-1CHY4U1 The West & The World Unit 2 Lesson #06 Ships, Sugar & Slavery Primary Document

ent Analysis (DBQ 2b) Secondary Readings Each paragraph should have at least 2 different annotations. Please read the following article and using the space on the right hand side of the page please annotate the text by adding the following elements: Identification of Main Ideas Questions about supporting details Words to Define or look up Key Points & understandings Inferences (reading between the lines) Prior Knowledge (is there something you have read that you already know something about). Key Passages to use as evidence for essay response.
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slavery and the slave trade in Africa and the Americas Slavery is a condition in which human beings are kept in a state of forced servitude. Many non-African historians use the term as a shorthand to encompass all forms of slavery, giving the misleading impression that all systems of servitude and bondage are alike. They are not. The brutal and dehumanizing system of chattel slavery that arose in the Americas and into which millions of Africans were abducted against their wills, sold, and held as the property of their purchasers was a Western, non-African development. Numerous so-called slave rebellions attest to the unwillingness of Africans to accept this attack on their humanity and limitation on their freedom. Scholars of African culture note that the system of domestic bondage or slavery that existed in West Africa before Portuguese explorers arrived in 1441 bore little resemblance to chattel slavery, a system unique to the Americas, by which human beings were legally defined as property. In African society, prisoners of war, people who violated a traditional custom or prohibition or committed a crime, and people who were unable or unwilling to settle a just debt could be held in a condition of servitude. This condition was not perpetual. These slaves were not considered property, and they enjoyed certain rights. Families were typically not separated, and children of the enslaved were not automatically slaves. People held in a state of slavery often married into the kinship group of their masters and became members of their masters' extended families. Islam took root in Africa starting in the seventh century, first in North Africa and along the Swahili coast and later in West Africa. Muslim law provided protections for persons in slave status, but these protections resulted in reinforcing the institution of slavery in Muslim lands. Most slaves performed domestic tasks, but some did field labor or comparable jobs. In the parts of North Africa occupied by the Ottoman Empire, slaves entered military or government service, sometimes achieving high rank. Even though books often call people held in this kind of servitude slaves, the distinction between chattel slavery and what might be called "traditional slavery" or servitude should be noted. Slavery after 1441 became the story of chattel slavery in the Americas and its impact on African life. It is possible that some Africans transported into slavery in the Americas already lived in a traditional form of slavery in their own states or villages. It is probable, however, that the majority were abducted in raids against their people and transported as captives in chains to work in

-2the mines and, later, the fields of the New World. Background and Overview During the Age of Discovery that began in the 1430s, Europe, led by Portugal, began to expand beyond its borders, exploring first the coast of Africa and later the Americas. The prevalent cultural and religious attitudes of the day among Europeans legitimized slavery in their minds. When the exploitation of commercial resources in the Western Hemisphere required a large labor force, they did not hesitate to enslave the native American populations of the lands they colonized. When this source of labor dwindled, they increasingly imported African laborers and held them in a state of chattel slavery. In 1415 the Muslim city of Ceuta, a center of the North African slave trade, became Portugal's first permanent conquest in Africa. Ceuta is located directly across from the Iberian Peninsula on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar, a channel that is at its narrowest point just 8 miles (13 km) wide. Ceuta was the gateway to the Atlantic and the starting point for the explorations of the West African coast and the Atlantic islands that Prince Henry the Navigator (13941460) of Portugal sponsored in the years following 1420. In 1441 the first African captives from West Africa were brought to Portugal. At first the Portuguese trade in human captives took place directly between West Africa and Europe, circumventing the Arab traders in Ceuta and in other North African ports, and provided servants and farm laborers for Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe. Europeans did not enter into the African (domestic) slave trade. Very soon, however, a much more extensive transatlantic trade in humans began to emerge in response to the need to supplement or replace native workers on plantations in the Americas. With the influence of superior European weaponry, a system of raiding villages and abducting people was begun, without regard to any concept of slavery as previously practiced in Africa, and it was totally foreign to those who were suddenly caught up in its practices. The first voyages of slave ships from Africa to the Western Hemisphere began in the 1520s. Their human cargo sailed on Portuguese vessels destined for the Spanish colonies on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). As the need for laborers grew or their commercial interest in Africa expanded, other European kingdoms joined the Portuguese in the trade in Africans. These include the Spanish (after 1479), the English (1562), the Dutch (1625), the French (1640), the Swedes (1649), the Danes and Norwegians (1651), and the German states (1685). After declaring its independence from Britain in 1776, the United States continued North American involvement in the slave trade, which began as early as 1619 in the Jamestown colony in Virginia. The largest traders overall, however, were Portugal, France, and especially Britain. By the middle of the 18th century Britain was the most active exporter; British ships carried more than half of all the enslaved Africans being transported across the Atlantic. The transatlantic slave trade from ports in Angola, Senegambia, in West Africa, and Mozambique, in East Africa, was of long duration and did not end even when formal declarations to abolish slavery were promulgated by the major slave-trading countries in the 19th century. These declarations served

-3only to make slaving operations covert; British and American naval vessels on antislavery patrols on the African coast were generally evaded and their cargoes of human beings were carried off to the plantations of the New World. The process of abolition and emancipation took most of the 19th century to accomplish worldwide. Wide-ranging abolition movements arose after the start of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain about 1760 and spread to Europe and then to the United States in the 19th century. Some historians argue that the shift from an economy based on agriculture to an economy based on industry and manufacturing enabled abolition to occur because it made the system of chattel slavery less economically advantageous. As evidence of this, they cite the fact that abolition occurred earlier in industrialized areas such as Britain and the New England states, where manufacturing dominated the economy, and it spread more slowly in the agrarian economies of the American South and the Caribbean region, where extensive field labor was still required. Abolition Formal abolition of chattel slavery did not necessarily entail the emancipation, or freeing, of peoples already enslaved, which often occurred at a later date. France temporarily outlawed the slave trade in the aftermath of the French Revolution, during the early 1790s, but soon lifted the ban and did not reimpose it until 1817. In 1805 the Danish government forbade its citizens from taking part in the slave trade. Sweden banned the slave trade in 1813, and Netherlands followed in 1814. The United Kingdom officially outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and in 1834 Africans living in British lands were emancipated. The Human Cost Africa's greatest export from 1530 to 1830 was its people. Records indicate that at least 10 million Africans from West Africa and Central Africa were landed alive in North and South America and the Caribbean and sold as slaves to work in the plantation-based economies of the region during those years. If deaths in transit are calculated, an additional 2 million people can be added to that number. An average of 20,000 Africans per year were taken into chattel slavery during the 1600s, a number that leapt to between 50,000 and 100,000 Africans per year for much of the 1700s. Less conservative historians argue that much of the trade in slaves went unrecorded and that the actual total is twice or more the conservative estimate, or somewhere between 24 million and 50 million Africans. Slavery in all its forms, however, took its human toll on Africa both before and after the European involvement in the slave trade. Between the seventh century and the late 19th century, roughly 14 million Africans were transported into the Islamic world and beyond in trans-Saharan trade or from ports along the Swahili coast. Traditional forms of slavery also thrived in West African states throughout this period. When the Berber Almoravid empire of North Africa attacked the ancient Ghana Empire in the 11th century, the conquerors found thousands of African captives at the trans-Saharan trading town of Audaghost, which was then under Ghana's control. Ghana's successor states, the Mali Empire and the Songhai Empire, took thousands of captives in their wars of expansion. Historians believe that, during the 19th century, the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northwestern Nigeria may have utilized the labor of as many as 2.5 million captives to produce the palm oil, cloves, and other products it sold to its European trading partners.

-4Nevertheless, the transatlantic slave trade significantly differed from the practice of slavery in other parts of the world, including earlier times in Africa. Never before had so many people been forcibly uprooted from their places of birth. The status and treatment of the abducted captives was extremely brutal, the single business of enterprise of the transatlantic slave trade all but dominated African life. The Economic Cost The slave trade brought West Africa into the international economy not as a partner but as a market to exploit and a source of cheap labor to ensure the profitability of enterprises elsewhere. Slavery deprived Africa of the productive labor of significant numbers of its youngest and healthiest people. In places where the Islamic slave trade across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea was dominant, local populations often had their women and children carried off into bondage, often as concubines or menial laborers, to other parts of the Muslim world. The European slave trade deprived Africa of its strongest young males, who were carried off in chains to do productive labor in the Americas. Populations often became unbalanced, with a surplus of males existing in some areas and a surplus of females in others. The ability to develop a local, labor-intensive agriculture was thereby impaired. Slavery and the slave trade also arrested the development of local industries. The availability of cheap European textiles undermined the local production of cloth, and the availability of cheap European manufactured goods caused local production of metal goods to dwindle, thus blocking the growth of a local ironworking industry. Text Citation: Page, Willie F., and R. Hunt Davis, eds. "slavery and the slave trade in Africa and the Americas." Encyclopedia of African History and Culture: From Conquest to Colonization (1500 to 1850), vol. 3. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. Modern World History Online. Facts On File, Inc. middle passage The 21- to 90-day voyage of captive Africans' across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Caribbean. The transatlantic slave trade is often visualized as a triangular trade. On the first leg of the triangle, goods from Europe were loaded aboard ships and brought to Africa. On the second leg, the so-called middle passage, the ships were loaded with Africans, who were transported amid conditions of great squalor and danger to destinations in the Caribbean. On the third leg of the triangle, agricultural products and other commodities, sometimes bought from the proceeds of the sale of Africans to local purchasers, were shipped to Europe. Although the visualization is inexact when North American trade and ports of call are added to the trade, the term middle passage has maintained its traditional meaning. Sailing ships were generally not built to specifically carry captives. Instead, a ship's standard hold inside the hull was modified to accept human cargo. Manifests list from 150 to 600 Africans depending on the size of the vessel. They were chained to platforms that were stacked in tiers in the hold, given limited headroom, and allowed a space not much more than 16 inches (40 cm) wide in which to lay their bodies. The crowded conditions aboard slave ships was so severe, the ventilation so poor, and the rations of rice, yams, or millet so limited that ship owners

-5expected that 14 percent to 20 percent of their human cargo would die during the crossing. An estimated 10 to 12 million captive Africans reached the Americas after surviving the middle passage. The causes of death were many. Despondent about being forced from their homes or fearful of the unknowns they might encounter at the end of the voyage, a number of the individuals committed suicide. In good weather the captives were allowed to sit on deck to get fresh air and exercise, during which time their quarters were cleaned and aired out. In bad weather, however, they were forced to remain below deck for days, seasick, amid excrement and vomit, in conditions that often led to death from dysentery and fever. Males were generally kept shackled to the deck or to one another to prevent mutiny, which was the fear of every captain whose vessel carried a human cargo. Attempted mutinies were viciously and quickly quelled, and the bodies of the mutineers thrown overboard. The number of deaths in the middle passage often went unrecorded. They could be as few as four of the 207 captives from the Congo River region who were taken to Havana, Cuba, in 1835 aboard the Spanish ship Amalia or as many as 360 of the 560 human captives from Madagascar destined for Cuba aboard the Aguila Vengadora in 1837 or the 702 Africans drowned while chained below deck aboard the Leusden near Surinam, in 1738. Most of the Africans on board were destined for Portuguese Brazil or the hot, humid sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 18th century, for example, Spanish Cuba and Barbados, St. Christopher, the Bermudas, and Jamaica in the British-owned West Indies all required constant replenishment of their labor force. As many as 40 percent of the Africans brought directly into British North America were landed at Charleston, in South Carolina. They were held in quarantine on Sullivan Island in the harbor until they were sold in Charleston's slave market. Text Citation: Page, Willie F., and R. Hunt Davis, eds. "middle passage." Encyclopedia of African History and Culture: From Conquest to Colonization (1500 to 1850), vol. 3. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. Modern World History Online. Facts On File, Inc. sugarcane plantations in the Americas The histories of African slavery and sugar production in the Americas are inextricably bound together. The plantation economies of the Caribbean and Brazil, which together received approximately 80 percent of the estimated 10 million African slaves transported to the Western Hemisphere from the 1490s through the 1860s, were dominated by sugar production. As an expansive scholarly literature since the 1960s has made plain, sugar and slavery are the keywords of much of Brazilian and Caribbean history and together have shaped the cultural, economic, political, social, and demographic history of the Atlantic World in many profound ways. The origins of sugarcane (Saccarum officinarum L.), a type of grass, have been traced to New Guinea in around 8000 B.C.E. By the first century C.E., it was grown across much of southern Asia and the Pacific. By 1000 C.E., its production and consumption among the elite had spread through much of the Mediterranean world, largely in consequence of the spread of Islam. In the 1400s, the Portuguese and Spanish developed important templates for later

-6New World plantation sugar production on their Atlantic islands: the Portuguese in So Tom and Madeira, the Spanish in the Canaries. Before the encounter with the Americas in 1492, both were employing African slave labor to produce sugar and developing processing techniques that, after 1492, were transplanted wholesale to the sugar-producing zones of the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus is credited with taking the first sugarcane to the New World in 1493 from Spain's Canary Islands. Soon Hispaniola had largely reproduced the industrial processing techniques developed in the Atlantic and made its first shipments of sugar to Europe around 1516. By the mid-1520s, large quantities of sugar were being shipped from Brazil to Lisbon. The sweet granular substance proved a sensation among its elite customers, and demand skyrocketed. Cultivation and processing of sugar quickly spread throughout the Antilles and the Brazilian littoral as well as to Mexico, Paraguay, and South America's Pacific coast. Early Spanish efforts in the Caribbean ended largely in failure, though by the 1580s the French and English began plantation sugar production using African slave labor in the Lesser Antilles. Large-scale slave-based commercial sugar production in the Caribbean did not take off until after 1650, on the islands claimed by the French, English, and Dutch. The English example is instructive. Sugar from Barbados began arriving in England in the mid-1650s. In the 40 years from 1660 to 1700, annual English consumption rose from 1,000 to 50,000 hogsheads, while export rose from 2,000 to 18,000 hogsheads. By the 1750s, the vast bulk of the 110,000 hogsheads imported annually were being consumed at home. The peak of British West Indian sugar exports to England was in 1774, with nearly 2 million hundredweight. Growth rates for the French were comparable. For the Portuguese, the 1600s was the century of sugar, as their coastal plantations in Brazil spread rapidly inland, especially in the Northeast. Demand seemed insatiable, and production grew apace. Sugar making, especially in its New World incarnation, has been aptly described as an industry that depends on farming and factory production. Through a series of complex steps requiring substantial skill and technical infrastructure, the cane juice was extracted from the stalk by mechanical means (crushing, chopping, etc.). After the juice was boiled and cooled numerous times, with precise temperatures and timing, the end product consisted of a granular precipitate of the plant's naturally occurring sucrose, ranging in color from dark brown to white. Its labor demands were intensive and immediate; for optimal production values, the cane juice must be extracted from the plant within 24 hours of its harvest. Two Categories of Labor Needed Sugar production thus required two broad categories of labor: one in the field to cut and haul the cane to the mill, and another in the mill to process the juice into granulated sugar. These labor requirements in turn created two broad strata of slave laborers: more numerous field slaves, among whom mortality rates were exceedingly high (in 17th-century Brazil, an average of 90 percent of imported African slaves died during their first seven years in the colony), and a smaller number of skilled slaves, who tended to receive more preferential treatment. Among mill slaves, industrial accidents were common,

-7as many were crushed to death in the grinders and burned in the mill's many boilers and kettles. As sugar production skyrocketed so did the importation of African slaves into the sugar-producing zones. The relationship between the two was direct, as most scholars agree. In 1645, before widespread sugar production had taken root, Barbados counted 5,680 African slaves; by 1698, with sugar production having grown by more than 5,000 percent, its slave population exceeded 42,000. Jamaica counted 1,400 African slaves in 1658; by 1698, their numbers had risen to over 40,000. Slave population growth rates in Antigua, SaintDomingue (later Haiti), and other English, French, and Dutch sugar islands were comparable. The vast majority slaved in the sugar economy. In 17th-century Brazil, sugar plantation slavery came to form the central pillar of the colonial economy. Similarly, one of the colony's core social institutions became the engenho (same root as the English engine), which came to mean both the machinery of the mill itself and the larger plantation complex. The sugar harvest (safra in Portuguese, zafra in Spanish) began toward the end of July and continued without stop for the next eight or nine months. Slaves were divided into crews: one to cut and haul cane to the mill, another to process the cane into sugar. Water power turned the grinding mill in larger engenhos, oxen in smaller engenhos. The highest strata of workers consisted of the boiler technicians and artisans, who could be either slave or free. The average engenho had from 60 to 80 slaves, though some counted more than 200. Overall slave mortality rates averaged from 5 to 10 percent annually but were higher among field slaves. Sugar planters became the dominant social class in Brazil and almost everywhere else where sugar production formed the basis of the colonial economy. Caribbean and Brazilian sugar production generated ripple effects throughout the Atlantic World. Large quantities of West Indian sugar were exported to Britain's North American colonies, where most of it was distilled into rum. The West Indian trade also fueled the North American colonial economy through its large and growing demand for lumber, foodstuffs, and other goods produced for export to the sugar islands. Rum exports to Britain similarly skyrocketed, from 100,000 gallons in 1700 to 3,341,000 gallons in 1776. The effects generated by West Indian sugar production on the British and British North American economies were enormous and remain the topic of ongoing scholarly research and debate. In his book Capitalism and Slavery (1944), West Indian historian Eric Williams was the first to propose a direct causal relationship between the growth of African slavery in the New World, dominated by sugar production, and the development of capitalism in Europe, particularly in Britain. Spawning a huge debate and literature, this book has been challenged in many specific points. Yet the overall thrust of his thesisthat sugar, slavery, and British capitalism all emerged together as part of the same process of social transformationhas stood the test of time, its main arguments retaining credibility in the scholarly community six decades after the book's publication.

-8African Slavery Expands After the French acquisition of the western portion of the Spanish island of Hispaniola in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1695 (henceforth Saint-Domingue), sugar production and African slavery exploded. By the 1760s, slave imports averaged between 10,000 and 15,000 per year. By 1787, the number exceeded 40,000 per year. By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Domingue was populated by an estimated 500,000 slaves, more than two-thirds born in Africa, vastly outnumbering both whites and mulattoes. Known in France as the "Pearl of the Antilles," SaintDomingue had quickly become the world's largest sugar producer, with more than 800 sugar plantations, many with hundreds of slaves. Decadal mortality rates among slaves on Saint-Domingue in the mid- and late 1700s are estimated at more than 90 percent. The more than 10 million African slaves transported over nearly three centuries to work in New World plantation agriculture, most in sugar production, has been called accurately the largest forced migration in the history of the world. The African diaspora, fueled in large part by an insatiable European demand for sugar, coffee, tobacco, and other tropical plantation export commodities of the Americas, profoundly shaped every aspect of African, European, and American history, especially in the Caribbean and Brazil. The long-term historical effects of Europe's sweet tooth remain readily apparent across the Americas, Africa, and the broader Atlantic World. Text Citation: Schroeder, Michael J. "sugarcane plantations in the Americas." In Ackermann, Marsha E., Michael Schroeder, Janice J. Terry, JiuHwa Lo Upshur, and Mark F. Whitters, eds. Encyclopedia of World History: The First Global Age, 1450 to 1750, vol. 3. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. Modern World History Online. Facts On File, Inc.