Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Estates and gentry income/Slave Trade

Slavery

The slave trade was a profitable venture, as nine million Africans were taken from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries.

In England, the business of selling slaves was regulated by the monarchy for most of its life. Charles II created the Royal African Company in 1672, and was the major patron for the company. Many of the directors of the Royal African Company were also MPs, a position they used to make sure the company’s best interests were maintained. This appointment was obtained by means of money rather than status in most cases. The company also had hundreds of shareholders, as well as debtors and creditors. These creditors were often suppliers of the company (often guns or ships) who had been paid with company bonds. As the 1600s drew to a close, Parliament passed the African Trade Act, which gave all English citizens the right to trade in African slaves, effectively ending the Royal African Company’s monopoly. It is important to note, however, that many of those who traded in slaves were more so placed as part of the merchant class, who often held Catholic sympathies as Portugal and Spain were the largest purchasers of slaves. This created tensions during the Protectorate.

The Slave Trade in American Colonies

Slavery in the British North American Colonies was part of a long established system of labor exploitation that dates to ancient times. [1] Slavery existed in the great civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and even among the Inca and Aztec worlds of pre-colonial America. [2] At first, white Indentured Servants were used as the needed labour for the British colonies, but this changed in the later part of the 17th century. In the first half of the century, not less than 70-80% of English immigrants arrived in the Chesapeake as indentured servants. [3] These were people who usually served 4-5 years in return for their passage, food and lodging and other fees. [4] Once their indentured period was over, the Indentured Servant was free to live as a regular citizen, many choosing to buy their own land. [5] They came to the Colonies because there were no opportunities for them in England; they were drawn for the most part from the impoverished slums, poor rural workers, female domestic servants, and men from skilled and semi skilled trades who had decided that prospects were better in the colonies. [6] They came from a wide variety of locations in England, had an enormous diversity of occupational backgrounds, and on average arrived in the Colonies between the ages of 15 and 24. Many of them had been migrants already in England and movement across the Atlantic was another phase in their search for identity and stability. [7] But during the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined, as there became better economic opportunities at home. [8] When this supply of Indentured Servants began to decline in England as employment opportunities increased and when the supply of African slaves began to increase because of deregulation of the slave trade, the planter elite in the American Colonies gradually shifted from servants to slaves during the last quarter of the century. [9] The Atlantic Slave Trade was the result of, among other things, labour shortage, itself in turn created by the desire of European colonists to exploit New World land and resources for capital profits. There was already a bustling slave trade in the New World by the time that slaves started to arrive in the American colonies. The Spanish and the Portuguese first began bringing slaves to their colonies in Caribbean and Central America around 1501 from Western Africa. [10] This transatlantic trade helped to create a new global economy and an international world and was unlike anything ever known before, linking the Americas to Africa and Europe in ways that resulted in the development of Europe and North America and the underdevelopment of Africa and the rest of the Americas. [11] Profits made from slavery and the slave trade in the years from 1600 onward greatly contributed to the emergence of Western Europe and the United States as the dominant nations of the world. [12]

References: 1. ↑ David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 27. 2. ↑ Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 28-29. 3. ↑ James Horn, “Tobacco Colonies: the Shaping of English Society in Seventeenth Century Chesapeake.” In Oxford History of the British Empire: Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny. (New York: Oxford University Press), 177. 4. ↑ Horn, “Tobacco Colonies”, 177. 5. ↑ Horn, “Tobacco Colonies”, 178. 6. ↑ Horn, “Tobacco Colonies”, 177. 7. ↑ Robert D. Mitchell, “American Origins and Regional Institutions: The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” 73(1983): 414. 8. ↑ Horn, “Tobacco Colonies”, 179. 9. ↑ Mitchell, “American Origins and Regional Institutions”, 414. 10. ↑ Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 80. 11. ↑ Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 80. 12. ↑ Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 78.