A Brief History of Transatlantic Slavery

This post is an excerpt from my unpublished dissertation, Race and beauty in Canada: print culture, retail, and the transnational flow of products, images and ideologies, 1700s to present 

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enslaved men, women, and children were culled from West African ethnocultural communities of the Wolof, Mandingo, Mende and Yoruba.[1] In his examination of Africa before the transatlantic slave trade John Thornton points out that there existed a bustling economic exchange between Africa and Europe:

Europe exported a wide range of goods to African before 1650, of which we can recognize several categories. First and surely foremost in terms of volume was cloth – a whole world of textiles of dozens of types by the seventeenth century. Then there were metal goods, principally iron and copper, in raw (iron bars and copper manillas) and worked form (knives, swords, copper basins and bowls, etc.). Next there was currency, consisting of tons of cowry (sic) shells.[2]

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In general, West African aesthetics were frequently changing, and by the sixteenth century this adaptive and creative impulse permeated all aspects of Africans’ wardrobe, from the combining of actual items of African and European dress to the reworking of cloth that composed that dress, Africans were as interested in dress and fine clothing as Europeans had become.[3]

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Europeans, however, promoted the slave trade by using indirect military pressure on African leaders, such as controlling important military technology, such as horses and guns.[5]

Before European slavery, enslavement had been widespread in Africa for centuries. The transatlantic slave trade was in many ways an outgrowth of this internal slavery. Thornton explains further that slavery was widespread in Africa because slaves were the only form of private revenue-producing property recognized in African law.[4]

These economic pressures coupled with trade mechanisms, which had already been in place between Africa and Europe meant that by the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese reached the Senegal region they abandoned their earlier strategy of raiding for commerce and began to export African slaves.[6]

Once the slave trade commenced, the Portuguese, Spanish, and the Dutch were some of the first countries to escalate the capture and enslavement of Africans, shipping them across the Atlantic Ocean through what has become known as the Middle Passage to the “New World” of the Caribbean, the Americas (North and South). This voyage had the effect, among other things, of homogenizing the African body. Many of the ethnic and linguistic differences that had existed in Africa were neutralized. The voyage through the Middle Passage on the slave ship was instrumental to this process of renaming and (re)identification.[7]

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The Middle Passage is the space of transport, violence, and transmutation that occurred in the Atlantic Ocean between the northwest horn of Africa and the shores of North America (including Canada), Caribbean, and South America.

Source: Unsplash | By the seventeenth century, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean territories had slave populations that resisted their bondage by such means as malingering, petty theft, sabotage, arson, poisoning, running away, suicide, and armed resistance.[8]

Africans were frequently resisting their enslavement. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica for instance, outbreaks occurred on an average of every five years.[9] Importantly, the centuries of exchange between Africans and Europeans before the slave trade meant that clothing, in particular, already carried meaning for enslaved Africans; there existed, as Monica Miller aptly notes, “a deeply ingrained cultural predisposition to exploring hybridity, syncretism, and displays of conspicuous consumption.”[10]

Thus, although the wearing of fine clothing would become part of a strategy of slave resistance and escape, it had been a celebratory part of various African cultures for centuries before the slave trade.

The first enslaved African were brought to North America after other enslaved persons arrived in the Caribbean. Over the course of the seventeenth century several American states implemented laws that sanctioned the institution.[11]

The Dutch – roughly between 1620 and 1670 – were the first colonial powers to impact the Atlantic world. During those years, Ira Berlin notes that “the Dutch took control of Portuguese enclaves in Africa, introduced their commercial agents, and pressed their case for Dutch culture.”[12]

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By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch were actively supplying slaves to the Caribbean, South America, and even with the transformation of New Netherlands into New York with the English conquest of 1664, Dutch merchants were still participating in the slave trade.[13]

By the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the Dutch had an immense cultural impact on mainland North America. For example, even though the Dutch lost control of New York, they still exerted strong linguistic influence in the Hudson Valley, and other areas of New York; a century after the English conquest, many people in North America, including some slaves, continued to speak Dutch.[14]

European contact with Africans, and the subsequent conquest and control of the black body through slavery irrevocably changed the course of modern history.

In the context of the Atlantic world, racial distinctions based on supposed truths of colour and blood were made and confirmed in slavery, and as a result, blackness, as Nadine Ehlers asserts,

“Became synonymous with servitude and whiteness with freedom.”[15] Those who possessed the phenotypic markers of white skin, straight hair, aquiline nose and thin lips were typologized as “Caucasian” and in opposition to those possessing “black skin-pigment, ‘woolly’ hair … [and] thick lips,” those were identified as part of the “Negroid race.”[16]

The bodily distinctions in hair, skin colour, and phenotype between Black and white women gained intrinsic meaning in the institution of slavery.

Notes

[1] These slaves were obtained from three distinct areas along the West African coastline: Upper Guinea coast (modern-day Sierra Leone), Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, and the Gambia; the other sites were the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), and central and south central Africa (present-day Congo and Angola). See Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997). Also see Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006), 35.

[2] John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45. Ira Berlin posits that depending on the location, the exchange also involved “guns, liquor, and beads for African gold, ivory, hides, pepper, beeswax, and dyewoods. The coastal trade or cabotage added fish, produce, livestock, and other perishables to this list, especially as regional specialization developed.” See Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 43.2 (Apr. 1996): 261.

[3] Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 90.

[4] Thornton, Africa and Africans, 74. Thornton explains that African slaves were typically used in two different ways: First of all, slaves became the preeminent form of private investment and the manifestation of private wealth – a secure form of reproducing wealth equivalent to landowning in Europe. Second, slaves were used by state officials as a dependent and loyal group, both for the production of revenue and for performing administrative and military service in the struggle between kings or executives who wished to centralize their states and other elite parties who sought to control royal absolutism. See Africa and Africans, 89. The use of slaves by private people to increase and maintain their wealth was just one of the ways in which slaves were used in African societies, another way was by the political elite, who employed slaves to increase their power. These slaves were used as a form of wealth-generating property, just as they were in private hands, or they might have been used to create dependent administrations or armies. See Africa and Africans, 91.

[5] See Thornton, Africa and Africans, 98.

[6] Thornton, Africa and Africans, 95.

[7] As Marcus Rediker explains, “the specific importance of the slave ship was bound up with the other foundational institution of modern slavery, the plantation, a form of economic organization that began in the medieval Mediterranean, spread to the eastern Atlantic islands (the Azores, Madeiras, Canaries, and Cape Verde), and emerged in revolutionary form in the New World, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and North American during the seventeenth century.” See Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 43. See also Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 2.

[8] Richard Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution,” in Origins of the Black Atlantic: Rewriting Histories, eds. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 26-7.

[9] Sheridan, “Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776, 27.

[10] Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 90.

[11] In 1641 Massachusetts became the first state to legalize slavery; in 1662 Virginia courts enacted laws that ensured that children born to slaves would also be considered slaves; and finally in 1670 Virginia declared that baptism did not alter a person’s servitude – not even Christianity could “save” slaves from the chains of eternal servitude. See Ayana D. Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 11-2.

[12] Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 264-65.

[13] Cooper, Hanging of Angélique, 53; 60-1.

[14] Cooper, Hanging of Angélique, 61.

[15] Nadine Ehlers, Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 32.

[16] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 25. Also see Charles Davenport, State Laws Limiting Marriage Selection: Examined in the Light of Eugenics, Bulletin 9, Eugenics Record Office (Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, 1913).