Istwa Nou

Through the fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish builders produced ships made for the open ocean, and their navigators learned to use the compass and to read the Atlantic's currents and prevailing winds well enough to sail out and get home again. That combination opened the Atlantic islands. Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde were reached and settled. Italian merchants, who had financed and run sugar around the Mediterranean for generations, worked with the Iberian colonisers to establish the crop on those islands, grown by enslaved people. The plantation of the Americas was assembled there first, in miniature and offshore. The ships did something else as well. Until then the winds and the distances had kept the Western Hemisphere out of contact with Africa and Eurasia. Once the route was solved that barrier was gone for good, and everything that followed for the people of the Caribbean followed from a set of technical problems being solved in Lisbon and in Seville.

For the three centuries from 1500 to 1820, about eighty percent of everyone who boarded a ship for the Americas was an African being carried there by force. The hemisphere was peopled principally by people who did not choose to come. Eltis and Richardson put mortality on the crossing at fifteen percent or higher, and that figure counts only the deaths at sea. It leaves out those who died on the march from the interior to the coast, which could take months, and those who died in the barracoons and forts while traders waited for a vessel to fill. Historians who have tried to reckon the total loss from capture to arrival generally conclude that the ocean crossing accounts for well under half of it. These numbers are the foundation of every colonial economy in the region, including the one that made Saint-Domingue the most profitable colony on earth. The wealth cannot be separated from the arithmetic.

The transatlantic slave trade ran for more than three hundred and sixty years and carried an estimated 12.5 million Africans away from the continent. It was a commercial operation. Sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton were luxuries with enormous European markets, and the cheapest possible labour was the entire point of the arrangement. Eltis and Richardson are blunt about the motive, which was profit, and about the scale, which puts this among the largest crimes on the historical record. There is a second consequence that draws less attention. The New World that European emigrants crossed to in the nineteenth century, the prosperous one they came for, had been cleared, planted and built by people brought over in chains. The millions who arrived voluntarily were entering an economy whose foundations were laid by the millions who did not. Saint-Domingue in 1789 produced more wealth than all thirteen former British colonies together, and it produced it this way.