QN: Discuss the process of change from slave trade to tropical agricultural products as foreign trade staples in West Africa during the first half of the 19th century.
Before the abolition of slave trade in 1807, the British had dominated the trade in shipping Africans to the plantations of the Americas. But after 1807, the Royal Navy joined by the Americans a year later became a fierce global opponent of slave trading. The most successful slave poacher of the eighteenth century (British ships carried more than three million Africans in that century) became the self-appointed game-keeper of the nineteenth century. It was a stunning legislative and strategic volte face.
There was that highly racialized form of slavery devised by Europeans for the conquest and development of key regions of the Americas. Satisfying the insatiable appetite of American plantations required the enslavement and oceanic transportation of millions of Africans. Europeans turned to enslaved labour in the Americas at the time they had abandoned it in Europe not for any ideological or philosophical reason. The demand for labour was generated by the emergence of labour-intensive plantations producing tropical staples for western consumption. Early European maritime adventurers and traders to West Africa went not in search of slaves, but for well-known African commodities especially gold traditionally acquired via overland trade routes. But in the process, they encountered forms of African slavery and slave trading. They bought Africans, shipped them back to Portugal and Spain, later to the Atlantic islands, where they were slotted into a number of roles as enslaved roles. By the mid-fifteenth century about eight hundred Africans a year reached Portugal. Europeans still remained much more interested in gold and spices, but all this changed with the rise of sugar plantations.
Cane sugar was transplanted from plantations in the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands, and later onto the islands off the African coast—Sao Thome and Principe. European markets could not get enough sugar, mainly to mix with their new drinks, tea and coffee which were all bitter. The more sugar the plantations produced, the more African labourers they required. If the trade in Africans encountered difficulties on one stretch of the African coast, European traders simply took the ships elsewhere on Africa's vast coastline. From haphazard origins, there developed that creeping zone of coastal slave trading which was to characterize the slave trade for centuries. But it was utterly transformed by events on the far side of the Atlantic. There, early efforts to cultivate sugar using indigenous labour, failed in the teeth of the universal refusal of Indians to bend to the imported disciplines of plantation labour in addition to the devastation caused by imported disease and sickness. With never enough European settlers, and faced by a disappearing or dying indigenous labour force, pioneering settlers fell back on the labour system already tried in Spain, Portugal, and the Atlantic islands-African slave labour. By 1600, the booming Brazilian sugar industry had proved that sugar plantations, using African slaves, could generate prosperity on a remarkable scale-although not for the Africans. The British were late-comers, but along with the French joined in with growing enthusiasm after the acquisition of their Caribbean islands from the 1620s onwards.
This new trading system intimately linked the peoples and economies of three continents. European traders arrived on the African coast in vessels packed with European and later Asian goods to be exchanged for Africans; colonial plantations devoured African slaves by the boat load; and homebound ships were filled with slave-grown produce to slate the insatiable European appetite for tropical staples. It was a highly successful agricultural-industrial system where sugar 'factories' were the heart of the sugar plantations which was quickly copied in other crops and regions; tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice in Carolina, coffee at higher altitudes, and, last of all, cotton in the south of the United States in the nineteenth century. The cultural and economic consequences were vast. And everywhere the whole system hinged on the supply of Africans.
This Atlantic trade in Africans was an issue in the remarkable political and strategic struggles between European maritime powers. How best to regulate (and tax) the trade, how best to promote it (monopoly or open trade?) to the best colonial and metropolitan advantage, and how to dominate it and exclude rivals and interlopers? All these and more were major themes in European economic, diplomatic, and strategic thinking between the early-sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The trade in Africans became in effect a lubricant of trade and commerce throughout the vast littoral of the settled and trading Atlantic. Indeed, it reached even further than that, sucking in commodities and trade from distant posts and settlements in Asia (Indian textiles, cowry shells from the Maldives) and penetrating deep into American interiors, far beyond the sight and the ken of Europeans. The Atlantic slave system had vast reach and global consequences.
All of Europe's major maritime powers became slave traders, but the trade was dominated by those with slave colonies in the Americas, in turn by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English (British), and French—all helped of course by their colonial settlers in the Americas, notably the Brazilians and the North Americans. Slave ships acquired Africans from a vast coastal stretch, from Senegambia south to Angola and round the Cape to Madagascar. But by the late-eighteenth century, the apogee of the trade, the bulk of Africans were drawn from a narrower region of coastal West Central Africa. Of course the regions of original enslavement—where Africans were initially enslaved—often went deep into Africa, entangling African societies far from the view and knowledge of the traders on the coast. Outside slave traders perched nervously on the coast, a few in castles or trading settlements, but most operating from on board their ships, dealing with African traders who brought captives in small batches to be exchanged for the variety of goods waiting in the holds. This transfer of Africans onto the slave ships could not have thrived as it did without the arrival of Africans on the coast via other African traders and merchants, themselves linked to distant, interior trades in enslaved people. The spur was the securing of captives for onward movement to the slave ships in the Atlantic. For all its violence and uncertainty and despite the overarching sense of fear, it became a mature and sophisticated trading system.
The major turning point however was the break-away of the American colonies in 1776–1783. The ideology of that revolution established a universal vernacular of equality which could not simply be limited to white people. That war also left the British with thousands of 'loyalist' ex-slaves on their hands; people who had accepted the British offer of freedom in return for joining the (losing) British side. This group was scattered to a cold fate in Nova Scotia or to penury on the streets of London, the latter attracting charitable efforts to relieve them in 1787, which, eventually, prompted a government-backed scheme to encourage black migration to Sierra Leone. From the confusion of that scheme there emerged the one black spokesman who brought an African voice to the gathering arguments about abolition—Olaudah Equiano.
The economic value of the slave trade was visible and unavoidable. There were massive ship-building and out-fitting industries which sustained the slave trade throughout. Most of the thousands of slave ships sailing to Africa were packed with cargo disgorged by a host of British industries: textiles from the west country, later from Lancashire; metal goods from Sheffield; fire-arms (shipped by the hundreds of thousands) from Birmingham. The slave plantations in the American colonies were equally dependent on imported goods (and people). Africans in the sugar fields wore imported clothing and hats, used imported hoes, axes, and other tools, the animals were harnessed in imported leather (and the slaves beaten by imported whips). Planters' homes were filled with goods from British industries, from the cutlery and crockery on the tables to the books on the shelves. Finally, of course, barrels and bales of slave-grown produce were packed into returning ships, to feed those other booming sectors of Britain's Atlantic economy—the processing, distribution, and retailing trades. Sugar to the refineries of Bristol and Liverpool, tobacco from the Chesapeake passing down the Clyde to the warehouses in Glasgow, all before reaching millions of consumers via that profusion of shops which Adam Smith and Napoleon commentated on.
The fruits of slave labour helped transform the fabric and landscape of British urban life. Look at Glasgow's tobacco mansions, the fine homes of merchants and traders in Bristol and Liverpool. Look too at the rural retreats of the most spectacularly successful returnees from the slave colonies: Harewood House in Yorkshire, Penryhn Castle near Bangor. Scratch the surface of mid-eighteenth century Britain, and slavery quickly oozes to the surface. It is thought, for example, that in the 1780s forty per cent of the income of people in Bristol was slave-based. And Liverpool was no different. There were other, less obvious, economic consequences. The development of a credit-system for example—vital for so protracted and far-flung a system as slavery (when voyages might take eighteen months, and where credit was required at all corners of the Atlantic trading system). It was a credit system that fed into the development of a new banking system in provincial Britain, and all in addition to the role of the City of London, whose bankers and insurers invested in, and were beneficiaries of, Atlantic slavery. Again, to state the matter simply, the continuing success of Atlantic trade and commerce was intimately linked to the success and expansion of the slave system. What is equally clear, is that those who made most from the Atlantic system were those engaged in slavery.
At a stroke in 1807 the British changed their trading and strategic policy. The Royal Navy, once the guardian of the Atlantic slave lanes, was now the scourge of slave traders. Parliament, once a legislature anxious to promote Britain's slaving interests, was now wedded to global abolition (although it was also keen to ship indentured Indian labour to fill labour vacuums round the colonial world). Henceforth, the British prided themselves on their abolitionist credentials.
Reference
Kenneth Morgan Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 Cambridge University Press, 2000 ISBN: 0521588146
João Pedro Marques The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Berghahn Books, 2006 ISBN: 1571814477; 304pp