Transcript Slavery - Literature and Writing

Slavery
Mapping the Spread of Slavery
“The institution of chattel slavery is older than the
first human written records”
“Wherever we look, slave systems dot (and sometime
dominate) the historical geography of very different
regions of the globe.”
“Between the fall of Rome and the decline of feudalism – a
period of some 1000 years – slavery and other forms of
bondage were as common in Europe as in other continents.”
“The Arabs and their Muslim converts were the first people to make use of
millions of blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and to begin associating black
Africans with the lowliest form of bondage. As many as fourteen million
African slaves were exported to Muslim regions.”
“While African slaves were not part of any original European
blueprint for colonizing the Americas, spatial boundaries had
shifted by the 1490s in a way that would enable Europeans to
draw on an enormous potential supply of African slave labor.”
“There were few states strong enough to prevent
opportunistic African kings from profiting from the low cost
of capturing, transporting, and minimally sustaining a captive
who could be sold for highly desired commodities.”
“As the slave trade increased (dramatically after 1600) ever more
Europeans sought a toehold on the coast as the best way of guaranteeing
their own share of the lucrative trade across the Atlantic. . . . At the same
time, newly emergent European powers began to flex their own
commercial and maritime muscles, seeking a profitable share both in the
trade and in the settlement of the Americas.”
“About twelve million Africans began the Atlantic crossing – the Middle
Passage – by being loaded into the slave ships, but only ten and a half
million lived to see landfall on the far side of the Atlantic. . . . The purpose
of this violent system was profit.”
“The Atlantic slave trade thus became a massive industry. It was also an industry
that spawned a complexity of other businesses and trades throughout the Atlantic
world. It became, in effect, the lubricant of a huge Atlantic trading system, and it
reminds us of the need, throughout, to integrate the slave trade with the wider
commercial activities of which the slave trade was a critical part.”
“The Atlantic crossings constituted the largest enforced movement of peoples
known to the pre-twentieth-century world. . . . It was the unique terrors of
crossing the Atlantic that seem to have scarred the Africans most deeply. Not
surprisingly, the Atlantic slave trade has come to symbolize the most brutal feature
of the wider story of slavery in the Americas.”
“The westward drift of sugar production presented the ideal crop for New
World development at a time when Western Europe was about to develop
internal markets for such other luxury products as eastern spices, tea,
coffee, chocolate, and tobacco.”
“Slavery had been a feature of many African societies long before the Europeans arrived by
sea. It was the existence of slavery in Africa that enabled Europeans to accept Africans as
slaves in the first place. In addition, the idea that slavery of other alien people was wrong
was largely unknown – in Europe or Africa – in these years of colonial expansion. Africans
felt no more uneasy about enslaving other Africans, from different cultures, than European
traders felt uneasy when buying Africans on the coast.”
“Sugar poured across the Atlantic to Europe. Everywhere the key was the African.
Europeans all agreed that Africans, later their locally born descendants, were
essential to the task of converting fertile Caribbean lands to profitable cultivation.”
“There was a discrepancy throughout the islands between the numbers imported
and the numbers in the population, but the explanation was simple. The sugar
islands were a ‘graveyard for slaves.’ All the human data we possess were at their
worst among African slaves. And these data were the worst of all among sugar
slaves.”
“Until the 1720s, the black population of North America grew via imported Africans. Thereafter, it began
to increase naturally rather than via the Atlantic slave trade. When the American colonies broke away from
Britain in1776, they took with them half a million blacks; by 1810, that had increased to 1.4 million,
overwhelmingly in the Old South. This established American slave population that was to make possible
the development of the enslaved cotton revolution of the nineteenth century and the consequent westward
movement of slavery from the former colonies to the new cotton frontier.”
“The association between cotton and slavery is embedded deep in US history and folk
memory. The development of cotton in the South saw the emergence of a new trading axis.
The net result of the cotton revolution was the transfer of slavery across huge tracts of North
America.”
“At the outbreak of the Civil War, the USA was home to four million slaves. The USA no
longer needed Africa. But it did need a slave trade. This was the period of heightened slave
distress, when the agonies of slavery were often compounded by family separations, with
families split by slave traders trawling for suitable labour to buy and move to the cotton states.
The agonies wrought by this internal American slave trade were there for all to see.”
“The history of slavery is the history of slave resistance. Slaves resisted their bondage in
many different ways. Most spectacular of all forms of slave resistance were slave revolts and
rebellions. Only one fully succeeded in overthrowing slave society: the Haitian revolt of 1791.
Most failed and were crushed, normally with a savage brutality designed to overawe other
slaves.”
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep
forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel
of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable
by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in
such a contest.”
“There were strong economic reasons for the broad reach of American slavery. Southern
slave-grown cotton was by far the nation’s leading export. It powered textile-manufacturing
revolutions in both New England and England. American slaves represented more capital
than any other asset in the nation, with the exception of land. In 1860 the value of Southern
slaves was about three times the value of the capital stock in manufacturing and railroads.
The Southern ‘lords of the lash’ forged ever closer ties with Northern ‘lords of the loom.’”
“New World slavery. . .its specifically racial character. . . . slavery became indelibly linked throughout the
Western Hemisphere with people of African descent. This meant that the dishonor, humiliation, and
bestialization that had universally been associated with chattel slavery now became fused with Negritude.
This linkage, which lies at the heart of white racism, would have disastrous consequences in nineteenthand twentieth-century South America as well as in the United States.”
“It was only in North America that the extremely arbitrary and artificial concept of
‘Negro’ – denoting anyone with supposedly visible African ancestry, revealed by
hair as well as skin color – took on the stigma of slave heritage.”
“…the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
It was the larger Atlantic Slave System…that prepared the way for everything America was to
become. Thus, vital links developed between the profit motive, which led to the
dehumanization of African slaves, and a conception of the New World as an environment of
liberation, opportunity, and upward mobility.”
“Slavery became the dark underside of the American Dream – the great exception to our pretensions of
perfection, the single barrier blocking our way to the millennium, the single manifestation of national sin.
The tragic result of this formulation was to identify the so-called Negro as the Great American Problem.
Hence the victims of the great sin of slavery became, in this ghastly psychological inversion, the
embodiment of sin. And for some two hundred years African Americans have struggled against accepting
or above all internalizing this prescribed identity, this psychological curse.”