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The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of “darkest” West Africa.
Sounding like an updated Barros, Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading eighteenth-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labor “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity and social effervescence.
Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the West. African labor, in the form of slaves, became the providential factor that made the very mise en valeur or development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World, such as we know them, are simply unimaginable.
Djenné is the most prominent of many ancient cities in Africa that give the lie to this. It had urbanized hundreds of years before Arabs first swept into North Africa in the seventh century,
And the existence of a quasi-universal currency greatly facilitated the growth of Arab commerce from the Levant to Andalusia, the name given to the Muslim empire that flourished in what are now modern Spain and Portugal.
The clear twin lesson of Ghana’s demise was that never again would either ambivalence toward Islam or geopolitical aloofness be viable options for the rulers of empires in the western Sudan. Like it or not, their region had been permanently drawn into a thickening web of connections involving power centers north of the Sahara and beyond, along with all of the benefits and perils that this portended.
What would ultimately doom its rulers and indeed the entire polity was a weakness fatal to so many empires, including the great Inca Empire, as well as those of the conquering Iberian world, which was just then about to make its presence felt in Africa: chronic, internecine disputes and civil warfare over rules of succession.
More than any other fact, mobility on a scale never witnessed before in all of history became the new name of the game.
The Chinese stand out as the most spectacular explorers before the western Europeans, but they were by no means the only ones.
Ferrer’s explicit aim was to journey to a spot that had begun to feature widely on fourteenth-century maps of the world, in which Africa suddenly enjoyed pride of place: the Rio do Ouro (River of Gold), postulated in Libro del conosçimiento (The Book of Knowledge), a mid-fourteenth-century book that enjoyed widespread circulation in the courts of Europe.
In all probability, already by the end of the fourteenth century, Jews, possibly accompanied by Genoese, had already crossed the Sahara repeatedly, reaching the trading cities of the western Sahel.
Urban had urged southern Europeans to venture out beyond their own lands, which were surrounded by mountains and “shut in by the sea.”
The Canarians were ruthlessly abducted and shipped off to Europe, where they fed a highly lucrative market in slaves; later, they were traded as chattel on nearby islands in the Atlantic for work on early sugar plantations.
Nowadays, the idea that medieval Europeans enjoyed any lead whatsoever in science and technology over Muslims, South Asians, or East Asians doesn’t withstand even passing scrutiny; as we have already seen with navigation, in many areas Europeans, in fact, lagged quite significantly.
Most important, working in tandem with Genoese operators, the prince came into ownership of what was probably the first sugar mill of the Atlantic world on the newly conquered island of Madeira; it proved to be both a lucrative investment and a profound harbinger of the future. By the middle of the century, Madeira was producing almost 70 tons of sugar per year, and in 1456 a British ship landing from there provisioned the parlors of Bristol with one of their first supplies of this new luxury commodity. At the time, it was still mostly prized as an exotic medicinal. The Portuguese determined
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Framed at its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.
It was due, rather, to the critical contributions that Africa began to make to European wealth and prosperity in the second half of the fifteenth century, including driving big economic changes, such as the capitalization of Iberian economies and the launching of a new gold coin, the cruzado, in 1457.
Black Africans did not, by and large, live in unorganized societies without clear and well-established hierarchies and elaborate belief systems of their own devising, as the newcomers had initially imagined.
Metalwares and textiles for onward export to Africa started to play an important but little heralded role within Europe itself as Portuguese merchants began selling goods acquired in Africa to northern Europeans. These included the prized “grains of paradise,” or malagueta pepper, a type of chili that the Portuguese bought in large quantity near Sierra Leone and in what is modern-day Liberia, a region they called the Pepper Coast. In exchange, northern Europeans sold the Portuguese the textiles and metal goods that were in heavy demand in the newfound African societies.
Lisbon’s new monopoly over West Africa’s tremendous supplies of gold then left the Spanish with little choice but to venture out far beyond the Pillars of Hercules and push new exploration efforts into the westward extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, Portugal’s newfound wealth further fueled Spain’s obsession with finding its own sources of the precious metal. It was a matter of keeping up.
The Canary Islands, meanwhile, would soon serve as a critical springboard for the Columbus voyages and for Spain’s subsequent Church-sanctioned control over almost all of the new New World.¶ The geographic situation of these islands, astride the Canary Current, all but assured Spain’s success in this incomparably more famous breakthrough of its own. Ships that set sail from the Azores, the Portuguese launching point into the Atlantic, by contrast, were always stubbornly blown back toward Europe.
construction of fort in elmina
“People who meet occasionally remain friendlier than do neighbors, on account of the nature of the human heart,”
By itself, trade with Elmina caused royal revenues to nearly double in Portugal during the last twenty years of the fifteenth century. By 1506, with the tentacles of Portuguese empire already enveloping Brazil and reaching deep into Asia, gold from the Elmina region still constituted fully a quarter of crown revenue. The Gold Coast was generating about 680 kilograms of gold per year for Portugal or, it has been estimated, about a tenth of the entire known total world supply around that time.
Here it should be emphasized that up until this time, the people of this continent had little notion of a collective identity of themselves as being “African,” as anyone might understand the term today. Put another way, among the people of the continent in the fifteenth century, “African” was a label for a moral or political community that was still awaiting invention.
The demand for ceremonial art that, among other things, conserved a record of events at court and history, appears to be one of the principal reasons the Beninese coveted trade with foreigners for copper and for bronze manilhas, which they melted down to use in the creation of friezes and busts.
At its peak, which still lay a few years in the future, the profit the Portuguese realized from the sale of slaves alone, equaled 15 percent of their profits from the trade in gold itself.
As a purchaser of slaves from elsewhere in Africa, Elmina was equally important as a catalyst for what became the Atlantic slave trade. In this, though, São Tomé deserves an equal, if distinct renown—or infamy, one that has so far largely eluded it.
the way it shaped the global economy, society, and geopolitics of the next five hundred years. Here, for the very first time, we find fully racialized slavery for the production of processed agricultural exports into foreign markets. São Tomé’s plantations, in other words, were designed for and run exclusively on the basis of the violent domination of Black African slave labor.
By the middle third of the sixteenth century, it had gone on to figure out how to bring together sugar production, bound Black labor, and largely private enterprise, in order to dominate the South Atlantic and Europe’s commercial relations with Africa.
Directly or indirectly, the essence of the slave plantation model that arose here would be responsible for the two most significant mass agricultural revolutions in modern history, both of which we will look into in detail: Big Sugar and Big Cotton, with the straight line that connects them running right through the cultivation of indigo and tobacco here and there as well as South Carolina rice and coffee and cacao, as the slave plantation experience was extended to wherever it could be made to work in the New World.
One recent demographic study has suggested that the total population of Native Americans at the time of first contact with Europeans (1492) was roughly 60 million, or 10 percent of humanity’s global total, and that by 1600, as a result of contact with white people, 56 million of them were dead.
Given the enduring depth of both public ignorance and primitive stereotypes about Africa’s present and past, readers might be even more surprised to learn that by the late medieval and early modern eras, even literacy, especially in the Sahel and on its fringes, was not so different from medieval Europe.¶ The continent had any number of states that boasted their own formal institutions and processes of learning and scholarship. Make no mistake. There would be a real divergence between Europe and Africa, but for the most part it still lay in the future, and it would ride on the backs of the
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Taking slaves away to the far-off Americas was a “second-best alternative,” in the words of the historian David Eltis. And it was a path taken not only for reasons of a hostile disease environment, but because of African agency.
For one, slave uprisings were inseparable from plantation sugar production. In the ensuing centuries, as many as 70 percent of the slaves shipped in chains to the Americas would go on to be employed in this singularly cruel pursuit. Seen in one light, the history of sugar’s migratory spread, driven by devastating deforestation and soil exhaustion, as well as by the relentless search for greater and greater scales of production, was a remarkable, if terrible economic story. Seen in another, though, it was essentially the history of violent rebellion.
Elmina, by contrast, had produced many generations of culturally polyvalent operators by the middle of the eighteenth century—many, but not all of them, mixed-race people who went on to help seed virtually every economically important port of call in the Atlantic world.
As such, Creoles became the grease that made the commercial and social machinery function. They were the ultimate go-betweens.
THE MODERN HISTORY OF Africa as a geopolitically contested landmass full of parcels of territory that were sliced up by covetous outsiders formally began in Germany in 1884, at a famous event known as the Berlin Conference. At the time, Europeans barely controlled 10 percent of the continent, mostly in its northern and southern extremities. By 1914, as a result of decisions taken in Berlin, Old Continent monarchs and other rulers held sway over 90 percent of Africa.
The notion of a Scramble for Africa, as the late-nineteenth-century push by Europeans to lay imperial claim to virtually every part of the continent is called, is one of the most powerful images that the public retains of African history, and for good reason. It left an enduringly debilitating legacy for the continent: a plethora of puny and scarcely functional states, with conflict among and between ethnic groups, and with some once coherent groups left pointlessly straddling borders and others with far less in common, just as illogically, jumbled together in an artificial confection.
By the seventeenth century, intra-European competition over Africa and the new wealth that its labor generated on plantations in the New World had fueled a prolonged, multifaceted contest over the South Atlantic, indeed, a quasi-world war that is seldom taught about or discussed.
Prior to Williams’s writings, after all, the dominant historical tradition had been something called the British Imperial School, which insisted “the development of the Caribbean colonies resulted from the riches of Europe,” not the other way around.‡ Much the same, by the way, would be said about Africa as it emerged from European colonization.
“Empire was making the British state, not the other way around.”
Put to work in stringently coordinated and heavily policed ways, the rents extracted from Africans became far more valuable even than the yellow metal extracted from the continent in the sixteenth century had been as a natural resource.
As other powers sought fortune of their own overseas, Lisbon failed to improvise fast enough, and soon found itself unable to keep up. European rivals (notably the French and the English) had already begun to poach on Portugal’s holdings during the sixteenth century.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, sugar and the various products made from it, from molasses to rum, had laid the foundations of mass consumerism, and utterly transformed eating habits in Europe; in no place was this more so than in England. Indeed, no other product did as much to shape and define the modern condition. As an abundant commodity that was newly affordable for all, sugar would have profound economic and social impacts, transforming trade, labor, worker productivity, leisure, and, of course, health. More grimly, sugar also became a proxy in tangible form for slave labor.
The planters owned the land, they owned the tools—the sugar mills—and they owned the labor [slaves]. But a sugar plantation was also a society consisting of 100 to 300 people—even more in later centuries. The plantations were scattered throughout the countryside in a new country where the web of government was not yet capable of dealing with individuals. These small societies needed some form of government. It was natural for the senhor de engenio, or master of the sugar factory, to begin settling quarrels, punishing offenders against the common interest, and taking on the powers that were
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A seventeenth-century saying favored among the Dutch at the time held that wars made “gold scarce but negroes plenty.”
Practical limitations on harnessing indigenous laborers like these led the Portuguese to consider substituting Africans for Indians in the first place.
There, as a plain and modest UNESCO World Heritage sign attests, nine hundred thousand Africans first landed in the New World, more than any other single point of disembarkation.
Beyond the most obvious benefits from the sugar business—the revenues and profits that it generated directly—one must also look at what economists call multiplier effects, which stemmed from the many spin-offs and ancillary businesses that flowed from sugar, and from the rapidly expanding world of plantation economies. In terms of scale, perhaps the biggest of these was the exploding slave trade itself, which sugar drove like nothing else, before or after.
