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The Transatlantic Slave Trade
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US History – Slavery, 1500-1865
In this course, Professor Tim Lockley (University of Warwick) explores the history of slavery in the United States. We begin in the first module with an exploration of the earliest history of slavery in Africa and the development of the transatlantic slave trade. After that, we turn to the domestic slave trade – i.e. the buying and selling of slaves within the United States – before turning in the third module to the question of the kind of work that enslaved individuals did. In the fourth module, we think about the kind of relationship that enslaved people had with their owners, while in the fifth we think about what enslaved people did in their free time. In the sixth module, we think about enslaved people’s family life, in the seventh their health, and in the eighth their religious life – focusing in particular on why so many enslaved people converted to Christianity. In the ninth module, we think about slave culture – how enslaved people spoke, what they ate, the kinds of stories they told and songs they sang – before turning in the tenth module to consider the ways in which enslaved people resisted slavery. In the eleventh module, we think about why there were so few slave rebellions in the United States, while in the twelfth and final module, we think about how attitudes towards race factored into the workings of slavery in the United States.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
In this module, we think about the earliest history of slavery in the United States, focusing in particular on: (i) the extent of the slave trade in Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans; (ii) European involvement in the African slave trade from the mid-15th century onwards; (iii) the discovery of the Americas in the late 15th century and the reasons for the mass importation of African slaves, as opposed to the enslavement of Native Americans; (iv) the development of the triangular trading system between Europe, Africa and the Americas; (v) the level of African involvement in the slave trade; (vi) the destination of enslaved Africans in the Americas – 80% to the Caribbean or Brazil, just 5% to the United States – and the reasons for this imbalance; and (vii) the profound impact of the slave trade on the demography of the United States.
Hello,
00:00:05My name is Tim.
00:00:06Luckily, I am a professor of American history here at the University of Warrick,
00:00:07and this is a short series of lectures on American slavery.
00:00:11This first section
00:00:15is about the origins of American slavery,
00:00:16specifically about the transatlantic slave trade.
00:00:18Now slavery had existed in Africa for a
00:00:22long time before Europeans ever visited there.
00:00:25But when Europeans first started to visit and explore the West African
00:00:29coast in the 15th century was mainly the Portuguese and the Spanish.
00:00:33They found that slaves were one of the
00:00:37commodities that Africans were willing to trade.
00:00:39Uh, finished goods, cloths, precious metals worked goods
00:00:42for.
00:00:47And so even before Columbus travelled the Atlantic in 14,
00:00:4892 African slaves were being used in
00:00:51Spain and Portugal.
00:00:56Now, once the Spanish and the Portuguese got to the Americas
00:00:58and they found these
00:01:02new undiscovered, as they thought lands,
00:01:04they decided that they were going to exploit these lands for
00:01:07their mineral wealth and for their potential for tropical agriculture.
00:01:11Now
00:01:18they had a problem
00:01:18because they didn't have enough people willing to go from Spain and Portugal
00:01:20to go and work in these new places.
00:01:24So they first of all, decided to use the local Native American population.
00:01:27But there was a big problem.
00:01:32The Native American population had been cut off from the
00:01:34rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years,
00:01:37and they were not immune to any of the diseases
00:01:40that Europeans brought with them to the Americas.
00:01:43And so very quickly the Native American population
00:01:45started to decline
00:01:48and they died of things like influenza
00:01:50and measles and smallpox.
00:01:52So Europeans were faced with a dilemma. How could they continue to exploit
00:01:55these new lands
00:01:59without labour?
00:02:02Well,
00:02:03the solution
00:02:04presented itself very readily.
00:02:06It was in Africa. They already knew that Africans were willing to sell
00:02:08people,
00:02:13and therefore they went to Africa and brought
00:02:15those people from Africa to the Americas.
00:02:18Now this started what was called a triangular trade,
00:02:22where Europeans and it wasn't just the Spanish and the Portuguese,
00:02:25the French and the English, and the Dutch and the Danish or got involved
00:02:29would take finished goods
00:02:34to Africa. They would trade those finished goods
00:02:36in Africa for slaves.
00:02:40They would take those slaves to the Americas and in the Americas
00:02:42they would trade those slaves for raw materials so cotton, sugar,
00:02:45coffee, rice,
00:02:51those kinds of products
00:02:52and they would bring those raw materials back to Europe.
00:02:54And, of course, it was a triangular trade.
00:02:57The middle section of that trade,
00:02:59from Africa to the Americas became known as the Middle Passage,
00:03:01and over the course of about 400 years, from about 1500 to about 1900
00:03:05about 12 million Africans were taken from Africa and transported forcibly
00:03:11to
00:03:17the Americas.
00:03:18Now you shouldn't get the idea that the slave trade involved Europeans
00:03:19raiding Africa for slaves that's far too inefficient away to transport people.
00:03:24Europeans wanted to spend as little time as
00:03:32possible on the African coast for two reasons.
00:03:35Firstly, it was an economic.
00:03:38So time they spent in Africa was time they weren't making money,
00:03:40but secondly, Africa was a really difficult disease environment for Europeans.
00:03:44So endemic diseases such as malaria and yellow fever that were common in West Africa
00:03:49had a very large impact on ships crews that were ducking
00:03:55in in West African ports in order to gather slaves,
00:04:00so they wanted to spend as little time there as possible.
00:04:03And so what they did is they came to arrangement with local African rulers, princes,
00:04:06kings chiefs
00:04:10and asked them to gather slaves at the coast
00:04:12and for them to raid to the inland areas in order to
00:04:15gather their slaves and have them ready in
00:04:19waiting for the ships when the ships arrived.
00:04:21And so
00:04:24there was definitely a strong African involvement in the slave trade
00:04:25from the very outset, and it continued throughout the transatlantic slave trade,
00:04:29and Europeans transported these 12 million people over to the Americas,
00:04:35where they sold them for use in plantation agriculture.
00:04:40And about 40% of those transported went to the Caribbean.
00:04:46About 40% went to Brazil, and only 5% around
00:04:49500 to 600,000 people
00:04:54ended up in what is now the United States. So they were very much a bit part player
00:04:57in the transatlantic slave trade.
00:05:02And that's partly because
00:05:04the North Americans were nowhere near as wealthy
00:05:06as planters in the Caribbean in Brazil,
00:05:09but also because
00:05:10plantation slavery started slightly later in North America
00:05:12and they thought they came a bit later into the system.
00:05:16But
00:05:19the transatlantic slave trade,
00:05:20uh,
00:05:22is something that dominates the history of the
00:05:22Americas and completely changed the demography of the place
00:05:25
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Lockley, T. (2019, October 17). US History – Slavery, 1500-1865 - The Transatlantic Slave Trade [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/slavery-in-the-united-states-c-1500-1865/race-relations
MLA style
Lockley, T. "US History – Slavery, 1500-1865 – The Transatlantic Slave Trade." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 17 Oct 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/slavery-in-the-united-states-c-1500-1865/race-relations