October 5, 2023
Troy D. Smith
“How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began”
Last week I told you about the Arab slave trade, which
involved mostly captives from sub-Saharan Africa but also involved some other
groups of people, including Europeans captured on or near the Mediterranean
(perhaps as many as a million over a couple of centuries), and which lasted
around a thousand years. It has been estimated that as many as 17 million
people were sold as slaves in that millennium. How does that compare with the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade, wherein Europeans transported African slaves to the
New World? That has been estimated at around 13 million -but over only 350
years. So, during that 350 years, Europeans were trading two-and-a-half times as
many slaves as were their Arab counterparts. So that’s one big difference
-sheer scale. Let’s discuss how that happened.
It all started in the “Age of Discovery,” roughly the
early-to-mid 1400s. Europeans had been exposed to luxury items from the Far
East (like silks and spices -and sugar) during the Crusades in the Middle East.
It was impossible to trade directly with East Asian lands like India and China,
because the Muslim-controlled Middle East was in-between Europe and those far
eastern markets. It’s fair to say that European Christendom and Islamic lands
were not on the best terms, post-Crusades. It was therefore either impossible
to get at those Far Eastern trade goods, or you could only get them by going
through Middle Eastern middlemen who had a considerable markup attached. This
is why so many Europeans in the 1400s were wanting to explore oceans, hoping to
find a way to bypass the Muslim World and get at those treasured items. There
was also a strong desire for access to the gold and gems (and, later, coffee) of
southern Africa -and Muslims were blocking them there, too.
Enter Prince Henry of Portugal, alias Henry the Navigator. Henry
supervised the construction of a new, lighter and more maneuverable ship, the
caravel -and invested money in the training and hiring of cartographers and
navigators, convinced they could make their way down the (unknown to Europeans
at the time) coast of Africa and find the source of all that gold. The plan was
to sail west and swing wide around northwest Africa and the Arabs and Berbers
there, looping back east south of the Sahara Desert.
While making that initial swing into the Atlantic, though,
the Portuguese stumbled across several uninhabited islands previously unknown
to them, namely Madeira and the Azores (still part of Portugal today). These
semi-tropical islands, it turns out, were capable of growing sugarcane. It
would no longer be necessary to buy it from India or intermediaries. The
Portuguese government encouraged Portuguese farmers to move to the islands to
work in cane fields -to be transplanted, in other words. Which is why such
farms began to be called, in English, plantations. However, it proved hard to
convince even poor Portuguese people to move out to the middle of nowhere for
very low wages, so another tack was tried -slavery. Initially, the slave labor
consisted of the native people of the nearby Canary Islands, which Portugal had
already claimed. However, they had low resistance to disease, and quickly died
off.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese had, in fact, made contact with
the African peoples south of the Sahara -people who had been participating in
the Arab slave trade for centuries by selling off the captives they took when
warring with one another. The Portuguese began buying African slaves from them,
as well, to work on their sugar plantations off the coast of Africa. And so had
been planted -on a very small scale -both the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and
the genocide of indigenous people… for
the sake of trade and profit.
In ensuing decades, both the Portuguese and their Spanish
allies/competitors/frenemies would push farther into the Atlantic looking for
trade routes. They would find two huge continents ripe for cultivation -but,
inconveniently, already inhabited.
To be continued.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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