'In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African
kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade
slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the
Muslims and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the
belief
that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only
evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplistic scenario
that hardly reflects the facts.
Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by
Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the
origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and
Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light
on centuries of slave trading.
What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the
early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and
western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that
trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the
African kingdoms were paying with their own people. In most instances,
no violence was
necessary to obtain those slaves. Contrary to legends and novels and
Hollywood movies,
the white traders did not need to savagely kill entire tribes in order
to exact their tribute in slaves. All they needed to do is bring goods that
appealed to the kings of those tribes. The kings would gladly sell their
own subjects. (Of course, this neither condones the white traders who bought the
slaves nor deny that many white traders still committed atrocities to maximize
their business).
This explains why slavery became "black". Ancient slavery, e.g. under the
Roman empire, would not discriminate: slaves were both white and black
(so were Emperors and Popes).
In the middle ages, all European countries outlawed slavery (of course,
Western powers retained countless "civilized" ways to enslave their citizens, but
that's another story), whereas the African kingdoms happily continued in
their trade. Therefore, only colored people could be slaves, and that is how
the stereotype for African-American slavery was born. It was not based on
an ancestral hatred of blacks by whites, but simply on the fact that blacks were the
only ones selling slaves, and they were selling people of their own race.
(To be precise, Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war,
and Muslims were selling Christian slaves captured in war, but neither the
Christians of Europe nor the Muslims of Africa and the Middle East were
selling their own people).
Then the Muslim trade of African slaves
declined rapidly when Arab domination was reduced by
the emerging European powers.
(Note: Arabs continued to capture and sell slaves, but mostly
in the Mediterranean. In fact, Robert Davis estimates that 1.25 million
European Christians were enslaved by the "barbary states" of northern Africa.
As late as 1801
the USA bombed Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli precisely to stop
that Arab slave trade of Christians.
The rate of mortality of those Christian slaves in the Islamic world was
roughly the same as the mortality rate in the Atlantic slave trade of
the same period.)
Christians took over in black Africa, though.
The first ones were the Portuguese, who, applying an idea that
originally developed in Italian seatrading cities, and often using
Italian venture capital,
started exploiting sub-Saharan slaves in the 1440s to support the
economy
of the sugar plantations
(mainly for their own African colonies of Sao Tome and Madeira).
The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America,
but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including
South and Central America. We tend to focus on what happened in North America
because the United States would eventually fight a war over slavery (and it's
in the U.S. that large sectors of the population would start condemning slavery,
contrary to the indifference that Muslims and most Europeans showed for it).
Even after Europeans began transporting black slaves to America, most trade was
just that: "trade". In most instances, the Europeans did not need to use any force to get those
slaves. The slaves were "sold" more or less legally by their (black) owners.
Scholars estimate that about 12,000,000 Africans were sold by Africans to
Europeans
(most of them before 1776, when the USA wasn't yet born)
and 17,000,000 were sold to Arabs.
The legends of European mercenaries capturing free people in
the jungle are mostly just that: legends. A few mercenaries certainly stormed
peaceful tribes and committed terrible crimes, but that was not the norm.
There was no need to risk their lives, so most of them didn't: they simply
purchased people.
As an African-American scholar (Nathan Huggins) has written, the "identity"
of black Africans is largely a white invention: sub-Saharan Africans never felt like
they were one people, they felt (and still feel) that they belonged to
different tribes. The distinctions of tribe were far stronger than the
distinctions of race.
Everything else is true: millions of slaves died on ships and of diseases,
millions of blacks worked for free to allow the
Western economies to prosper, and the economic interests in slavery became
so strong that the southern states of the United States opposed repealing it.
But those millions of slaves were just one of the many instances of mass
exploitation: the industrial revolution was exported to the USA by enterpreuners
exploiting millions of poor immigrants from Europe. The fate of those immigrants
was not much better than the fate of the slaves in the South. As a matter of
fact, many slaves enjoyed far better living conditions in the southern
plantations than European immigrants in the industrial cities (which were
sometimes comparable to concentration camps).
It is not a coincidence that slavery was abolished at a time when millions
of European and Chinese immigrants provided the same kind of cheap labor.
It is also fair to say that, while everybody tolerated it, very few whites
practiced slavery:
in 1860 there were 385,000 USA citizens who owned slaves, or
about 1.4% of the white population (there were
27 million whites in the USA). That percentage was zero in
the states that did not allow slavery (only 8 million of the
27 million whites lived in states that allowed slavery).
Incidentally, in 1830 about 25% of the free Negro slave
masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves: that is
a much higher percentage (ten times more) than the number
of white slave owners.
Thus slave owners were
a tiny minority (1.4%) and it was not only whites: it was just about
anybody who could, including blacks themselves.
Moral opposition to slavery became widespread even before Lincoln,
and throughout Europe.
On the other hand, opposition to slavery was never
particularly strong in Africa itself, where slavery is
slowly being eradicated only in our times. One can suspect
that slavery would have remained common in most
African kingdoms until this day: what crushed slavery in
Africa was that all those African kingdoms became colonies
of western European countries that (for one reason or
another) eventually decided to outlaw slavery. When, in the 1960s,
those African colonies regained their independence, numerous cases of slavery
resurfaced.
And countless African dictators behaved in a way that makes a slave owner
look like a saint.
Given the evidence that this kind of slavery was practiced by some Africans
before it was practiced by some Americans, that it was abolished by all whites
and not by some Africans, and that some Africans resumed it the
moment they could, why would one keep blaming the USA but never blame, say,
Ghana or the Congo?
The more we study it, the less blame we have to put on the USA for the slave
trade with black Africa: it was pioneered by the Arabs, its economic mechanism was invented
by the Italians and the Portuguese, it was mostly run by western Europeans,
and it was conducted with the full cooperation of many African kings.
The USA fostered free criticism of the phenomenon:
for a long time no such criticism was allowed in the Muslim and Christian nations that
started trading goods for slaves, and no such criticism was allowed in
the African nations that started selling their own people (and, even today,
slavery is a taboo subject
in the Arab world). MORE
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