INTRODUCTION
The British banned their slave trade in 1807, but it continues to exercise a repellent fascination in the public mind. The image of a foul slave ship, packed tight with African victims, is etched in popular memory on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a historical horror story that gets worse the more we know about it. Despite some remarkable research, it remains difficult to write a historical account that does full justice to the victims, or fully comprehends the outlook of the tens of thousands of people involved in the trade.
Even with indisputable data, it is still hard to grasp the scale of the Atlantic trade. Over centuries it devoured millions of human beings, blighted regions of Africa and obliged its victims to endure a protracted and scarcely imaginable seaborne trauma. The 11 million (and more) Africans who stumbled ashore, at myriad points along a vast coastline stretching from New Amsterdam to the River Plate, became the shock troops in the conquest of the virgin Americas. Until the 1820s, the number of African arrivals greatly outnumbered European arrivals. The African survivors from the slave ships (and their local-born offspring) laid the foundations for the emergence of early material prosperity in the Americas. Slave-based plantations spawned a new form of wealth – and not merely for planters, but for their backers, suppliers and consumers in Europe and the Americas. Their efforts can still be seen in surviving plantations and their great houses, but equally on the streets of Liverpool and Bordeaux, Nantes and Rio. More chillingly, of course, their story echoes through the gloomy cells of the massive forts on Africa’s slaving coast. Here is a story that draws together four continents. The sinews that bound them ever closer were the enslaved Africans.
The slave trade has often been projected as a distant story: a historical account that concerned Africa, the Americas and the sea routes in between. Viewed from Europe, it was as if the slave trade was far away: something that took place over the horizon. Yet Europe was the engine behind the whole enterprise, in inspiration, in finance and support, in political and military engagement – and in profitable returns. Yet, although the slave trade hugely benefited European finance, industry and employment, it was largely regarded as existing on the margins of European experience. It was, to put it crudely, out of sight and out of mind.
Yet it was the slave ships that made possible the initial development of swathes of tropical and semi-tropical America. Their human cargoes broke in the land, cutting back and burning the luxuriant wilderness and converting it to profitable cultivation. The relatively small handfuls of European settlers, and the reluctant (and rapidly diminishing) native American peoples were inadequate for the labour involved. Thus the Atlantic slave routes became the major supply of labour for the development of the Americas. Enslaved Africans laid the foundations on which subsequent massive human and economic growth took place. We need, then, to integrate the story of the Atlantic slave ships into the wider history of the Americas, and to see them as a critical force in American development.
The slave plantations are generally seen as the crucible from which black society evolved, in a variety of different forms, across the Americas. Yet the slave ships themselves played their own distinctive role. The traumas of the months anchored off the African coast, followed by months at sea, left their own physical and mental scars on the survivors. It was an experience that fed into family and community life across the Americas. The Atlantic crossing was an exposure to a violent culture of management and control that had developed in the Americas. Slaves knew what to expect if they stepped out of line.
Does all this matter – except to historians? Undoubtedly. There are millions of descendants of the slave system on both sides of the Atlantic for whom this story has a painful resonance. But we need to grasp that its importance extends far beyond those with a personal stake. It matters because it is part of the history of Europe itself. All of Europe’s major empires – Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British and French – derived enormous benefits from Atlantic slavery. Their slave ships were loaded in, and then cast off, from all of Europe’s major ports. The slave trade was an important feature of the European historical experience, and we need to find some way of integrating it more securely into that narrative, and of creating public awareness that slaving helped to shape the kind of people we were – and became.