While the slave trade had a major impact on the economic development of the modern world, it also contributed to the emergence of a new African diaspora, particularly the spread of people of African origin to the Americas. Today there are tens of millions of people of African origin who, as a consequence of the forced removal of their ancestors, live in the Caribbean, the United States, Brazil and other countries in the Western Hemisphere, as well as elsewhere outside Africa.
When these millions of people were physically removed from their homelands, they took with them their languages, beliefs, craftsmanship, skills, music, dance, art and other important elements of culture. As a result, today we're surrounded by the legacy of the slave trade in a multitude of forms. Another legacy of the slave trade is the continued existence of a body of ideas initially formulated to justify it and which now underpins modern anti-African racism in all its forms.
These harmful ideas have no basis in fact but were and are designed to suggest that Africa and Africans are inferior to Europe and Europeans in a variety of ways. These views permeated the centuries of the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans and continued to be expressed during the post-slavery colonial era.
They still exist today in the form of racial stereotypes and prejudices and racist violence, as well as Eurocentric views about Africa, its peoples and their cultures. The slave trade finally came to an end due to a variety of factors, including the protests of millions of ordinary people in Europe and the United States. Its abolition was also brought about by millions of Africans who continually resisted enslavement and rebelled against slavery in order to be free.
Resistance started in Africa, continued during the so-called Middle Passage and broke out again throughout the Americas. The most significant of all these acts of resistance and self-liberation was the revolution in the French colony of St Domingue, now Haiti, in It remains the only successful slave revolution in history and led to the creation of the first modern black republic.
Haiti's constitution was the first to recognise the human rights of all its citizens. First Denmark in , and Britain in , and then other countries in Europe and the Americas abolished the transatlantic slave trade for a variety of reasons including changes in their economic requirements. However, an illegal trade continued for many years, and slavery itself was not abolished in some countries until the s.
In Brazil for example, slavery continued to be legal until On the eve of the transatlantic slave trade, France had a large and growing population: between the early 17th and midth century it increased from 24 million to 26 million. Read more The Dutch were to become key figures in the story of the slave trade and slavery.
Even before the establishment of the Dutch Republic in Increased European demand for slave labor, however, increased the number of people captured and sold whole sale to the slave ships. Ultimately, modern estimates place the number of people taken from Africa in chains between nine and twelve million between the 16th and 19th centuries. The finance ministers of Europe also subjected the slave trade to the same Exclusif-style regulations as their colonies. All major colonial powers in the Americas participated in the trade to some extent, but when looking at the records, slave traders overwhelmingly disembark at ports owned by the nation whose flag whose flag they flew.
As the records show, however, there were many exceptions to this rule. The vast majority of these voyages disembarked at Caribbean, Central or South American ports. The first is that while cotton and tobacco were profitable, crops like sugarcane can only be grown in tropical climates, which North American colonies lacked.
The other reason is that slaves in North America did not die as often. As an economic practice, human misery drove slavery and saying that does more than make a moral point. Sugarcane farming in the Caribbean and South America was extraordinarily deadly for slaves, and plantation owners considered importing new slaves a cheaper option than properly maintaining their current workforce, creating a constant demand for new workers and perpetuating the cycle of the triangular trade.
As the 18th century progressed, Mercantilism eventually fell into disuse, especially with the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the first major work of modern capitalist theory.
Smith argued against the high tariffs, government intervention in industries, and other barriers to free trade that defined earlier economic thought, and the rapidly industrializing Europe soon came around to his way of thinking.
The slave trade also went into decline in the 19th century, as abolitionism took hold in Britain and France, though obviously, slavery continued in the United States and Brazil. It did not, however, cause the end of colonization, which began again in Asia and Africa itself in the coming decades.
Rev War Article. The Triangular Trade. The Economics of Slavery and the New World. But from the perspective of Brazil, Cuba, and others, the term has much less validity. When the European powers abolished their slave trades, merchants in the Americas built on many years of experience in their own bilateral trades to keep it going.
That means that almost two-fifths of the entire slave trade traced a bilateral, rather than a triangular pattern. Read more: A digital archive of slave voyages details the largest forced migration in history. And this makes it very difficult to generalise about the slave trade.
Understanding this dimension also underscores the global nature of the trade, which was organised by merchant networks spanning not only the Atlantic but also the Indian Ocean. By far, the most important of the bilateral traders was Brazil. This is hardly surprising, since Brazil imported more captives than any other New World region, receiving just under half of all of the Africans transported across the Atlantic.
While many of these Africans arrived aboard vessels sailing from Portugal, the vast majority — perhaps nine in ten — came aboard vessels that had originally sailed from Brazil. Merchants in Brazil began trading in earnest in the s, when parts of the colony were occupied by the Dutch, but increased participation dramatically after the Dutch expulsion in After British abolition in , Britain went on a crusade to get other countries to end the slave trade, pressuring them to sign treaties.
Brazilians managed to do this by trading their plantation surpluses for slaves in Africa. Traders supplemented these goods with Indian textiles, which they obtained via the global Portuguese mercantile networks, and with sophisticated financial instruments that allowed them to transfer credits around the globe.
0コメント