African slave trade An African slave trade existed since the days of ancient Egypt, when Nubian captives were brought from the Nile Valley to work for the pharaohs. Slaves were an important trade item in the trans-Saharan trade that flourished between North Africa and West Africa after the 10th century A.D., and slaves had been traded into the Indian Ocean world from East Africa for centuries. However, the most significant African slave trade was that initiated by Europeans in West Africa during the 16th century. Over three centuries, the Atlantic slave trade forcibly removed millions of Africans to plantations throughout the New World. In doing so, it left an indelible imprint on the histories of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. Portuguese mariners began trading with states along the West African coast in the middle of the 15th century. In 1470, Portuguese merchants began buying slaves from the Kingdom of Benin (in modern Nigeria) to trade with the Akan peoples to the west (in modern Ghana). There they were exchanged for gold and put to work in mines. In the 1480s, the Portuguese established sugar plantations on the Atlantic islands of SĂŁo TomĂŠ and Principe, which were located off of the west coast of Africa. Those were modeled after plantations in the Mediterranean and southern Europe, which used North African and Eastern European slaves to undertake the arduous work of harvesting and processing the sugar. The close proximity of those new sugar plantations to the mainland encouraged sugar planters to purchase slave labor from African traders. The African slaves worked in large gangs and were supervised by European overseers. When the Iberian powers began establishing sugar plantations in the New World after 1492, they adopted the plantation model used on the African islands. As the plantation economy of the New World expanded, it developed an insatiable appetite for African slave labor. European criminals imported to work on plantations quickly succumbed to tropical diseases, and Native American peoples were all but exterminated by harsh treatment at the hands of Europeans and exposure to new strains of disease. Beginning in 1532, slaves from West Africa were imported directly to the New World in a system that would last over three centuries and ultimately enslave and transport millions of victims. The conditions of enslavement, transportation, and servitude were horrifying. After being captured in Africa, slaves were chained and kept in port until they were purchased by European traders. The trip across the Atlantic was extremely hazardous, with many slaves perishing from disease or even being thrown overboard to their death when a ship's provisions ran low. While historians debate the volume of slaves transported during this era, it is evident that at least 10 million African slaves arrived in the New World. Given the vast number who died during the notorious Middle Passage (estimates range in the low millions), and the number sent to other regions (like South Africa), the total number of people ensnared in the system would have been much greater. Portuguese domination of the trade ended in the 17th century as merchants from several European states began supplanting them. By the mid-18th century, British, French, and Dutch merchants were transporting upwards of 100,000 slaves out of West Africa annually. Those slaves worked in mines in South America, on coffee and sugar plantations in Brazil, on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and on cotton plantations in the American South. Life expectancy on those plantations was short due to overwork and disease, which created a constant demand for more slave labor. Different regions of West Africa participated in the commerce to varying degrees. The Senegambia region was an important supplier in the early days of the trade, as was Angola. Later, the west coast of modern Nigeria became the focus of the trade, earning the region the nickname the "slave coast." The coast of modern Ghana was also an area with a high concentration of European slave trading posts. At the slave trade's peak in the 18th century, virtually every port along the West African coast was participating in the trade. The role of African rulers and merchants in the trade has been a subject of much controversy. Most people who were sold to Europeans were captives from wars or criminals. Before the advent of the Atlantic trade, captives would have been returned home after ransom was paid or enslaved. Criminals would have been either executed
or enslaved. However, slavery in that context meant something quite different from what it would come to mean in the New World. A slave in West African communities was frequently considered a member of a family. In many cases, slaves were eligible to own and inherit property, and their children would often be freed. Thus, while forms of slavery can be said to have existed in West Africa before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade, the chattel slavery of the New World, which viewed slaves as private property and beasts of burden, was rare in Africa. Europeans did not have the resources or inclination to capture slaves themselves, and they acted for the most part as buyers in slave markets along the coast. However, European merchants proved willing and able to encourage conflict among African states, as they did in Angola and the Kongo Empire in the 16th century, in order to maximize the pool of available captives. In general, the demand for slaves appears to have encouraged conflict among African states and to have transformed the nature of warfare. Where victory would have once encouraged rulers to exact tribute from the vanquished, the slave trade encouraged the victors to destroy and enslave weaker communities. The slave trade also had significant demographic and social consequences in West Africa. European traders preferred to purchase men over women because they were seen as better suited to survive the grueling Atlantic crossing and the arduous labor of the plantations. That preference left many regions of Africa with a disproportionate number of women, many of whom were enslaved by African rulers. It also robbed local economies of their most productive members, who were exchanged for European manufactured goods like alcohol, cloth, and guns that had little if any productive value. The plantation system also gradually took hold in West Africa, and by the 19th century, large plantations run by slave labor were producing palm oil and other products desired by European traders. Thus, the chattel slavery of the New World came to transform slave relations in Africa. During the 18th century, the Atlantic slave trade reached its zenith. Developments in Europe during the century, however, were laying the foundations for the system's demise. In the late 18th century, European intellectuals, influenced by the Enlightenment, began calling for an end to the trade. Some of those critics were inspired by the French philosophes' ideas of the equality and dignity of all people, while others were influenced by the economic arguments of Adam Smith and other physiocrats, who maintained that slavery was an inefficient economic institution. At the same time, Christian evangelicals in Great Britain and the United States began arguing for abolition on the grounds that the traffic in human beings was immoral. Many of the abolitionists were freed slaves or repentant slave traders. Initially, the abolition movement focused its attention on the slave trade itself. The abolitionists reasoned that the Middle Passage was the most dangerous aspect of the system for those enslaved, and that if the supply of slaves dried up, the owners in the New World would be forced to treat their slaves more humanely. Many abolitionists were also hesitant to support the cause of manumission, which was seen as an infringement on the property rights of slave owners. The European campaign for abolition coincided with important changes in the political economy of the Atlantic world. A glut in world sugar production in the 18th century, combined with a rising price of slaves on the West African coast, cut into the profits of plantation owners and slavers. Meanwhile, the rising manufacturing class of Great Britain (many of whom were staunch abolitionists) was beginning to view Africa as a potential source of raw materials and markets, rather than a reserve of human labor. As sugar interests lost their influence in the British Parliament, the cause of abolition gathered strength. Abolitionists were further aided by the growing specter of slave revolts. The Haitian slave uprising, or Haitian Revolution, of 1791 was the most prominent and successful such rising. Other resistance movements proliferated throughout the New World. For example, slaves in Brazil and Jamaica were able to form self-governing communities outside of European control. Such movements made slave trading an increasingly precarious investment and helped pave the path toward abolition. The abolitionist cause was strongest in France, where the trade was outlawed by the French revolutionaries after 1789, and in Great Britain, where Parliament approved the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The
United States abolished the trade in the same year, with Holland following suit in 1814. At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain was able to get several of the remaining powers of Europe to agree to a ban on the trade. The restored French monarchy refused to agree to the ban on slave trading, although by 1831, the nation had effectively ended its participation in the trade. Spain was the one European nation that continued to ignore the ban, and many slave ships began using Spanish or Cuban flags. The trade between Africa and the New World plantations of Cuba and Brazil was only ended in 1867. With British subjects forbidden from trading in slaves, the British government determined to prevent rival powers from benefiting from the use of slave labor. Therefore, the British Royal Navy began patrolling the coast of West Africa, intercepting slave ships and liberating slaves. Repatriation of the slaves proved difficult in many cases, however, and the British colony of Sierra Leone was established as a home for freed slaves. The Royal Navy also plied the waters along the eastern African coast, where Swahili and Arab slave traders continued to export slaves to the Middle East and Asia. Ironically, the abolition of the slave trade actually increased the incidence of slavery in West Africa in the short term. African states that had grown wealthy by supplying slaves to coastal traders were slow to abandon their economic livelihood. With the Royal Navy closing off the export of slaves from the coast, vast reservoirs of slaves accumulated in ports. European missionaries and merchants attempted to encourage African states to replace slave trading with "legitimate commerce," the production of tropical foodstuffs for export to the European and North American markets. However, those new products were produced on large plantations that still used slave labor. In the late 19th century, European powers justified their conquest of Africa in part by promising that colonial rule would end the traffic in human beings once and for all. However, European administrators soon found that without slave labor, many colonies would not be economically self-sufficient, and they often turned a blind eye toward the practice. Though slavery had been eradicated throughout much of Africa by 1930, it has continued to exist in some areas of the continent until today. William Wilberforce In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, William Wilberforce, an elected member of the British House of Commons, advocated the abolition of the British slave trade and later the abolition of the practice of slavery worldwide. He also supported many other humanitarian causes in Great Britain. Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759 in Yorkshire, England. He was the only son of a wealthy merchant, Robert Wilberforce, and his wife Elizabeth. Wilberforce's father died in 1768, and he went to live with his uncle William and his wife in Wimbledon. His mother, however, did not approve of William's wife, who was a staunch Methodist, and fearing that her son would be unduly influenced by Methodism, she brought him back home with her. Even at a young age, Wilberforce impressed people with his intelligence, although his health was never good. At the age of 17, he entered St. John's College at Cambridge, where he met William Pitt, the Younger, future prime minister of Britain with whom Wilberforce would have a lasting friendship. As a young man, Wilberforce decided to embark on a career of politics. In 1780, he was elected for a parliamentary seat from his hometown of Hull. Once in the British Parliament, he usually supported the Tory Party policies, and when Pitt became prime minister, Wilberforce was supportive of him as well. Wilberforce remained a member of Parliament until 1825. In the fall of 1783, Wilberforce took a trip to France with his friends Pitt and Edward James Eliot. At Fontainebleau, they were presented to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. As exciting as this trip was, however, it was a voyage during 1784-1785 that changed Wilberforce's life. He went on a tour of England with
another friend, Isaac Milner. During this trip, he converted to the Evangelical Christianity from which his later humanitarian causes would emerge. In 1786, Wilberforce introduced a bill to reform the criminal law, advocating among other things that women criminals should no longer be burned but hanged instead. The following year, Wilberforce founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (also known as the Anti-Slavery Society). In January 1788, Wilberforce became very ill and nearly died; he was saved only by taking doses of opium, a drug that he had to keep taking for the rest of his life. By 1789, he was recovered and speaking openly against the British slave trade during sessions of parliament. Throughout the 1790s, Wilberforce worked for a variety of humanitarian causes. His great passion, however, was the slave trade, and every year, he brought before the House of Commons his motions for abolishing the trade. He had intermittent support from Pitt and other members of Parliament interested in Enlightenment ideals of freedom and liberty, but the British planters staunchly opposed the abolition of slavery. Many times in the 1790s and early 1800s, Wilberforce's bills were voted down either in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Part of the problem was that the French Revolution of 1789 had inspired the Haitian Revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. British planters were fearful that African slaves in their own colonies would follow suit. Because the French revolutionaries supported the slave insurrection, British king George III refused to sanction any measure that had the sympathy of the Jacobin government. Nonetheless, Wilberforce continued to speak eloquently against the horrors of the African slave trade, and he slowly began to make progress. Abolition was, he asserted, "the grand object of my parliamentary existence." By the early 1800s, the atmosphere in Parliament became more conducive to the discussion of abolition, largely because the Jacobins were no longer in power in France. Finally, in June 1806, Wilberforce introduced a bill for the British abolition of the slave trade to the House of Commons, which it agreed to send to the House of Lords. The House of Lords passed the bill in January 1807. On February 10, 1807, the bill was passed by the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16, and finally, on March 25, 1807, the bill received royal approval. Wilberforce had finally succeeded in abolishing the British slave trade. Early in his career, Wilberforce had not advocated the abolition of slavery itself. He was convinced that African slaves were not yet ready to be free. He believed that slaves had to be educated and trained or they would never be able to sustain themselves as free men. Once the slave trade was abolished, however, Wilberforce had no place to invest his great energy and began to support the immediate emancipation of all British slaves. In 1823, he organized a new group, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions. By 1825, due to his declining health, he was forced to retire from Parliament, but with his support, both financial and moral, bills for the abolition of slavery continued to be introduced to the House of Commons. Wilberforce was always a very popular man, even when his causes were unpopular. He was kind and witty, charming even to those people who disagreed with him. He was independently wealthy but used his wealth to help support his programs and charities. He was religious and concerned about vice and immorality. In 1787, he had started a group called the Proclamation Society, which, among other things, lobbied against indecent and blasphemous writings. He founded another similar group in 1802, the Society for the Prevention of Vice, which had much the same goals of the earlier association. Wilberforce was also the author of A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, published in 1797. This popular bestseller provided an analysis and explanation of Wilberforce's evangelical faith. After he retired from Parliament, Wilberforce lived a quiet life surrounded by his friends and family, with whom he was very close. He died on July 29, 1833 from influenza in London. Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act within one month of his death.