Istwa Nou

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.

The first sales of African captives in the Americas took place in the Greater Antilles in 1501, and the ships came from Spain rather than from the African coast. Many of the people landed had been living on the Iberian peninsula for years, so they arrived speaking Spanish and knowing Catholic practice, which is one reason the earliest colonial records treat them differently from Africans who came later. The importance of these voyages is legal and commercial. They set the licensing arrangements, the duties and the accounting conventions that the far larger trade used for the next three centuries. Eltis and Richardson also point out how much geography decided. Taking part in the early trade depended on where a port sat in relation to the wind systems of the Atlantic, since a ship leaving Seville could reach the Caribbean easily and a ship leaving the Baltic could not. The map of the traffic was drawn by the winds before anyone drew it by policy.