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Brazil’s vast expanses of flat, extremely fertile, and well-irrigated land made labor the most important form of capital in plantation farming, amounting to perhaps 20 percent of the expense of sugar production in this era, and if one frames this only as a narrow economic problem, putting aside morality and ethics, Central Africa no doubt stood out as the best solution.
In 1760, when Brazil’s total exports were valued at 4.8 million milreis, sugar made up fifty percent of that total and gold forty-six percent.
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.
With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of history, not only through the prodigious wealth it would generate, a wealth hitherto “unknown in other parts of colonial America,” but by its legal and social example as well. The island colony stood out as a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery and in the construction of the plantation machine, as the originator of codes like these, and later as a crucial source of early migration, both Black and white, to the Carolinas, Virginia, and later Jamaica.
Although he bought some of the crop of smaller planters who grew sugarcane nearby (as had most of the early mill operators in Brazil), in an important innovation, the brunt of his business, by design, was the vertical transformation of his product, all the way from replanted cane cuttings of his own to the white, granulated loaves of sugar that he shipped off to England.
By then, the price of slaves delivered to Barbados had fallen by 35 percent from the highs of the 1640s, when roughly 10,000 fewer Africans were sold. Of far more lasting importance than any short-term fall in price, though, was the breaking of the Dutch stranglehold on this human traffic. This put Britain on a path to dominate the slave trade outright, as it would for the next century and a half, propelling its imperial expansion throughout the Caribbean, and its widening empire generally.
In the words of the late historian of Atlantic slavery Joseph C. Miller, plantations, monopoly companies, and new sugar colonies like Barbados constituted “controlled laboratories for early investment and management,” that were responsible for “creating golden modernity from monarchical lead.”
Between 1630 and the 1680s, Barbados went from being an island with a tiny Black presence to one where people brought in chains from Africa constituted 75 percent of the population, and 95 percent of the workforce.
Mortality rates on Brazilian sugar plantations were undoubtedly also high, but the approach of Drax and other members of the founding generation of big planters on Barbados marked a sharp break with the practices in Pernambuco and Bahia, one that reflected the industry’s important but unheralded role in the early stages of a shift from feudalism toward capitalism.
In contrast to this seigneurialism, the big, early success stories among Barbados growers were men who, like Drax, followed a much narrower, more hard-nosed pursuit of profit and specialization, quite close, in fact, to the ethos of modern business.
“The English planter combined the roles of mill owner and cane grower. He did not attempt to produce food, clothing, and equipment for his work force on his own estate, but depended on outside suppliers. He offered a minimum of social services.”
Slaves who worked in specialized roles tended to outperform those who floated from one task to another, developing little expertise.
Barbados and the other Caribbean sugar colonies that followed in its wake not only provided a direct boost to the European economy in the seventeenth century, but perhaps even more critically, they threw a lifeline to the struggling colonies of British America, which were restricted from selling many types of manufactures into the protected English market.
It credits two main factors for Europe’s sharp, British-led ascent. The first of these, he said, was the “ecological dividend,” the windfall that Europe reaped by completely taking over the Americas in an astoundingly brief period of time, effectively integrating many millions of square miles of agriculturally productive land into the European economic sphere. Pomeranz’s second factor was Europe’s expropriation of African labor on an immense scale through slavery, or what he rather delicately called “the fruits of overseas coercion.”
The caloric boost furnished by cheap sugar, Pomeranz postulated, fueled the long, intense workdays of England’s early industrial mill laborers.
The era of Big Sugar therefore ushered in a new age of alertness based on drinks that had the additional benefit of being hygienic, because their preparation required boiling water.
In speaking of the modern, we must consider much more than just economics, and sugar and its stimulant companions played a role of outsized importance in developments in another sphere altogether: the nature of society itself.
[A]n acre of tropical sugar land yields as many calories as more than 4 acres of potatoes (which most eighteenth-century Europeans scorned), or 9–12 acres of wheat.
England’s economic takeoff and industrialization prior to its neighbors was contingent upon overcoming the limitations bound up in dependence on wool-led growth. This it was able to achieve via the new Atlantic markets, which only slavery and sugar had made possible. This Atlantic world was one of economic diversity and wealth-producing opportunities based on division of labor and trade.
What clearly emerges through their data is that the differential in growth between Western Europe compared with other regions during this time period is almost entirely accounted for by the growth of nations with access to the Atlantic Ocean, or what the authors call “Atlantic traders.”
There, the slave trade became the central issue in the seventeenth-century debate over whether, in the words of the British historian William A. Pettigrew, “the legitimacy of the English state [ought] to derive from the crown or from the subjects of the crown.”
In reality, the imperial contest over the Caribbean was driven by a realist understanding that power flows in good part from wealth, whose sources must be controlled lest one’s rivals seize them to one’s detriment or peril.
By the 1640s, the trade in cloth with the Gold Coast had played an important role in the dramatic growth of the Dutch textile industry, which had been in crisis for much of the sixteenth century, its production having essentially fallen to zero by 1580.
Notwithstanding this boon, by 1660, England had become the clear volume leader in the North Atlantic slave trade, a position it would not relinquish until it abolished the trade in 1807.† This, in fact, was the moment when the Gold Coast went from being predominantly prized as a gold mine to being regarded above all as a slave mine, whose Black labor had become highly prized in Jamaica and other parts of the English Caribbean.
Another body of scholarship has long argued that it was the lack of a concept of private land ownership, or at least the common practice of it, in many African societies, that encouraged the trade in humans. People themselves thus became one of the most important forms of capital, both living and fungible.
The booming foci of the slave business along this stretch of the seaboard, in other words, had become important stimuli for circuits of exchange within Europe. This represented a deepening of a process we first saw with Portugal and its Africa trade beginning in the fifteenth century, where ties with the continent helped propel European integration.
In fact, as early as the first decades of the seventeenth century, some spoke openly of this divide-and-rule strategy and regarded the growth of a robust slave trade as a sort of dream outcome. A Portuguese trader wrote candidly, for example, that “there will soon be more war among them and that will make them have to trade more gold to finance their wars.”
Following England’s lead, the eighteenth century saw an explosion in the Europe gun business in slave-trading areas.
Sure enough, here and there Africans began incorporating the use of European guns in their military tactics. In addition, they frequently traded for them by offering up slaves they had captured in localized conflicts, something seen as early as the latter fifteenth century in the Kingdom of Kongo,
As a result of these victories, the Asante controlled virtually the entire gold trade in the Gold Coast by the 1750s and positioned themselves to play a dominant role in the slave trade as well.
As the slave trade intensified greatly in the eighteenth century, it set into motion forces of heightened chaos and political destruction in West Africa that became almost impossible for most polities to escape. Under these circumstances, selling members of rival identity groups or defeated and captured enemies into the trade took on an element of rational, if to us nonetheless highly regrettable, statecraft. Often, short-term survival simply demanded it.
Seen in this light, the lucrative sale of slaves into the American trade, which was increasingly necessary to finance armament, can be understood as being as much about statecraft as it was about the greedy pursuit of luxury goods and commercial profits.
This region, which stretches eastward from the Niger River delta in modern Nigeria to the thick forests of Gabon, situated to the south along the continent’s long torso, would become one of the three leading sources of slaves sent across the Atlantic, accounting for roughly 1.6 million people in the three hundred years after 1550.
Whether one speaks of suicide or rebellion, reputations like these force us to consider a counterfactual. Beneath the level of the local elites who profited from it, we must assume African resistance to enslavement to have been near universal, albeit taking different forms and exhibiting varying intensity from place to place.
Of most immediate importance is the fact that the creation of a literate elite allowed Kongo to become the first sub-Saharan state whose history was extensively documented and preserved in its own words and from its own perspective. It was not long before, in fact, João I of Kongo was himself exchanging letters with Manuel I (who had succeeded João II as king of Portugal) as “Brother.” John Thornton, a historian of Kongo, estimates that the entire archive of documents left by the kingdom amounts to more than ten thousand items.
Dispatching students to Europe gave his elite a deep and nuanced understanding of the ways of the foreigners, and for a time this enhanced Kongo’s efforts to safeguard its sovereignty.
As São Tomé become the chief entrepôt for all Portuguese trade and communication in the region, it assiduously opposed anything that could increase Afonso I’s autonomy, and even intercepted much of his official correspondence to prevent him from communicating with Lisbon.
This is not to prettify African bondage, or to assert that it was necessarily pleasant for those who were subjected to it, and historians take different views of this question. But what is certain is that the pathways that led out of slavery in environments like western Central Africa were comparatively abundant. They included marriage and absorption into the family lines of the owners, and did not typically involve transgenerational bondage, as under the chattel system.
In each newly exposed area, as the radius of the trade widened, a flood of foreign goods that still enjoyed maximum novelty value drove a succession of constantly renewed local market frenzies.
The existence of fifty-four countries, many of them tiny, with haphazard borders drawn solely according to the whims of imperial Europe, constitutes a severe burden that the people of the continent now seem condemned to carry indefinitely into the future.
To be completely fair to our counterfactual, though, one must reach beyond the crippling legacy of borders imposed by outsiders and consider the even larger cost to Africa of having had its own sovereign political processes derailed under the twin pressures of the four-centuries-long Atlantic slave trade, and the brief hegemony on the cheap of colonialism that followed on its heels.
Here, two purposes were in play: to ease the psychological blow of its loss to the United States, and the securing of a tropical realm that could become an inexhaustible source of the kinds of agricultural products and raw materials that would be needed as the Industrial Revolution deepened. This became what was, in effect, the third incarnation of Africa as a European El Dorado, following the Iberian-led age of African gold and the long centuries of the slave trade. Unlike the others, this new age, which is all but forgotten now, would prove merely evanescent.
The British East India Company essentially took over the Indian subcontinent in the 1780s and 1790s. The Company’s monopoly there would end in 1813, but by that time the India trade had become a far more developed and safer source of commerce than any conceivable African alternative, especially given the continent’s fragmentation.
It is seldom remembered this way, but what followed the long slave-trade era was a remarkably short period of colonial rule, when a neat graft of Western laws and institutions onto Africa’s bodies politic is sometimes imagined to have taken place. The reality was never so promising, however, not even from the outset. During this time, with few exceptions, the European powers committed precious few resources, whether budgetary or human, to developing or even administering Africa.
Whatever their ancestors’ participation in the Atlantic trade, broad swaths of West Africa and western Central Africa were forced to absorb captives from elsewhere into their ethnic groups, and indeed into their families, via enslavement.
Nunn and Wantchekon bluntly assert that “the slave trade altered the cultural norms of the ethnic groups exposed to it, making them less trusting of others.” Moreover, they continue, “areas with low levels of trust have developed weaker institutions, and [their] weaker institutions in turn have resulted in worse behavior and still lower levels of trust. These societies remain trapped in an equilibrium of uncooperative behavior, mistrust and inefficient institutions.”
Local officials took advantage of their power, according to Joseph Miller, to convert “judicial institutions from courts of arbitration to tribunals condemning accused thieves, witches, and sorcerers from rural areas to sale and exile.”
Nunn and Wantchekon say that “in areas heavily exposed to the slave trade, norms of mistrust toward others [became] more beneficial than norms of trust, and therefore they would have become more prevalent over time.”
The observable traits of an organism (and in this case, we of course mean human beings), in other words, are affected not only by their genotype, but by their phenotype as well. According to the theory, this comes about as a result of interactions between the expression of their various genes and their environment and social conditions.
Under these circumstances, he wrote, “[a] hypothetically average farming hamlet of one hundred people could thus expect to suffer the disappearance of one of its twenty or so young men once in the course of each agricultural cycle or two.” The impact of such steady disappearance of people into the slave traffic like this, often stealthily and by surprise, injected an enormous dose of ambient environmental insecurity into people’s lives, and this imposed social costs that went beyond the taxes on African manpower, production, and fertility that we have spoken of.
