cane, speed was incredibly important because once cut, sugar sap could go sour within a day. This meant that slaves would often work 48 hours straight during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses. Slaves often caught their hands in the sugar rollers and had to get their hands amputated. The average life expectancy for these slaves was about 23 years.

The living and working conditions in the colonies were much better (though still inhumane). Slave populations began to increase naturally in the colonies, meaning that more slaves were born than died. This kept slavery a perpetuating cycle in which masters would use or sell the born slave children. This is why the percentage of imported slaves is rather small. The harsh conditions in the carbeean and brazil meant that slave should never increase their population naturally, which led to constant import.

Atlantic slavery was especially terrible because it was chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is a term historians use to indicate that the slaves were move-able property.

Green believes the world slave is over-used and thrown around to easily. He believes that the term slave is rarely used correctly. Green believes it is only okay to use the word slave when a person is the legally owned property of another and is forced to obey them. A common characteristic of slavery is that they are dehumanized.

The fact of why slavery is so horrendous is captured in the definition of slavery by sociologist Orlando Patterson, "The permanent, violent, and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons." A slave is removed from the culture, land, and society of his/her birth. These characteristics of slavery result in what is called "social death." One of the worst aspects of slavery is that slaves are dehumanized.

Modern slavery was a collective combination of all of the worst aspects of slavery throughout history. The Greeks were among the first to consider otherness a characteristic of slaves. Most Greek slaves were barbarians and their inability to speak Greek kept them from talking back to their masters, and it also indicated their slave status. Aristotle said, "it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves." The Greeks popularized the idea that slaves should be traded from far away. Slaves made up 30 percent of the total Roman population. The romans also invented the plantation, using mass numbers of slaves to work the land on giant farms called latifundia. The Bible was widely used to justify slavery. In particular the enslavement of Africans, because if the moment in Genesis when Noah curses Ham. The quote reads, "Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers." This encapsulates that slavery can be a hereditary status passed down. Next that slavery is a result of human sin. Muslim Arabs were the first to import large numbers of Bantu speaking Africans to their territory as slaves. The Muslims called these Africans Zanj and they were a distinct and despised group.

Atlantic slavery was a worldwide phenomenon because it was a culmination of all of the millennia of slavery type practices before it. Atlantic slavery connected the dots between the history of slavery in the world and harvested ideas from all of them. Atlantic slavery shaped into what it was after years of cultures imagining the other as inherently lesser. One can not blame a single group of people for slavery because they were all responsible.