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September 3, 2022 - January 21, 2023
In one of his biggest hits, “Redemption Song,” the visionary Jamaican artist Bob Marley had famously called on Africans and members of the Black diaspora to “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.”
Where the Portuguese favored commercial and maritime enterprise and took a comparatively hands-off approach to colonial economic management, Spain endeavored to micromanage its vast colonies and tightly monitored all economic transactions. When the emphasis was not on direct extraction of gold and silver, it was on the exaction of tribute from newly conquered peoples, which was “easier to keep track of than the profits of enslavement.”
Unlike the Dutch, the English, and the Venetians, Portuguese rulers did not license merchants to organize colonial rule. Unlike the Spanish, they did not tolerate the creation of great autonomous domains in their overseas territories. But they could not stop colonial administrators, priests, and soldiers from trading on their own account, or from accepting payoffs for illegal uses of their official powers. Colonial revenues thus made Lisbon and its king relatively independent of powerholders elsewhere in Portugal, but dependent on frequently corrupt officials. Such a monarchy could only
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To be fair, part of the distinction with Spain here may be more a reflection of demographic realities than sheer ideology. Much smaller Portugal simply lacked the population to staff large settler bureaucracies. By contrast, not only could its Iberian neighbor send plentiful settlers, it routinely deployed nobles to occupy the highest posts of government in places like New Spain and Peru, carefully auditing them once their terms of duty ended.
There is little doubt that the immense windfall that Spain derived from its business in New World silver had a profound impact on global economic history, famously binding East and West together more tightly than ever before. Less widely noted in accounts of economic change in this era, but also extraordinary in terms of the new wealth that it generated, was a prolonged eighteenth-century boom in gold production in Brazil, centered in the Minas Gerais region.
injection of specie into the European economy that resulted from the Brazilian gold boom with helping fuel the Industrial Revolution.
Scarcely recognized in most historical accounts of the rise of the West, however, is the fact that Brazil’s sugar crop, which by itself accounted for 40 percent of Portugal’s total revenue by the late 1620s, generated more income than either of these metal booms, silver or gold.
It was for precisely these reasons that Portugal calculated that a Brazil worked by slaves was worth substantially more to it than its holdings in the East. Under pressure from every quarter, particularly from the Dutch, this forced a painful, but necessary choice. Portugal lost Elmina in 1637 and soon began relinquishing control of its various Asian footholds as well. Within less than three decades, these came to include Malacca (in present-day Malaysia), Colombo (Sri Lanka), and Kochi and Kannur (India), all key ports in the spice trade.
This meant that after an extraordinary series of seesaw wars fought simultaneously against the Dutch and against a pair of highly capable and resilient kingdoms in western Central Africa, as we will see, Portugal managed to restore its control over the twin jewels of its empire: Brazil and Angola, the first being almost worthless without the second. Had it attempted to hold on in the East, it seems almost certain that Lisbon would have lost everything.
IN THE 1640S, the epicenter of the mounting Atlantic sugar revolution began to shift away from the vastness of Brazil and back to small and far more easily controlled islands, not so different, in fact, from the island off Africa where it had begun. The first step in this transition took place in tiny Barbados, in the eastern Caribbean.
When the first permanent settlers from England arrived there in 1627, Barbados was completely uninhabited, having been abandoned by the Caribs, and before them by the Arawaks, possibly due to slaving raids mounted by the Spanish in order to supply manpower for their mines on Hispaniola.
Lesser Antilles mainly for its strategic value. That is because the Caribbean Sea was situated well beyond “the line,” meaning located in a zone south of the Tropic of Cancer and west of the mid-Atlantic, in which the diplomatic treaties, conventions, and other niceties governing relations among rival European empires on their home continent lost all legal force.
was places like these that helped make the Caribbean Sea “the cockpit of Europe,” in the memorable phrase of Eric Williams—in other words, a zone of ceaseless maritime jousting and warfare well into the nineteenth century.
By the mid-1630s, the takeoff of Virginia as a tobacco-growing colony and the relatively poor quality of the Barbados crop combined to foreclose early dreams of tobacco-driven wealth on the island. The pressure from Virginia on Barbados’s tobacco earnings, however, coincided with a strong upward movement in the price fetched by sugar, propelled in part by continued instability in Brazil, where the rivalry between Holland and Portugal over control of the South Atlantic raged on. The confluence of these two factors set the stage for sugar’s historic takeoff on Barbados.
The law described Africans as a “heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people,” and gave their white owners near total control over their lives. The right of trial by jury guaranteed for whites was excluded for slaves, whom their owners could punish at will, facing no consequences even for murder, so long as they could cite a cause. Other rules barred Black slaves from skilled occupations, thus helping to reify race as a largely impermeable membrane dividing whites and Blacks in the New World. With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of
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the Dutch launched a short-lived but much more ambitious push to become a world power in their own right.
Under this scheme, the Great Design mentioned earlier, the Dutch hoped to use their country’s newly founded West India Company to construct a monopolistic trading system in the Western Hemisphere, much in the mold of what it had already accomplished in Asia.
While it lasted, Holland would control many of the leading sources of slaves in both Central and West Africa, meaning both Elmina and Luanda.
The Dutch never managed to completely fulfill their grand scheme, but this does not mean that their designs went unexecuted. Their implementation would be left, instead, to the English, whose fast-rising power, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, was founded on pursuing the same kinds of synergies, only much further still.
From the early stages of this new integrated system, Britain’s American colonies served as the larder of meat, fish, and grain, as well as horses, oxen, timber, and other natural resources for far wealthier colonies like Barbados, whose sugar industry gave it the highest per capita exports in the Americas, and where the high profits from growing cane quickly made other uses of scarce land uneconomical.
In the end, no part of continental America was bootstrapped more dramatically than New England, whose farmers and fishermen focused heavily on supplying Barbados and the greater, sugar-growing Caribbean.
fact, as much as any Enlightenment ideals, it was the West Indian roots of New England’s rising prosperity—freeing the merchants and farmers of places like Boston, Salem, and Providence from economic reliance on the English homeland—that fueled a nascent thinking about independence in this part of British America.
But what had tied each wave, from Portuguese to Dutch, then Dutch to English, of European empire building in the New World together in the first place was a common foundation premised on the game-changing, wealth-generating value of enslaved Africans. Without this, none of the Europeans’ imperial ambitions made any sense.
Raynal’s insights mirrored those of William Burke, a cousin of Edmund Burke and a colonial official in Guadeloupe in 1760, then only recently seized by England from France. “It is by means of the West-Indian trade that a great part of North America is at all enabled to trade with us,” he wrote. “[I]n Reality the Trade of these North American Provinces . . . is, as well as that of Africa, to be regarded as a dependent Member, and subordinate Department of the West-Indian Trade; it must rise and fall exactly as the West-Indies flourish or decay.”
In Burke’s formulation, the Africa trade overwhelmingly consisted of the violent commerce in men and women who were shipped in chains across the ocean from that continent.
With Holland substantially weakened, the English moved in for the pickings, seizing New Amsterdam in 1664 and rebranding it as New York, while also going from strength to strength in the Caribbean.
One other subscriber of note was a young professor at Oxford named John Locke.
For this purpose, almost straightaway after the change in the Company’s charter, a convoy of forty English ships were dispatched to Africa where, as the historian Hugh Thomas wrote, they “conquered the Cape Verde Islands, and recaptured Cape Coast [eleven miles from Elmina] along with several other Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast, before crossing the Atlantic to seize New Amsterdam, in New Holland, in North America, a city soon after renamed after the leading shareholder in the Royal Adventurers, the duke of York.”
TO ENTER THE ELMINA CASTLE one must first cross a narrow bridge over the moat that was dug around its perimeter for protection against attack, whether foreign or local. At one end of this gangway there is a marble plaque that reads: In Everlasting Memory of the anguish of our ancestors may those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We the living vow to uphold this.
Door of No Return.
When a similar holding pen at the nearby slaving fort at Cape Coast was excavated in 1972, archaeologists scraped away from its floor eighteen inches of compacted waste, much of it feces, blood, and skin.
Climbing out of the darkness of the dungeon of the fort at Elmina and into those waves was like leaving the womb in a strange and backward birthing ritual. By clambering aboard the ship that would carry them to the Americas, the survivors were completing “the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle.”
But in a remarkably brief period of time, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, it came to be rapidly eclipsed by another commodity; one that would change the course of the world economy in its wake even more profoundly than gold itself had: the transatlantic trade in Black people.
As the slave trade first began to ramp up in the first half of the sixteenth century, its early volume was mostly sourced in an area that the Europeans called Cape Verde, a region that comprises not just the island of that name, but stretches from the baobab-studded scrublands of modern-day Senegal and Gambia all the way to Guinea-Bissau and the rain forests and swamp of Sierra Leone.
For these reasons, Upper Guinea, as this region is also known, became the first part of sub-Saharan
Saharan Africa to become integrated into the emerging Atlantic world.
The trade in slaves by Europeans that began with a relative trickle here after the mid-fifteenth century was largely conducted from the Cape Verde Islands.
By the early sixteenth century Lisbon’s population of about 100,000 was fully 10 percent Black, while Portugal as a whole contained 40,000 people of African descent.
The most pressing and constant challenge for the crown in this era, in fact, was how to maintain control of a business that generated such lucrative revenue streams. Toward this end, Lisbon introduced increasingly restrictive statutes and codes aimed at regulating business on the African mainland. Soon, travel to the continent without authorization was made a capital offense, according to a law that read, “no person, irrespective of rank or station, should throw himself with the Negroes, on pain of death.”
Upper Guinea region was a highly propitious ground upon which to found a transcontinental business in slaves. That is because it had already become a kind of “shatter zone” over the previous two centuries; this occurred as Kaabu, a Malinke empire, expanded coastward, both to the west and south, from its heartland in what is today southwestern Mali and collided with other kingdoms that lay in its path, creating a “mêlée of peoples,” in the phrase of the historian Walter Rodney. “Indeed, the whole of the Upper Guinea offered ample opportunities for conflicts between ethnic groups, localized wars
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And it is reasonable to postulate that Africans who already had a long history of selling members of rival groups into slavery via circuits like these would have just have eagerly sold them to newcomers from Europe.
As other European nations dove into the trade for African slaves, the stiffening competition, in addition to other factors that we will explore, drove the Portuguese farther and farther down the African coast until they reached the region of Kongo and Angola, where they would soon begin to acquire slaves in much greater numbers than ever before.
WITH ITS RANK AND centuries-long exploitation of Africans, the plantation-complex was the most important driver of wealth in the New World, and indeed in driving the ascension of the West.
By 1501, the enslavement of Africans had clearly been introduced into the New World, beginning in the settlement that Columbus founded, Hispaniola.
In the sixteenth century, approximately 277,000 Africans were brought in chains across the Atlantic, with nearly 90 percent of them going to Spain’s newly conquered American territories, led by Cartagena, New Spain, and Veracruz. Over its long course, this human traffic would bring an estimated 2.07 million people to the Spanish Americas, either by direct shipment across the Atlantic, or via a lively intra-American trade, trafficked onward from places like Dutch Curaçao or English Jamaica.
This made the Spanish Americas the second most important zone of forced permanent African migration, after Brazil. As
And yet the available evidence shows that Africans were just as indispensable to making Hispanic Latin America viable as they were in the domains of the hemisphere’s other major European colonial powers.*
The advocacy of Las Casas and others would lead to an abolition of the trade in Indians throughout the Spanish Americas in 1542.
By 1600, Potosí, in Bolivia, had a population nearly as large as that of London or Tokyo.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, Spanish America would have half a dozen cities that were larger than the biggest cities in British America, led by Mexico City and Guanajuato, and many of them teemed with Blacks.
