The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Castelar’s part in the abolition of slavery is commemorated in the statue to him in the Castellana in Madrid. All the same, slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, in Cuba only in 1886.

  In 1869, Portugal finally abolished slavery: later than any other European country. Since Portugal had led Europe into the slave trade from Africa, and for two hundred years (1440-1640) had managed it, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should have taken so long for the institution to be abolished at home. Portugal still held much of Angola and Mozambique, and was busy converting those territories into something like conventional European colonies. Between 1876 and 1900, she behaved much as France was doing in Sénégal: she liberated her slaves, but put them to work for fixed periods, so that they were slaves in all but name. Portugal only formally abolished slavery throughout her empire in 1875; and whether that change meant as much to the populations of Angola and Mozambique as abolitionists would have desired is an open question.

  In 1870, there were still one and a half million slaves in Brazil—many more than there had been in 1800. Two-thirds of this population of slaves lived in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo—above all, on coffee plantations, whose fazendeiros continued, whatever Adam Smith might have thought, to find slavery profitable. In 1871, the Emperor Dom Pedro, who knew, through his many European connections as well as from his conscience, that slavery in Brazil could no longer be justified, took the initiative in pressing “o lei do ventre livre,” by which children born to slave mothers would be declared free. State-owned slaves would be freed immediately, and the right of slaves to buy freedom was codified. A public fund would assist manumission, and a register of slaves was announced. This law passed 65 to 45 in the Chamber, 33 to 7 in the Senate, after long, entirely worthy, and important debates. But as late as 1884, a bill introduced by a liberal prime minister to emancipate without compensation slaves who reached the age of sixty was lost, and the government indeed fell on the issue. The following year, thanks to the efforts of the Brazilian Antislavery Society led by Joaquim Nabuco, a new bill on the same subject did pass though, even then, slaves over sixty were obliged to work without payment for another three years for old owners—a form of compensation.

  Only during the late 1880s did Brazilian slavery collapse. Three-quarters of a million slaves were still left in March 1887, but by then, many were fleeing their farms, in acts of mass desertion. It is not altogether fanciful to see these unpunished escapes as a repetition of the flight from servitude which occurred at the beginning of the eleventh century in Europe, and which signaled the end of the institution there. The army in Brazil was now no longer willing to round up runaways, as they had done for so many generations, and prices collapsed. Planters began to free slaves on the condition that they signed labor contracts for three or four years. The Church, for the first time, overtly backed abolition, probably from fear that revolutionary blacks would sweep the country in an onda negra, in the style of Haiti. Fazendeiros began to find in Italians a cheap alternative to slavery on coffee plantations: and three-quarters of a million European immigrants arrived on subsidized passages in the 1890s.

  In March 1888, the conservative government of Correia de Oliveira proposed the lei áurea, which provided for the immediate abolition of slavery in Brazil. No indemnification would be available for slaveowners. The bill became law in May, just eighteen months before the army deposed the Emperor Dom Pedro, whose kind and cultivated personality had done so much for the black people of his country—one reason, it is to be feared, why he had become unpopular with the oligarchy which ran the economy. To conclude the era of slavery in Brazil, and in America, the abolitionist minister Rui Barbosa in 1890 issued his famous order which ordered papers in the Ministry of the Treasury relating to slavery and the slave trade to be burned. But it remains a matter of controversy what was, and was not, thereafter consigned to flames. Among those, all the same, who watched the burning was a black worker in the customhouse, aged 108, determined to see for himself “the complete destruction” of the documents which bore witness to the “martyrdom” of his race.

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  Yet in Africa the trade in slaves continued; eunuchs were still in demand for northern harems; and, as late as the 1880s, slaves were still being exchanged for horses, as they had been by the Arabs and the Portuguese in the 1450s. The differentials in price in the nineteenth century were remarkable for, the explorer Captain Binger remembered, a horse valued at two or three slaves by the Moors in the north could be sold for fifteen to twenty slaves at Ouassoulou. The cowrie also continued to play its part. The German explorer Heinrich Barth in the 1850s saw a slave “of very indifferent appearance” being exchanged for 33,000 of them. (By 1870, a new unit of the old currency of cowries had been added in Bambara: a captif, a “slave,” meaning 20,000 shells.) David Livingstone would tell audiences in London in 1857 that, though the European slave trade might be dying, that of the Arabs in East Africa was growing. In the 1870s, de Brazza, in the interior of the Congo, found that slaves were still being exchanged there for salt, guns, and cloth from Mayumba. In the 1880s, in Senegambia, at the beginning of the era of direct French rule, slaves accounted for two-thirds of the goods traded at markets. Slaves may have constituted nearly a fifth of the population of Haut-Sénégal-Niger in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a quarter of that of the Sokoto caliphate. Muslim scholars still had their slaves in that region, as their predecessors had had in the fifteenth century, and so did noblemen. In 1883, Commandant Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the future proconsul of Madagascar, who spent some time at Ségou, on the upper Niger, an ancient slaving city 350 miles southwest of Timbuktu, described how “nothing equals the horror of the scenes of carnage and desolation to which the incessant war gives rise in regions renowned for their unexampled fertility and their wealth of minerals. The villages are burned, the old of both sexes put to death, while the young are carried into captivity and shared out among the conquerors.” In the now wholly British Gold Coast, slave labor was outlawed. Sir Bartle Frere forbade any governor to recognize the institution, in 1874. But a generation later, it was still winked at, and probably used in the palm-oil industry, including by the mulatto descendants of Danes who had experimented with cotton in Akuapem. British civil servants sometimes returned escaped slaves to their masters. If Saint Paul had done so, why should not an English ex-public-schoolboy do likewise? Perhaps 750,000 slaves were carried into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the nineteenth century, many in the last half of it.

  The General Act of Brussels of 1890 committed the European powers interested in Africa to act against slavery: not precisely to end it, but at least to place the pursuit of liberty in Africa on the agenda of Europe’s civilizing mission. In the end, the European empires did end slavery in the territories for which they became directly responsible. But they did not so act in protectorates: and the European will to rule Africa lasted barely two generations. Awkward new states have taken the place of old polities; but ancient systems of labor survived the changes and, at the time of writing, a slave trade in children seems to survive in Nigeria, and newspaper reports are frequent of the incidence of slavery in Mauritania where, despite the abolition of the institution at least three times, most recently in 1980, 90,000 black Africans are said to live as full-time slaves to Arab masters: precisely whence the Portuguese, in 1441, first carried black slaves away to a remote northern destination.

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  I See page 489

  The Slave Trade: A Reflection

  THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE took the shape that it did in consequence of the survival of slavery in the Mediterranean world during the Middle Ages. Black slaves had been carried to all the principalities in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years, beginning in ancient Egypt. Those slaves in antiquity derived principally from Ethiopia, with the consequence that, as late as the fifteenth century, black slaves were often known as “Ethiops,” whencesoever they really derived. The expansion of Mus
lim power in West Africa during the Middle Ages made possible an expansion of a trade in black slaves northwards across the Sahara from West Africa: the traveler Ibn Battutah recorded meeting them at almost every stage of his journey there in the fourteenth century; and he left with six hundred women slaves. Black Africans worked as servants, soldiers, and in fields in the Arab Mediterranean. Throughout modern history, blacks were especially sought after as eunuchs in the Muslim world, for use both as civil servants and in harems: the wellknown picture by the painter Levnî in Istanbul entitled The Chief Black Eunuch Conducts the Young Prince to the Circumcision Ceremony is dated c. 1720-32; but it could have represented a scene at any time between 1000 A.D. and 1900.

  Some black slaves reached Muslim Spain and Portugal from Africa in the late Middle Ages, and some went to the Christian territories: indeed, the religious brotherhood still known as “Los Negritos” was founded in Seville in the late fourteenth century by a benign archbishop.II Not long afterwards, the Portuguese began first to kidnap, and then to barter for, slaves as they made their way down the west coast of Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century. They were looking for gold but, finding little of it, made do with men and women. These slaves were brought back to Lisbon and sold either there or in Spain or Italy; the Lisbon Florentine Bartolommeo Marchionni, a renaissance man in every sense of the word, became the first modern European slave merchant on the grand scale.

  King Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon and the King-Emperor Charles V did not realize that they were initiating a great change when, in the early sixteenth century, they gave permission, first for two hundred, then for four thousand, slaves to be carried to the New World. Yet they were nonetheless the pioneers of the slave trade as we know it: when the admirable North American novelist Louis Auchincloss caused his character Winthrop Ward, in the story “The Beauty of the Lilies,” to ask himself, walking down to his office in Wall Street in 1857, why had “the first blithering idiot to bring a black man in irons to the New World not been hanged?” he was unwittingly referring to those monarchs.

  The reason why the Atlantic slave trade lasted so long is that, in the Americas, the Africans proved to be admirable workers, strong enough to survive the heat and hard work on sugar, coffee, or cotton plantations or in mines, in building fortresses or merely acting as servants; and, at the same time, they were good-natured and usually docile. Many black slaves had experience of agriculture and cattle. Both indigenous Indians and Europeans seemed feeble compared with them. That was why European slaves, of whom there had been some in Spain, especially from Greece or the Balkans, in the fifteenth century, were never tried out in the Americas. African Muslim slaves were more difficult to control for, as the Brazilians found in the 1830s in particular, some of them were at least as cultivated as their masters, and were capable of mounting formidable rebellions.

  This large labor force would not have been available to the Europeans in the Americas without the cooperation of African kings, merchants, and noblemen. Those African leaders were, as a rule, neither bullied nor threatened into making these sales (for sales they were, even if the bills were settled in textiles, guns, brandy, cowrie shells, beads, horses, and so on). When, in 1842, the sultan of Morocco told the British consul that he thought that “the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam,” he could have been speaking for all African rulers; or indeed all European ones fifty years before. There were few instances of Africans’ opposing the nature of the traffic desired by the Europeans.

  Some slaves were stolen by Europeans—“panyared,” as the English word was—and some, as occurred often in Angola, were the victims of military campaigns mounted specifically by Portuguese proconsuls in order to capture slaves. But most slaves carried from Africa between 1440 and 1870 were procured as a result of the Africans’ interest in selling their neighbors, usually distant but sometimes close, and, more rarely, their own people. “Man-stealing” accounted for the majority of slaves taken to the New World, and it was usually the responsibility of Africans. Voltaire’s sharp comment that, while it was difficult to defend the conduct of Europeans in the slave trade, that of Africans in bartering each other was even more reprehensible, deserves to be better remembered. But then there was no sense of Africa: a Dahomeyan did not feel that he had anything in common even with an Oyo.

  The slave trade was a disgraceful business even if considered in relation to the other brutalities of the time: the ill-treatment of workers generally in Europe (as well as of sailors and of soldiers), and the harsh way in which indentured English laborers, for example, or their French (the engagés) and other European equivalents were looked after. The traveler William Baikie was right when he pointed out, after a journey to Africa in the 1850s, “There is no captain who has carried slaves who has not been, either directly or indirectly, guilty of murder, [for] a certain number of deaths are always allowed for.” For captains, read also merchants; for, though some of those traders were quite insulated from knowing what the slave trade was, and looked upon it as just one more business, a high proportion of them had once been captains or mates in the traffic and, in their calm houses in Liverpool or Nantes, could easily imagine the crowding, the smell, the savagery, and the fears normal on every voyage which they financed.

  The consequence for the Americas was remarkable. In the first three and a quarter centuries of European activity in the Americas, between 1492 and 1820, five times as many Africans went to the New World as did white Europeans; and, even in the next fifty years, until 1870, probably as many blacks were taken to Brazil and Cuba as there were white men arriving in the continent. Most of the great enterprises of the first four hundred years of colonization owed much to African slaves: sugar in Brazil and later the Caribbean; rice and indigo in South Carolina and Virginia; gold in Brazil and, to a lesser extent, silver in Mexico; cotton in the Guianas and later in North America; cocoa in what is now Venezuela; and, above all, in clearing of land ready for agriculture. The only great American enterprise which did not use black labor extensively was the silver mining at Potosí in Peru, and that was only because they were at too high an altitude for Africans to be able to work there with their usual energy. The servants of the Americas between Buenos Aires and Maryland were for four centuries usually black slaves.

  Henri Wallon, the moralistic French nineteenth-century historian of slavery in antiquity, argued that the discovery of the Americas was an accidental development which led to retrogression in Europe: the settlement of America offered, he said, to a small group of selfish merchants and planters the chance to upset, through the development of large-scale slavery, the course of progress. But slavery had continued throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, and it was not only merchants, but kings and noblemen who inspired much of the early slave trading. Yet there is a sense in which Wallon was right: most of northern Europe had said good-bye to slavery by the early twelfth century. Most countries there which allowed themselves to become implicated in the slave trade to the Americas had some hesitations first. Richard Jobson in England, Bredero in the Netherlands, Mercado and Albornoz in Spain, Fernão de Oliveira in Portugal, not to speak of King Louis XIII in France were exponents of a different attitude at the end of the sixteenth century or at the beginning of the seventeenth. The reason why these humane doubts or even open hostility had no effect is surely to be accounted for by the memory of antiquity which dominated culture and education for the next three centuries. If Athens had slaves with which to build the Parthenon, and Rome to maintain the aqueducts, why should modern Europe hesitate to have slaves to build its new world in America? Busbecq’s regret should be remembered.III

  The effect of this traffic on Europe was considerable. The slave trade should not be seen as the main, much less the sole, inspiration of any particular development in industry or manufacture in Europe or North America. The memory of Dr. Eric Williams may haunt the modern study of the Atlantic slave trade, but his shocking argume
nt that the capital which the trade made possible financed the industrial revolution now appears no more than a brilliant jeu d’esprit. After all, the slave-trading entrepreneurs of Lisbon and Rio, or Seville and Cádiz, did not finance innovations in manufacture. Yet those who became rich as a result of trading slaves often did put their profits to interesting uses: Marchionni, for instance, invested in Portuguese journeys of discovery, as did Prince Henry the Navigator; John Ashton of Liverpool, helped to finance the Sankey Brook Canal, between his own city and Manchester; René Montaudoin was a pioneer of cotton manufacture in Nantes, and so was James de Wolf in Bristol, Rhode Island. Such investments aside, the slave trade had a great effect on shipbuilding, on marine insurance, on the rope industry, on ships’ carpenters in all interested ports, as also on textile manufacture (such as linen in Rouen), the production of guns in Birmingham and Amsterdam, and iron bars in Sweden, of brandy in France and rum in Newport, not to speak of beads from Venice and Holland, and on the sugar refineries near important European and North American ports.

  The effect of this emigration on Africa is extraordinarily difficult to estimate, for it is unclear what the population of Africa was at any stage before 1850. Still, most of the millions of slaves shipped from Africa were not members of an established slave population, but ordinary farmers or members of their families, suddenly deprived of their liberty by fellow Africans in response to what a modern economist might call “growing external demand.” Professor W. M. Macmillan, in Africa Emergent, argued that Africa was, for many centuries, underpopulated. He attributed the continent’s backwardness to the “lack of human resources” adequate to tame an inhospitable environment. Then Dr. Dike, most eminent of a new generation of African historians in the 1960s, insisted that, whatever might be the position in Central Africa, that could not be true of Iboland, in what is now southeastern Nigeria, where land hunger has been the most important “conditioning factor” in history.