The Slave Trade, Development of Colonial Plantation Economy and

In the colonial period, before the rise of large-scale industry, slavery existed in two different economic forms in the Western world, one representing its past, the other its future. The first was the patriarchal form in which it had always flourished from the beginning and the patriarchal plantations were largely self-sustained, retaining many features of natural economy. Production was then divided into two parts, one devoted to the cultivation of such cash crops as tobacco, corn, hemp, etc. and the rest were assigned to domestic consumption.²⁷³ The plantation system developed along these lines in the Virginia and Maryland colony. Blacks and whites who worked in the fields encumbered a lot of problems based on prejudice and deep seated antagonisms between them. Relations between masters and slaves had a paternal character; the slave owner was always at the site of production and supervising the slave workers. Field hands were often indulgently treated. Black servants, who replace white servants in the household as well as in the field, were frequently on intimate and trusted terms with the master and his family and remained in the family generation after generation.

Most of the plantations raised their own food, wove their own cloths, and built their own houses. George Washington estate for example, benefited from such labour by slaves. In South Carolina and Georgia, the plantation economy followed a different pattern.

The chattel slavery, which was predominantly practiced above, lost its patriarchal characteristics and transformed itself into a purely commercial system of exploitation based upon the production of a single money crop.

272 Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Gates, jr., Henry Louis (eds), Africana, The Encyclopaedia of the African and African American Experience, 1999, p. 1866. Compare also Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade,1997, p. 21ff; Iliffe, John, Geschichte Afrikas, 2000, p. 173.

273 New International, Vol. 5, Number 12, December 1939, pp. 343-345; Compare Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia;

The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Rev. ed., 1979; Blassingame, John W., and Henderson, Mae G (eds.), Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals. 5 Vols., 1980; Blesh, Rudi and Harriet, Janis, They all Played Ragtime, 4^th ed., 1971; Blier, Suzanne Preston, African Vudu: Art, Psychology and Power, 1995.

South Carolina and Georgia’s economy was dependent upon slave labour and consequently became the strongholds of the slave system in the English colonies of the mainland.²⁷⁴ Until the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the capitalist plantation system in the English colonies was perfected on the largest scale in Jamaica.

Economically considered, the whole island was converted into one vast plantation devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane and the making of sugar, which was then shipped overseas for sale. The individual plantations, carved in large sections out of the fertile soil were in many cases owned by landlords resident in England and managed by hired superintendents. They were extremely productive and worked entirely by slave labor.²⁷⁵ According to Ulrich B. Phillips, an average unit of industry in the Jamaican sugar fields became a plantation of the total of about two hundred Blacks, of whom more than half were workers in the field. The working conditions of the African slaves were deplorable and excruciating.²⁷⁶Consequently, the concentration of production upon sugar combined with exclusive use of slave labour gave rise to social and economic tension amongst the workers in the Cotton Kingdom. The small farmers who had originally worked in the island were systematically removed and disappeared. The inhabitants came to be categorized into two hierarchies: the planters and their agents on top and the Black slaves at the bottom. A sprinkling of merchants and mechanics between them catered for the needs of the plantation owners. The sugar lords were absolute rulers of the island, exploiting it for their exclusive benefits and representing it at Westminster.²⁷⁷ As could be expected the chattel slavery began to determine the future and also predominated the economy of the Southern kingdom. Apart from the South, slavery was a decaying institution in the English coastal colonies at the time of the American Revolution.

274 New International, Vol. 5, Number 12, December 1939, pp. 343-345. See also www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/narrative.html.

275

ibid.; Chandra, Siddharth, 1969, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (review), Technology and Culture, Vol. 42, Number 2, April 2001, pp. 342-354, The John Hopkins University Press, London.

276 New International, Vol. 5, Number 12, December 1939, pp. 343-345. Compare von Schimmelmann, Heinrich Carl in Hambuger Morgenpost of Monday 18^th September 2006, pp. 8-9; Chandra, Siddharth, 1969, American Sugar Kingdom:

The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (review), Technology and Culture, Vol. 42, Number 2, April 2001, pp. 342-354, The John Hopkins University Press, London.

277

Thomas, Hugh, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade1440-1870, 1997, pp. 203-205; New International, Vol. 5, Number 12, December 1939, pp. 343-345.

The decline in the value of tobacco forced many planters to device other forms of crop rising in which slave labour could not profitably compete with free labour. Finding their slaves to be an economic liability, some masters began to nurse the idea of emancipation and therefore the slave institution began to disintegrate, giving way here and there to tenant farming, share-cropping, and even wage-labour. ²⁷⁸

The importance and effectiveness of the Atlantic slave trade may not be adequately stated, if the role and the impulse of the merchants giving to slavery and slave trade are not mentioned. The Aristocratic economy had the responsibility of supplying slaves and retaining those who were optimal and useful for its use. The Aristocracy supplied the market with slaves but did not function through the market. In contrast, the merchant economy developed entirely around the market. For example, they bought captives from the aristocrats, conditioned them, transported and exported them to distant land from which demands have been transmitted through the merchants. In this context, they formed the pillar for the spread of slavery, opening up new markets along their route wherever local production could be exchanged for their merchandise and, in particular, for their captives.

In this connection, they redirected and diffused slaving exchange, by making it accessible not only to aristocrats but also to ordinary people, as long as they had the means to buy slaves.²⁷⁹

Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to postulate here that without the merchants, the effectiveness and quantity of slavery and slave trade would not have been achieved. However, the discovery of the new world in 1492 by Christopher Columbus marked the beginning of the transatlantic trading system. Through this new discovered trade, Africans were in large numbers exported to the various sites of production, thereby playing significant roles in the economies mentioned above. The genesis of this was the arrival of the Spanish adventurers in the Americas, who were hoping to trade for riches but soon began to enslave the Native American people in the search for gold and silver. The aim of the Spanish did not however succeed because disease, malnutrition and Spanish atrocities led to the deaths of millions of the Indians of the Americas and by 1520s, the depopulations of the Indians compelled the Spanish government to look for alternative sources of labour. As a result of this, the Spanish contracted the Portuguese merchants to supply African slaves to Spanish territory in the new world.

278 Compare Curtin, Phillip, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation’s Complex, Cambridge, 1990; Galloway, J. H., The Mediterranean Sugar Industry, Geographical Review XVII, 1977, pp. 177-92.

279

Meillassoux, Claude, The Anthropology of Slavery, 1991, pp. 239-240.

The first transatlantic slave voyages from Africa to the Americas began in the early 1520s on Portuguese vessels sailing from West Africa to the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola, the earliest European name for present day Haiti and for Dominican republic.²⁸⁰ Around the mid-1500s, the transatlantic slave trade swelled when the Spanish began to use African slave labour alongside Native Americans to mine silver in Peru. The slaves were transported to Colombia and Panama and further to overland in the Pacific coast of South America. There was also a remarkable increase of slave supplies in 1570s when the production of sugar plantations in Brazil were intensified, particularly as the merchants adopted production techniques, which originated in Madeira and Sao Tome. By 1620s, African labour had replaced Indian labours on Brazilian sugar plantations. At the beginning of British colonies in Virginia and Barbados (1630s-1640s), Jamaica (1660s) and South Carolina (1690s) and the French colonies Saint-Domingue (present day Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe (1660s-1680s), most labourers on the plantations were young European males who agreed to work for three to five years in return for free oceanic passage and food and housing in the Americas.²⁸¹ These workers were called indentured labourers. By the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, tobacco, sugar, indigo (used to make blue dye) and rice plantations switched from European indentured labour to African slave labour. By the mid-1700s Brazil, Saint Domingue and Jamaica were the three largest slave colonies in the Americas and by the 1830s, Cuba emerged as the principal Caribbean plantation colony.

Throughout the history of the transatlantic slave trade, however, more Africans began to arrive as slaves in Brazil than in any other colony.²⁸² Though the Dutch merchants were not involved in extensive plantation colonies in the New World, however they were involved in the large-scale slave trading in the mid-17^th century. Consequent upon this extensive trade in African slaves, the Dutch republic was among the first European nations to develop modern commerce, and the merchants had access to shipping, port facilities and banking credit.²⁸³ For example, the Dutch trade occupied several trading castles on the African coast, the most important of which was Armina (in Ghana).

280 Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Gates,jr., Henry Louis (eds), Africana, The Encyclopaedia of the African and African American Experience, 1999, p. 1867; Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, pp. 117-118.

281 ibid. Appiah et al.

282 ibid. Appiah et al.; Markham, Clements, Hakluyt Society, The Haws Voyages, Vol. LVII, London, 1878,p. 5; Compare also de Armas, Rumeu Antonio, Viages de Hawkins an American, Seville, 1947; Williamson, J. A., Sir John Hawkins, Oxford, 1927.

283 ibid. Appiah et al., pp. 1867-1870.

It is instructive to note here that the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa became a competitive ground for Europeans who threw overboard all sense of morality and competed amongst each other, in some cases going to war for the African slaves. The Dutch for example captured Armina from the Portuguese and rebuilt it. ²⁸⁴

They also took control of the Atlantic slave trade from the Portuguese in the 1630s, but by the 1640s, they were faced with increasing competition from French and British traders. And by 1680s, a variety of nations, private trading companies, merchants, adventurers and slave traders sent slave ships to Africa: merchants from Denmark, Sweden and the German states also organized slave voyages. However, the Britons, the Portuguese and the French commanded and profited more from the Atlantic slave trade than others.²⁸⁵