Title: Trading Souls - Europe's Transatlantic Trade in Africans
Authors: Hilary McD. Beckles &Verene Shepherd
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston
Reviewer: Barbara Nelson
Two of the Caribbean's most distinguished historians, Hilary McD. Beckles, professor of history and principal of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, Barbados, and Verene A. Shepherd, professor of social history, University of the West Indies, Mona campus, Jamaica, "benefited from, and cite extensively the research of many distinguished scholars from Europe, Africa and the Americas" to describe the transatlantic trade in Africans (TTA) and analyse its impact on African, European and Caribbean societies in this easy-to-read, enlightening, but emotionally disturbing 117-page book.
In what is arguably the largest forced human migration in recorded history, over 15 million enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas between 1492 and 1870. It is estimated that some 50 million Africans were caught in the web of the TTA, that is, killed, injured, socially displaced or shipped.
Punishment
Of the over 15 million human beings that were shipped across the ocean, between 10 per cent and 20 per cent died from punishment, hunger, diseases and trauma. Large numbers were simply thrown overboard when the slavers considered them sick.
It was trade in the true sense of the word. Trading in 'black gold', as the Africans were called, was 'big business'. Enslaved African peoples, many taken as prisoners of war by the more powerful tribes, were sold or exchanged for horses, firearms and a range of military hardware wanted by kings and nobles, "but consumer goods such as brass, glass, iron bars, textiles, tobacco, oils, alcohol, soaps, exotic foods, and a range of household items found their way into elite African households".
The TTA created a situation in which the military superiority of European slavers and their African clients criminally victimised millions of ordinary people. It stimulated domestic political conflict in Africa. The masses of Africa were the victims while the kings and nobles established a client relationship with their business partners, the heavily armed European slavers.
The authors state that Africa lost "not just an enormous pool of involuntary, victimised labour, but also a wide range of intellectual, technical, scientific and cultural resources". In fact, the bottom line is, Europe was enriched and the Americas underwent economic expansion, while Africa was greatly impoverished.
Trading Souls is divided into nine chapters.
Chapter 1: Global Origins and Development of Slavery
Chapter 2: Africa in World Development before the Transatlantic Trade in Africans
Chapter 3: Africanisation of the Trade: The Transatlantic Context
Chapter 4: Financial and Commercial Organization
Chapter 5: Volume and Variations
Chapter 6: Middle Passage: Death and Survival
Chapter 7: Prices and Profitability
Chapter 8: The Transatlantic Trade and African Economic Decline
Chapter 9: Conclusion: the Transatlantic Trade and Western Economic Development
While slavery (that is the practice in which people's lives were controlled by others) existed as an important institution in most societies in ancient Europe, Asia and Africa, Africans in their communities were never enslaved in the ways they were in European colonies in the Americas where "their very humanity" was questioned and "their inferiority to whites" was enforced.
"Before the transatlantic context, enslavement was not confined to any one race or ethnic group. The racialised character of slavery associated it exclusively with Africans and peoples defined as black within the Americas."
It was in the early 15th century that the Portuguese expanded commercial contact with West Africa to get "slaves" for Europe. By the 1440s, gold and slave trading was established along the River Senegal. The Europeans considered the Africans to be primitive and inferior. The Catholic Church at that time sanctioned war and kidnapping that sustained the TTA.
"The principal activity, however, which led to a major expansion of the transatlantic trade in captives was the successful development of the sugar plantation industry in Madeira, the Azores and the Canaries during the mid-fifteenth century." By the end of that century the Portuguese had a vibrant kidnapping and trading network along the west coast of Africa. The fort at Elmina on the Gold Coast facilitated trading in both gold and enslaved Africans.
Columbus, the authors say, knew this Portuguese trading fort, and he was familiar with the Atlantic projects in sugar and black slavery at Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary Islands. "Columbus, therefore, opened the trade in enslaved Africans to the Americas."
The TTA was a reign of terror unleashed upon the African continent. It was, along with slavery and colonialisation, a bloody use of force, uncontrolled military might, a system created to exploit and sustained by violence.
Once the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, English, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Germans sanctioned African slavery all declared war on the attempts by the Portuguese to monopolise the lucrative trade. Up to about 1735 the Portuguese shipped more Africans to the Americans than any other nation, but after the 1740s the British became the leading shippers of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
The authors identify six distinct stages of the degrading and horrible 'Middle Passage'. These are:
capture and enslavement in Africa
journey to the coast and other departure points
storage and package for shipment
transatlantic crossing
sale and dispersion in the America
seasoning/adjustment in the Americas
There was enormous loss of life prior to the Atlantic crossing. Africans were "stored" in prisons called barracoons on the beachfront. At Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana, for example, "storage space" was available for hundreds of captured Africans. Up to eight per cent of the captured people died at this stage. The captured people were often kept for more than one year before they were shipped across the Atlantic - a process that took about 50 days.
The Atlantic crossing was in "physically undescribable environments" where epidemics of contagious diseases like dysentery, measles, small pox and fevers often decimated the Africans who were chained together. The captives were tightly packed below deck in a filthy, stinking hole. The sexes were stored separately.
Sexual access
"The crew considered sexual access to women a right during the journey. Thousands of women arrived in the New World impregnated as a result of rape and sexual violation."
Many historians calculate that about 30 per cent of the Africans who survived the crossing of the Atlantic died within two years of arrival in the New World. It was only in Barbados and The Bahamas that the enslaved peoples experienced growth. In the other Caribbean colonies, and in Brazil, the African populations experienced decline. In contrast, the Africans in the United States of America succeeded in growing and not declining.
In the final chapter, the authors examine the importance of TTA to western economic growth and expansion in England and France. They write, "The Spanish and Portuguese did not show the same kind of economic results as the French and British because they did not possess the financial institutions to convert their American loot into investment capital or domestic industry."
The book is comprehensible for school students and the general reader. A bibliography follows the final chapter.
