The Transatlantic Slave Trade History 111 – World History since 1500 Spring 2022 Jorge Minella ([email protected])

Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Before the Americas: 500/year peak, 1480s.  To Europe.  To Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic Islands.

 After the Americas: 35,000/year peak, 1760-1820.

Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Portuguese foundations of the transatlantic slave trade.

 The mature slave trade.  Northern Europeans.

 The Middle Passage.

 Volume of trade.

Foundations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Early Portuguese Slave Trade

 Early stages of the maritime expansion.

 Portuguese in-land raids too risky.

 Trade outposts.

 Existing African slave markets.

Feitoria

 Fortified trading posts.

 Used to store goods and slaves.

 Little risk to European merchants.

 Influenced the development of New World colonies.

São Jorge da Mina (Elmina), current-day Ghana.

Portuguese Strategies

 Relations through trade.

 Offer of freight service.

 Conversion of the elites to Roman Catholicism.

 Examples: Kongo, Ndongo, Benin.

 5 million captives from West Central Africa to Americas (1519- 1867)

In Short – Origins of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

 Portuguese Feitorias.

 Existing African slave markets.

 African elites benefit.

 Slave-based plantations in the Atlantic Islands (15th century).

 Slave-based plantations in the Americas (16th century).

 No African collective identity.

The Mature Transatlantic Slave Trade

Mature Slave Trade  Northern European Traders replace

Portuguese.  Dutch, British, French, Danish, and

others.

 Increased demand in the colonies.

 Colonies also became suppliers of trade goods sent to Africa.

 Formation of the Atlantic World: set of relations allowed for by the Atlantic.

 Rivalry between European powers. Depiction of Recife’s slave Market, Brazil, 17th century. Zacaharias Wagner.

Profitability

 Decrease in transportation cost.

 Profits reinvested in Europe.

 European development.  Benefitted from slave trade.

 And from the products of slavery.

The Middle Passage  Hundreds of captives per ship.

 10 to 20% death rate.

 Suicide or attack on crew members.

 Mutinies rare.

 Difficult communication.

 Exemplary and brutal violence and humiliation against dissenters.

Detail of a British broadside depicting the ship Brooks and the manner (c. 1790) in which more than 420 enslaved adults and children could be carried on board.

Traffic to the Americas

 1492-1808

 2 million free European migrants.

 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans.

Opposition to the Trade

 Not relevant among Europeans.

 Racism strong.

 Visibility achieved in the late 18th century.

 Olaudah Equiano.

Western African Societies History 111 – World History since 1500 Spring 2022 Jorge Minella ([email protected])

Northern Africa Western Africa Central Africa Eastern Africa Southern Africa

UN Subregions of Africa

West and West Central Africa, 15th century

 Hoe agriculture.

 Chiefdoms.

 Some kingdoms (Mali, Benin, Loango, others).

 Long distance land-based trade.

 Islam in trade routes and Northern West Africa.

West and West Central African Kingdoms

Mali and Songhai

 Mali (~1200-1400 c.e.)  Gold.

 Trade caravans, gateway to the Sahara.

 Cultural crossroads.

 Songhai (~1400-1590s)  Took most of Mali’s territory.

 Thriving trade of gold, salt, forest products.

 Some slavery in both.

Benin and Yoruba

 Benin.

 Confederation in the twelfth century.

 Centralized kingdom by the fifteenth century.

 Yoruba.

 City-states.

 Thriving religious tradition.

Depiction of Benin City in the seventeenth century. D. O. Drapper (Dutch physician and writer).

West Central Africa

 Kingdoms of Loango and Kongo (~1300 c.e.)

 Ndongo (~1500 c.e.)

 Well developed metallurgy.  Iron works with political importance.

 Columbian Exchange diversified agriculture.

Slavery in Africa

Slavery in Africa before European Interlopers

 How did it work?

 Understand European slave traders’ strategies.

 Understand changes after European slave trade.

 Consequences for Africa.

Slavery in Africa

 War captives.

 Debt.

 Condition not passed to descendants.

 Pathways to freedom.

 Household service, military service, agricultural work.

African Slave Trade

 Internal African trade.

 External trade (since the eight century).  To the Arabian

Peninsula and Indian Ocean.

 To the Mediterranean.

 Small if compared to the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries).

An important distinction

Societies with slaves.

Slave societies.

Slavery in Early Modernity

 Slavery in Africa: societies with slaves.

 Slavery in Iberia (1440s): societies with slaves.

 Slavery in parts of America: slave societies.

 Europeans based enslavement on race.  Major difference in relation to slavery in African societies.

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17

Western Africa in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1450–1800

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Many Western Africas FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural practices, and political arrangements typified western Africa in early modern times?

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in West Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Africa?

Land of the Blacksmith Kings: West Central Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Central Africa?

Strangers in Ships: Gold, Slavery, and the Portuguese

FOCUS How did the early Portuguese slave trade in western Africa function?

Northern Europeans and the Expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1800

FOCUS What were the major changes in the Atlantic slave trade after 1600?

COUNTERPOINT: The Pygmies of Central Africa

FOCUS How did the Pygmies’ rainforest world differ from the better-known environment of savannas and farms?

backstory Prior to 1450, the lives of most western Afri-

cans focused on hoe agriculture, supplemen-

tary herding and hunting, and in some places

mining and metallurgy. Chiefdoms were the

dominant political form throughout the region,

from the southern fringes of Morocco to the

interior of Angola, although several expansive

kingdoms rose and fell along the Niger and

Volta Rivers, notably Old Ghana, which thrived

from about 300 to 1000, and most recently, as

the early modern period dawned, Mali, which

flourished from about 1200 to 1400.

Trade in many commodities stretched over

vast distances, often monopolized by extended

families or ethnic groups. Muslim traders were

dominant along the southern margins of the

Sahara Desert after about 1000 C.E. Some west-

ern African merchants traded slaves across the

Sahara to the Mediterranean basin, and others

raided vulnerable villages for captives, some of

whom were sent as far away as the Red Sea and

Indian Ocean. Islam predominated by 1450

along many trade routes into the savanna, or

grasslands, but most western Africans retained

local religious beliefs.

World in the Making This dramatic brass plaque depicts the oba, or king, of Benin in a royal procession, probably in the sixteenth century. He is seated side- saddle on a seemingly overburdened horse, probably imported and sold to him by Portuguese traders. The larger attendants to each side shade the monarch while the smaller ones hold his staff and other regal paraphernalia. Above, as if walking behind, are two armed guards. (Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, N Y)

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In 1594 a youth was captured in West Central Africa. The Portuguese, who con- trolled the Atlantic port of Luanda, where the young captive was taken, called this region Angola, a corruption of the Kimbundu term for “blacksmith.” The young man was branded, examined like a beast, and sold; he was also, in the words of his captors, “a black.” In Luanda, the captive was housed in a stifling barracks with others, whose words, looks, hairstyles, and “country marks,” or ritual scars, were unfamiliar.

Eventually, Roman Catholic priests who had just established a mission in Luanda appeared and spoke to the captives in mostly unintelligible words. After several weeks, each captive was sprinkled with water and given a lump of salt on the tongue. Then names were assigned. The young man was now called “Domingo.” Once in the Americas, scribes recorded his name as “Domingo Angola, black slave.”

Domingo was one of the lucky ones. He survived the barracks and then the grueling two-month voyage, or “middle passage,” to Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast of present-day Colombia. More than one in five died during these ordeals. Once ashore, Domingo Angola was washed, oiled, examined for signs of contagious illness, and fed maize gruel and tough, salted beef.

Domingo was sent to Panama, where he was sold to a merchant traveling to Quito, high in the Andes Mountains. There, in 1595, he was sold again to two merchants heading to the silver-mining town of Potosí, several thousand miles to the south. On the way, Domingo fell ill while waiting for a ship on the Pacific coast and had to be treated. In Potosí at last, he was sold yet again. He had not yet turned nineteen.1

Meanwhile, back in Angola, a story arose about men and women such as Domingo who had been sent across the sea. People began to imagine that they were being captured to feed a distant race of cannibals. These “people eaters,” red in color, lived somewhere beyond the sunset, on the far side of an enormous lake, and there they butchered ordinary Angolans. Human blood was their wine, brains their cheese, and roasted and ground long-bones their gunpowder. The red people—the sunburned Portuguese—were devotees of Mwene Puto, God of the Dead. How else to explain the massive, ceaseless traffic in souls, what Angolans called the “way of death”?2

Domingo’s long journey from Africa to South America was not unusual, and in fact he would have met many other Angolans arriving in Potosí via Buenos Aires. Victims of the Atlantic slave trade were constantly on the move, and slave mobility diminished only with the rise of plantation agriculture in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries. Shuffling of ethnic groups was typical of the Atlantic slave trade and what historians call the African diaspora, or “great scattering” of sub-Saharan

A frican diaspora The global dispersal, mostly through the Atlantic slave trade, of A frican peoples.

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African peoples. As we will see in the next chapter, millions of slaves were sent across the Indian Ocean from East Africa as well. This chapter focuses on western or “Atlantic” Africa, a vast portion of the continent that geographers normally split into two parts: West and West Central Africa (see Map 17.1, page 608).

Although slavery and slave trading were practiced in western Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, both institutions changed dramatically as a result of the surge in European demand for African slaves coinciding with colonization of the Americas. New patterns of behavior emerged. African warriors and mercenaries focused more on kidnapping their neighbors in order to trade them to foreign sla- vers for weapons, stimulants, and luxury goods; coastal farmers abandoned lands vulnerable to raiders; formerly protective customs were called into question; and Islam and Christianity made new inroads. We now know that even inland cultures such as the Batwa, or Pygmies, of the Congo rainforest were affected by the slave trade. They were driven deeper into the forest as other internal migrants, forced to move by slavers, expanded their farms and pasturelands. There, as we will see in the Counterpoint to this chapter, the Pygmies forged a lifestyle far different from that of their settled neighbors.

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS

The major global development in this chapter: The rise of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on early modern A frican peoples and cultures.

As you read, consider:

1. How did ecological

diversity in western

Africa relate to cultural

developments?

2. What tied western

Africa to other parts of

the world prior to the ar-

rival of Europeans along

Atlantic shores?

3. How did the

Atlantic slave

trade arise,

and how was it

sustained?

Many Western Africas

FOCUS What range of livelihoods, cultural practices, and political arrangements typified western Africa in early modern times?

The A frican continent was home to an estimated one hundred million people at the time of Columbus’s 1492 voyage. About fifty million people inhabited West

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0

0 500 Kilometers

500 Miles

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Mediterranean Sea

Gulf of Guinea

Volta R.

Canary Is.

Madeira Is.

Cape Verde

Is.

Cape of Good Hope

São Tomé

Senegal R.

Nig er R

.

N ile R.

Uele R.

Kasai R.

Congo R.

Zam bezi R.

Lim popo R.

Lake Tanganyika

Lake Chad

Orang e R.

Gambia R.

Kwanza R .

MATAMBA

LOANGO KONGO

A�N

BENIN

BENIN

SONGHAI

MO RO

CC O

YORUBA

MALI

NDONGO

S a h a r a

Atlas Mt s.

N am

ibia D esert Kalahari

Desert

W E S T A F R I C A

WEST CENTRAL AFRICA

Gao

Cairo

Jenne-jeno

EdoIfe

Timbuktu S U D A N

M A G H R E B

ANGOL A

S A H E L LO

W E

R G

U IN

E A

U PPER

G U

IN E A

Western Africa, c. 1500 Trade goods Agriculture

Cola nuts Copper Cowry shells Gold Honey Iron Ivory Ra�a cloth Salt

Bananas Co�on Millet Rice Sorghum Yams

Equator 0º

20ºN

20ºS

Tropic of Capricorn

Tropic of Cancer

20ºW 0º 20ºE

BATWA

MANDE

MANE

TUAREG

KHOIKHOI

MAP 17.1 Western A frica, c. 1500 The huge regions of West and West Central A frica were of key importance to early modern global history as sources of both luxury commodities and enslaved immigrants. But western A frica was also marked by substantial internal dynamism. The Songhai Empire on the middle Niger rose to prominence about the time of Columbus. Large kingdoms and city-states also flourished on the Volta and lower Niger R ivers and near the mouth of the Congo (Zaire). Rainforests and deserts were home to gatherer-hunters such as the Batwa (Pygmies) and K hoikhoi.

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and West Central A frica, what we refer to here as “western A frica.” Western A frica thus had a population comparable to that of all the Americas at that time. It con- tained several dozen tributary states, along with numerous permanent agricultural and mobile, warrior-headed chiefdoms. There were also pastoral or herding groups, trading peoples, fishing folk, and bands of desert and rainforest gatherer-hunters. The array of livelihoods was wide, yet most western A fricans lived as hoe agricul- turalists, primarily cultivators of rice, sorghum, millet, and cotton (see Map 17.1).

Religious ideas and practices varied, but most A fricans south of the Sahara placed great emphasis on fertility. Fertility rituals were integral to everyday life; some entailed animal sacrifice, and others, rarely, human sacrifice. A lso as in many other early modern societies, discord, illness, and material hardship were often thought to be the products of witchcraft. Islam, introduced by long-distance trad- ers and warriors after the seventh century C.E ., became dominant in the dry sahel (from the Arabic for “shore”) and savanna, or grassland, regions just south of the Sahara, and along the rim of the Indian Ocean. Christian and Jewish communities were limited to tiny pockets in the northeastern Horn and along the Maghreb, or Mediterranean coast. Over two thousand languages were spoken on the continent, most of them derived from four roots. A ll told, A frica’s cultural and linguistic di- versity easily exceeded that of Europe in the era of Columbus.

Even where Islam predominated, local notions of the spirit world survived. Most western A fricans believed in a creator deity, and everyday ritual tended to empha- size communication with ancestor spirits, who helped placate other forces. Animal and plant spirits were considered especially potent.

Places were also sacred. Rather like Andean wakas, western A frican génies ( JEHN-ees) could be features in the landscape: boulders, springs, rivers, lakes, and groves. Trees were revered among peoples living along the southern margins of the savanna, and villagers built alongside patches of old-growth forest. Through periodic animal sacrifice, western A fricans sought the patronage of tree spirits, since they were most rooted in the land.

Western A frica fell entirely within the lowland tropics and was thus subject to many endemic diseases and pests. The deadly falciparum variety of malaria and other serious mosquito-borne fevers attacked humans in the hot lowlands, and the tsetse fly, carrier of the fatal trypanosomiasis virus, limited livestock grazing and horse breeding. Droughts could be severe and prolonged in some regions, spurring migration and warfare. Western A fricans nevertheless adapted to these and other environmental challenges, in the case of malaria developing at least some immu- nity against the disease.

génie A sacred site or feature in the West A frican landscape.

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In the arid north, beasts of burden included camels, donkeys, and horses. Cattle were also kept in the interior highlands and far south, where they were safe from tsetse flies. A rabian warhorses were greatly prized, and were traded among kingdoms and chiefdoms along the southern margins of the Sahara. They were most valued where fly-borne disease made breeding impossible. Other domestic animals included goats, swine, guinea fowl, sheep, and dogs. In general, animal husbandry, as in greater Eurasia, was far more developed in western A frica than in the A mericas. There were also more large wild mammals in sub-Saharan A frica than in any other part of the world, and these featured prominently in regional cosmologies.

Mining and metalsmithing technologies were also highly developed. Throughout West and West Central A frica, copper-based metallurg y had grow n complex by 1500. Goldsmithing was also advanced, though less w idespread. Th is was in part because A frican gold was being increasingly draw n away by

trade to the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. To a large extent, western Eurasia’s “ bullion famine” spurred European ex pansion into A frica.

A fricans had long been great producers and consumers of iron. W hether in Mali or Angola, A frican ironmongers were not simply artisans but also shaman-like figures and even paramount chiefs—heads of village clans. A frican met- alsmiths produced substantial tools, ornaments, and works of art. They made the iron hoes most people tended crops with, and some items were traded in bulk over vast distances.

A frica’s internal trade mostly redistributed basic commodities. Those who mined or col- lected salt, for example, usually bartered it for other necessities such as cloth. Saharan salt was an essential dietary supplement throughout the vast West A frican interior. Similarly, man- ufactured goods such as agricultural tools were traded for food, textiles, and livestock, but bits of gold, copper, and iron also served as currency. Another key trade good was the cola nut, the sharing of which cemented social relations in much of West A frica.

A Young Woman from West Africa Since at least medieval times, West African women surprised outside visitors with their independence, visibility, and political influence, in both Islamic and non-Islamic societies. This drawing by an English artist during a slave-trading voyage to West Africa around 1775 depicts a young woman with elaborately braided hair, pearl earrings, and a choker strung with coral or large stones. It is possible that she is a member of an elite family given these proudly displayed ornaments.

husbandry Human intervention in the breeding of animals.

paramount chief A chief who presided over several headmen and controlled a large area.

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Copper and bronze bracelets were prized by some of western A frica’s coastal peoples, and eventually they were standardized into currency called manillas (mah-K NEE-lahs). In some areas seashells such as the cowry functioned in the same way. The desire for cotton textiles from India fueled A frica’s west coast demand for shell and copper-bronze currency, which in time would also contrib- ute to the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. A frica’s east coast, meanwhile, re- mained integrated into the vast and mostly separate Indian Ocean trade circuit, as we will see in Chapter 18.

A frican societies linked by trade were sometimes also bound by politics. A shared desire to both expand household units and improve security led many A fricans to form confederations and conglomerates. Like the confederacies of eastern North America (discussed in Chapter 15), some of these alliances had a religious core, but just as often they were spurred by ecological stresses such as droughts. Political flux caused ethnic and other identity markers to blend and blur as groups merged and adopted each other’s languages, cosmologies, farming techniques, and modes of dress and adornment.

Nevertheless, as in the Americas, intergroup conflict was common in western A frica prior to the arrival of Europeans. Expansionist, tributary empires such as Mali and Songhai made lifelong enemies. The motives of A frican warfare varied, usually centering on the control of resources, and especially people, sometimes as slaves put to work on agricultural estates. European trading and political meddling on A frica’s Atlantic coast would spawn or exacerbate conflicts that would rever- berate deep within the continent. Full-blown imperialism would come much later, with the development of new technologies and antimalarial drugs, but it would benefit in part from this earlier political disruption.

Landlords and Strangers: Peoples and States in West Africa

FOCUS What economic, social, and political patterns characterized early modern West Africa?

West A fricans in the period following 700 C.E . faced radical new developments. Two catalysts for change were the introduction and spread of Islam after the eighth century and a long dry period lasting from roughly 1100 to 1500 C.E . At least one historian has characterized human relations in this era in terms of “land- lords” and “strangers,” a reference to the tendency toward small agricultural com- munities offering hospitality to travelers and craft specialists.3 In return, these

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“strangers”—traders, blacksmiths, tanners, bards, and clerics—offered goods and services. The model “landlord” was an esteemed personage capable of ensuring the security and prosperity of numerous dependents and affiliates, usually conceived of as members of an extended family.

Empire Builders and Traders The late medieval dry period also witnessed the rise of mounted warriors. On the banks of the middle and upper Niger River rose the kingdoms of Mali and Songhai, both linked to the Mediterranean world via the caravan terminus of Timbuktu (see again Map 17.1). Both empires were headed by devout, locally born Muslim rulers. One, Mansa Musa (mansa meaning “conqueror”) of Mali, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325. Musa spent so much gold during a stop in Cairo that his visit became legend.

It was gold that put sub-Saharan A frica on the minds—and maps—of European and Middle Eastern traders and monarchs. West A frican mines were worked by farming peoples who paid tribute in gold dust unearthed in the fallow (inactive) season (see Lives and Livelihoods: West A frica’s Gold Miners). In general, land was a less-prized commodity than labor in West A frica. Prestige derived not from ownership of farmland or mines but from control over productive people, some of whom were enslaved. Captive-taking was thus integral to warfare. Like the sea- sonal production of gold, the seasonal production of slaves would vastly expand once Europeans arrived on Atlantic shores.

With the exception, as we will see, of the Songhai Empire, West A frican politics in this period was mostly confederated. Dozens of paramount chiefs or regional kings relied on tributaries and enslaved laborers for their power, wealth, and sus- tenance. Most common was the rise of charismatic and aggressive rulers, with few bureaucrats and judges. Rulers typically extended their authority by offering to pro- tect agricultural groups from raiders. Some coastal rice growers in Upper Guinea drifted in and out of regional alliances, depending on political and environmental conditions. A lliances did not always spare them from disaster. Still, as actors in the Columbian Exchange, enslaved rice farmers from this region transferred tech- niques and perhaps grains to the plantations of North and South America.

From Western Sudan to Lower Guinea, town-sized units predominated, many of them walled. Archaeologists are still discovering traces of these enclosures, some of which housed thousands of inhabitants. As in medieval Europe, even when they shared a language, walled cities in neighboring territories could be fiercely competitive.

Dating to the first centuries C . E ., West A frica was also home to sizable k ing- doms. Old Ghana flourished from about 300 to 1000 C . E ., followed by Mali,

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which thrived from about 1200 to 1400. From about the time of Columbus, the Songhai Empire, centered at Gao, rose to prominence under Sunni A li (r.  1464 –1492). Similar to the mansas of Mali, Sunni A li was a conqueror, employ ing mounted lancers and squads of boatmen to great effect. Sunni A li ’s successor