ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY

thelivyjr
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Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY

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WIKIPEDIA

Slavery in Africa
, continued ...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Effects

Demographics


Slavery and the slave trades had a significant impact on the size of the population and the gender distribution throughout much of Africa.

The precise impact of these demographic shifts has been an issue of significant debate.

The Atlantic slave trade took 70,000 people, primarily from the west coast of Africa, per year at its peak in the mid-1700s.

The Arab slave trade involved the capture of peoples from the continental interior, who were then shipped overseas through ports on the Red Sea and elsewhere.

It peaked at 10,000 people bartered per year in the 1600s.

According to Patrick Manning, there was a consistent population decrease in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa as a result of these slave trades.

This population decline throughout West Africa from 1650 until 1850 was exacerbated by the preference of slave traders for male slaves.

It is important to note that this preference only existed in the transatlantic slave trade.

More female slaves than male were traded across the continent of Africa.

In eastern Africa, the slave trade was multi-directional and changed over time.

To meet the demand for menial labor, Zanj slaves captured from the southern interior were sold through ports on the northern seaboard in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in the Nile Valley, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, India, Far East and the Indian Ocean islands.

Extent of slavery

The extent of slavery within Africa and the trade in slaves to other regions is not known precisely.

Although the Atlantic slave trade has been best studied, estimates range from 8 million people to 20 million.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database estimates that the Atlantic slave trade took around 12.8 million people between 1450 and 1900.

The slave trade across the Sahara and Red Sea from the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, and East Africa, has been estimated at 6.2 million people between 600 and 1600.

Although the rate decreased from East Africa in the 1700s, it increased in the 1800s and is estimated at 1.65 million for that century.

Estimates by Patrick Manning are that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th century, but about 1.5 million died on board ship.

About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas.

Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids in Africa and forced marches to ports.

Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young.

Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Asian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets.

Debate about demographic effect

The demographic effects of the slave trade are some of the most controversial and debated issues.

Walter Rodney argued that the export of so many people had been a demographic disaster and had left Africa permanently disadvantaged when compared to other parts of the world, and that this largely explains that continent's continued poverty.

He presents numbers that show that Africa's population stagnated during this period, while that of Europe and Asia grew dramatically.

According to Rodney all other areas of the economy were disrupted by the slave trade as the top merchants abandoned traditional industries to pursue slaving and the lower levels of the population were disrupted by the slaving itself.

Others have challenged this view.

J. D. Fage compared the number effect on the continent as a whole.

David Eltis has compared the numbers to the rate of emigration from Europe during this period.

In the 19th century alone over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas, a far higher rate than were ever taken from Africa.

Others in turn challenged that view.

Joseph E. Inikori argues the history of the region shows that the effects were still quite deleterious.

He argues that the African economic model of the period was very different from the European, and could not sustain such population losses.

Population reductions in certain areas also led to widespread problems.

Inikori also notes that after the suppression of the slave trade Africa's population almost immediately began to rapidly increase, even prior to the introduction of modern medicines.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY

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WIKIPEDIA

Slavery in Africa
, concluded ...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Effect on the economy of Africa

There is a longstanding debate among analysts and scholars about the destructive impacts of the slave trades.

It is often claimed that the slave trade undermined local economies and political stability as villages' vital labour forces were shipped overseas as slave raids and civil wars became commonplace.

With the rise of a large commercial slave trade, driven by European needs, enslaving your enemy became less a consequence of war, and more and more a reason to go to war.

The slave trade was claimed to have impeded the formation of larger ethnic groups, causing ethnic factionalism and weakening the formation for stable political structures in many places.

It also is claimed to have reduced the mental health and social development of African people.

In contrast to these arguments, J. D. Fage asserts that slavery did not have a wholly disastrous effect on the societies of Africa.

Slaves were an expensive commodity, and traders received a great deal in exchange for each enslaved person.

At the peak of the slave trade hundreds of thousands of muskets, vast quantities of cloth, gunpowder, and metals were being shipped to Guinea.

Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol.

Trade with Europe at the peak of the slave trade — which also included significant exports of gold and ivory — was some 3.5 million pounds Sterling per year.

By contrast, the trade of the United Kingdom, the economic superpower of the time, was about 14 million pounds per year over this same period of the late 18th century.

As Patrick Manning has pointed out, the vast majority of items traded for slaves were common rather than luxury goods.

Textiles, iron ore, currency, and salt were some of the most important commodities imported as a result of the slave trade, and these goods were spread within the entire society raising the general standard of living.

Although debated, it is argued that the Atlantic slave trade devastated the African economy.

In 19th century Yoruba Land, economic activity was described to be at its lowest ever while life and property were being taken daily, and normal living was in jeopardy because of the fear of being kidnapped. (Onwumah, Imhonopi, Adetunde,2019)

Effects on Europe's economy

Karl Marx in his economic history of capitalism, [Das Kapital], claimed that "...the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins [that is, the slave trade], signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production."

He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the "primitive accumulation" of European capital, the non-capitalist accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation and the advent of the capitalist mode of production.

Eric Williams has written about the contribution of Africans on the basis of profits from the slave trade and slavery, arguing that the employment of those profits were used to help finance Britain’s industrialisation.

He argues that the enslavement of Africans was an essential element to the Industrial Revolution, and that European wealth was, in part, a result of slavery, but that by the time of its abolition it had lost its profitability and it was in Britain's economic interest to ban it.

Joseph Inikori has written that the British slave trade was more profitable than the critics of Williams believe.

Other researchers and historians have strongly contested what has come to be referred to as the "Williams thesis" in academia: David Richardson has concluded that the profits from the slave trade amounted to less than 1% of domestic investment in Britain, and economic historian Stanley Engerman finds that even without subtracting the associated costs of the slave trade (e.g., shipping costs, slave mortality, mortality of whites in Africa, defense costs) or reinvestment of profits back into the slave trade, the total profits from the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to less than 5% of the British economy during any year of the Industrial Revolution.

Historian Richard Pares, in an article written before Williams’ book, dismisses the influence of wealth generated from the West Indian plantations upon the financing of the Industrial Revolution, stating that whatever substantial flow of investment from West Indian profits into industry there was occurred after emancipation, not before.

Findlay and O'Rourke noted that the figures presented by O'Brien (1982) to back his claim that "the periphery was peripheral" suggest the opposite, with profits from the periphery 1784–1786 being £5.66 million when there was £10.30 million total gross investment in the British economy and similar proportions for 1824–1826.

They note that dismissing the profits of the enslavement of human beings from significance because it was a "small share of national income", could be used to argue that there was no industrial revolution, since modern industry provided only a small share of national income and that it is a mistake to assume that small size is the same as small significance.

Findlay and O'Rourke also note that the share of American export commodities produced by enslaved human beings, rose from 54% between 1501 and 1550 to 82.5% between 1761–1780.

Seymour Drescher and Robert Anstey argue the slave trade remained profitable until the end, because of innovations in agriculture, and that moralistic reform, not economic incentive, was primarily responsible for abolition.

A similar debate has taken place about other European nations.

The French slave trade, it is argued, was more profitable than alternative domestic investments, and probably encouraged capital accumulation before the Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Legacy of racism

Maulana Karenga states the effects of the Atlantic slave trade in African captives:

"(T)he morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among people of today".

He says that it constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_i ... est_Africa
thelivyjr
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Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY

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Encyclopedia Britannica

Slave trade


Slavery, though abundantly practiced in Africa itself and widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world, had nearly died out in medieval Europe.

It was revived by the Portuguese in Prince Henry’s time, beginning with the enslavement of Berbers in 1442.


Portugal populated Cape Verde, Fernando Po (now Bioko), and São Tomé largely with black slaves and took many to the home country, especially to the regions south of the Tagus River.

New World black slavery began in 1502, when Gov. Nicolás de Ovando of Hispaniola imported a few evidently Spanish-born blacks from Spain.

Rapid decimation of the Indian population of the Spanish West Indies created a labour shortage, ultimately remedied from Africa.


The great reformer, Las Casas, advocated importation of blacks to replace the vanishing Indians, and he lived to regret having done so.

The population of the Greater Antilles became largely black and mulatto; on the mainland, at least in the more populated parts, the Indians, supplemented by a growing mestizo caste that clung more tenaciously to life and seemed more suited to labour, kept African slavery somewhat confined to limited areas.

The Portuguese at first practiced Indian slavery in Brazil and continued to employ it partially until 1755.

It was gradually replaced by the African variety, beginning prominently in the 17th century and coinciding with the rapid rise of Brazilian sugar culture.

As the English, French, Dutch, and, to a lesser extent, the Danes colonized the smaller West Indian islands, these became plantation settlements, largely cultivated by blacks.

Before the latter arrived in great numbers, the bulk of manual labour, especially in the English islands, was performed by poor whites.

Some were indentured, or contract, servants; some were redemptioners who agreed to pay ship captains their passage fees within a stated time or be sold to bidders; others were convicts.

Some were kidnapped, with the tacit approval of the English authorities, in keeping with the mercantilist policy that advocated getting rid of the unemployed and vagrants.


Black slavery eventually surpassed white servitude in the West Indies.

John Hawkins commanded the first English slave-trading expedition in 1562 and sold his cargo in the Spanish Indies.

English slaving, nevertheless, remained minor until the establishment of the English island colonies in the reign of James I (ruled 1603–25).


A Dutch captain sailed the first cargo of black slaves to Virginia in 1619, the year in which the colony exported 20,000 pounds (9,000 kilograms) of tobacco.

The restored Stuart king, Charles II, gave English slave trade to a monopolistic company, the Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, in 1663, but the Adventurers accomplished little because of the early outbreak of war with Holland (1665).

Its successor, the Royal African Company, was founded in 1672 and held the English monopoly until 1698, when all Englishmen received the right to trade in slaves.

The Royal African Company continued slaving until 1731, when it abandoned slaving in favour of traffic in ivory and gold dust.

A new slaving company, the Merchants Trading to Africa (founded 1750), had directors in London, Liverpool, and Bristol, with Bristol furnishing the largest quota of ships, estimated at 237 in 1755.

Jamaica offered the greatest single market for slaves and is believed to have received 610,000 between 1700 and 1786.

The slave trade still flourished in 1763, when about 150 ships sailed yearly from British ports to Africa with capacity for nearly 40,000 slaves.


There was no well-organized opposition to the slave trade before 1800, although some individuals and ephemeral societies condemned it.

The Spanish church saw the importation of blacks as an opportunity for converting them.

The English religionist George Fox, founder of Quakerism (founded in the 1650s), accepted the fact that his followers had bought slaves in Barbados, but he urged kind treatment.

The English novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe later denounced the traffic but seemingly regarded slavery itself as inevitable.

The English and Pennsylvania Quakers passed resolutions forbidding their members to engage in the trade, but their wording suggests that some were doing so; in fact, 84 of them were members of the Merchants Trading to Africa.

Those opposing the slave trade often objected on other than humanitarian grounds.

Some colonials feared any further growth of the black percentage of the population.

Others, who justified English slave sales to the Spanish colonies because payment was in cash, condemned the same traffic with French islanders, who paid in molasses and thus competed with nearby English sugar planters.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON THE ROOTS OF SLAVERY

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Encyclopedia Britannica

Slave trade
, concluded ...

Colonial wars of the first half of the 18th century

From 1689 to 1763 the British and French fought four wars that were mainly European in origin but which determined the colonial situation, in some cases for two centuries.

Spain entered all four, first in alliance with England and later in partnership with France, though it played a secondary role.

King William’s War (War of the League of Augsburg)

The war known in Europe as that of the Palatinate, League of Augsburg, or Grand Alliance, and in America as King William’s War, ended indecisively, after eight years, with the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697.

No territorial changes occurred in America, and because the great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb reigned in India, very little of the conflict penetrated there.

Queen Anne’s War (War of the Spanish Succession)

Queen Anne’s War, the American phase of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), began in 1702.

Childless king Charles II of Spain, dying in 1700, willed his entire possessions to Philip, grandson of Louis XIV of France.

England, the United Provinces, and Austria intervened, fearing a virtual union between powerful Louis and Spain detrimental to the balance of power, and Queen Anne’s War lasted until terminated by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

England (Great Britain after 1707) gained Gibraltar and Minorca and, in North America, acquired Newfoundland and French Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia).

It also received clear title to the northern area being exploited by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Bourbon prince Philip was recognized as king of Spain, but the British secured the important asiento, or right to supply Spanish America with slaves, for 30 years.

King George’s War (War of the Austrian Succession)

There followed a peace almost unbroken until 1739, when, with the asiento about to expire and Spain unwilling to renew it, Great Britain and Spain went to war.

The recent amputation of an English seaman’s ear by a Spanish Caribbean coast guard caused the conflict to be named the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

This merged in 1740 with the War of the Austrian Succession (called King George’s War in America), between Frederick II the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria over Silesia.

France joined Spain and Prussia against Great Britain and Austria, and the war, which was terminated in 1748 by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, proved indecisive.

New England colonials captured Louisbourg, the fortified French island commanding the St. Lawrence entrance, but France’s progress in India counterbalanced this conquest.

With the Mughal Empire now virtually extinct, the British and French East India Companies fought each other, the advantage going to the French under Dupleix, who captured Madras and nearly expelled the British.

The peace treaty restored all conquests; France recovered Louisbourg, and the British regained Madras and with it another chance to become paramount in India.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wester ... lave-trade
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