Preface
Our website is designed to examine the history of black slavery during the Atlantic slave trade era (1440-1807) as well as the harrowing experiences of black slaves from Africa on the various plantation in the Americas (1440-1880). On a whole, however, our narratives are very much a view with a British perspective; particularly in the their colonies of the West Indies and North America. The first three "main pages" of the website, and their "dropdowns" provide for a detail description of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. We further seek to understand how the world we live in today came to be with our "Early Culture Formation" Pages. In other words, understanding who and why we are. Our quarterly Newsletter publications are not a chronological account, but seeks instead to explore and provide critical analyses of those major experiences of our forebears during the slave era and beyond. We try to provide literature that are, by in large, in conversation with each other.
General Background regarding the Tans-Atlantic Slave Trade:
When in 1493, Columbus made his second voyage to the Americas, he took with him sugar cane from the Canaries. By 1516 the first sugar cane grown in the New World, in Santo Domingo (part of which became Haiti today) was shipped back to Spain. It had been grown by Africans transported in the early voyages of explorations and settlements. Sugar began to flourish wherever the Europeans settled, in Brazil (Portuguese), the Caribbean, in Mexico and the west coast of South America.
By 1568 the sugar plantations in Santo Domingo had significantly increase its trading in black slaves. But almost as quickly as it arose, the Spanish sugar industry collapsed. Cane production and export passed on to other regions and to other European nations. Initially the Portuguese were able to satisfy the European's taste for sugar with the expansion of production in Brazil. But by the early seventeenth century it was the English who began to revitalize sugar cultivation.
England's triangular trade with Africa and the New World poured thousands of captives into the British colonies. Moreover, England became a major supplier of slaves for the Dutch, French and Spanish. Noteworthy, a British Royal Co. (originating in 1672) to join the other European nation in the slave trade instantly became hugely successful. It had built forts and deployed many ships for transporting Africans. By the 1720s, however, its time had passed. It no longer made a profit and had created a demand it could no longer supply. Henceforth, the markets of America were satisfied by individual traders and companied largely unfretted by any trace of restrictive economic philosophy and seeking only to ferry as many live Africans as they could.
Black slavery in the Americas, though it differed from one place to another, was quite unique. No other slave system forcibly removed so many people and scattered them across such vast distances. Here was a labor system called into being by Europeans, to develop their settlements in the Americas, using labor from Africa, and all to satisfy the palates of Europeans. Sugar, tobacco, rum, coffee and other tropical products. Black slaves transformed the taste of the western world just as surely as slavery changed forever the faces of the Americas and Africa. Our Newsletter narratives are influenced by the description of that process.
A view from London
London life in the mid eighteen century had come to revolve round the city's coffee houses. They were to be found in most streets. Coffee houses were more than places of refreshments, providing instead a range of functions and pleasures. They were the cross-roads of international trade and empire. Actions often took place in coffee houses, even black slaves both and sold in England.
Here is an extraordinarily important institution which had come to prominence in a relatively brief period, but which depended for its very existence on produce from the tropics. It was in fact just one indication of the way Europeans tastes had been transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an array of tropical goods. Tea from China, sugar and coffee from the West Indies, tobacco from Virginia, chocolate from Africa and America, rum from the Caribbean all were consumed on an increasingly large scale. Most curious of all, the three major beverages -- coffee, chocolate and tea - all had a naturally bitter taste. What made them palatable to Europeans was the addition of sugar. And the invisible ingredient which placed these exotic goods on the tables throughout the Western world was the toil of the black slaves- Africans transported across the Atlantic, and their descendants born in the Americas. Without the slaves there would have been no national addiction to coffee and tea.
The British used sugar much more than their teas. The British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar. Also, with their tarts and pies and other junkets, the British had developed the "sweet tooth" for which they became famous' as often as not they lost their teeth altogether.
As the English became increasingly involved in the world though trade they encountered people of different cultures. One of the central tasks they faced was to find ways to categorized them. This was a gradual process, the emergence of what we now think of as "Race." Between 1650 and 1750 plantation slavery emerged and then flourished in many of Britain's American colonies, and Britons, in England and America, used "Africans," interchangeably with "Negroes" and "Blacks" to refer to the people they purchased and imported into the Americas as well as the American-born (or Creoles) descendants of those victims of the slave trade. Little surprise then, that "African" became a degrading term. "Negroes" is a Spanish word that both acknowledge the Spanish history of enslaving Africans and distinguished the English from the people they enslaved. The use of the word helps reinforce the distance between skin color and identity. The word "Black," then and now, was ambiguous, and in England (though less so in the Caribbean) it referred simultaneously to people of African descent, American Indians and those from South Asia. The meaning of skin color and race were initially two separate ideas. English participation in the slave trade and slaveholding labor linked those ideas, but in the beginning they were distinct.
Over the course of time the intensification of the Atlantic slave trade, and other factors, helped produce a conventional image of Africa in the Western imagination as a primitive and pagan place. Africans, according to this view, were a savage people who existed outside of the narratives of Western progress. The "Negroes" were viewed as a non-human "thing," a chattel, a piece of property. They would keep them illiterate and teach them how to hate themselves by admiring the whites.
Although those first Africans may have come to the Virginia colony as indentured servants that semi protected status was no longer available after a short while to them. The Virginia colony would designed laws to hold Africans in eternal slavery -- not because they were accused and found guilty of crimes, but because they were Africans. A slave labored under the burden of knowing that his children, even those yet unborn, were destined to be slaves for the span of their natural lives. They went as far as creating laws prohibiting the use of the drums. A precious commodity in the culture of the Africans.
Ambitious Europeans powers were expanding their Caribbean interest during the period noted above. But by 1777 a phenomenal change was on its way for that most modern and freedom-loving of European nations, Great Briton.
The following is a chronology of main events of the British's involvement in the slave trade:
General Background regarding the Tans-Atlantic Slave Trade:
When in 1493, Columbus made his second voyage to the Americas, he took with him sugar cane from the Canaries. By 1516 the first sugar cane grown in the New World, in Santo Domingo (part of which became Haiti today) was shipped back to Spain. It had been grown by Africans transported in the early voyages of explorations and settlements. Sugar began to flourish wherever the Europeans settled, in Brazil (Portuguese), the Caribbean, in Mexico and the west coast of South America.
By 1568 the sugar plantations in Santo Domingo had significantly increase its trading in black slaves. But almost as quickly as it arose, the Spanish sugar industry collapsed. Cane production and export passed on to other regions and to other European nations. Initially the Portuguese were able to satisfy the European's taste for sugar with the expansion of production in Brazil. But by the early seventeenth century it was the English who began to revitalize sugar cultivation.
England's triangular trade with Africa and the New World poured thousands of captives into the British colonies. Moreover, England became a major supplier of slaves for the Dutch, French and Spanish. Noteworthy, a British Royal Co. (originating in 1672) to join the other European nation in the slave trade instantly became hugely successful. It had built forts and deployed many ships for transporting Africans. By the 1720s, however, its time had passed. It no longer made a profit and had created a demand it could no longer supply. Henceforth, the markets of America were satisfied by individual traders and companied largely unfretted by any trace of restrictive economic philosophy and seeking only to ferry as many live Africans as they could.
Black slavery in the Americas, though it differed from one place to another, was quite unique. No other slave system forcibly removed so many people and scattered them across such vast distances. Here was a labor system called into being by Europeans, to develop their settlements in the Americas, using labor from Africa, and all to satisfy the palates of Europeans. Sugar, tobacco, rum, coffee and other tropical products. Black slaves transformed the taste of the western world just as surely as slavery changed forever the faces of the Americas and Africa. Our Newsletter narratives are influenced by the description of that process.
A view from London
London life in the mid eighteen century had come to revolve round the city's coffee houses. They were to be found in most streets. Coffee houses were more than places of refreshments, providing instead a range of functions and pleasures. They were the cross-roads of international trade and empire. Actions often took place in coffee houses, even black slaves both and sold in England.
Here is an extraordinarily important institution which had come to prominence in a relatively brief period, but which depended for its very existence on produce from the tropics. It was in fact just one indication of the way Europeans tastes had been transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an array of tropical goods. Tea from China, sugar and coffee from the West Indies, tobacco from Virginia, chocolate from Africa and America, rum from the Caribbean all were consumed on an increasingly large scale. Most curious of all, the three major beverages -- coffee, chocolate and tea - all had a naturally bitter taste. What made them palatable to Europeans was the addition of sugar. And the invisible ingredient which placed these exotic goods on the tables throughout the Western world was the toil of the black slaves- Africans transported across the Atlantic, and their descendants born in the Americas. Without the slaves there would have been no national addiction to coffee and tea.
The British used sugar much more than their teas. The British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar. Also, with their tarts and pies and other junkets, the British had developed the "sweet tooth" for which they became famous' as often as not they lost their teeth altogether.
As the English became increasingly involved in the world though trade they encountered people of different cultures. One of the central tasks they faced was to find ways to categorized them. This was a gradual process, the emergence of what we now think of as "Race." Between 1650 and 1750 plantation slavery emerged and then flourished in many of Britain's American colonies, and Britons, in England and America, used "Africans," interchangeably with "Negroes" and "Blacks" to refer to the people they purchased and imported into the Americas as well as the American-born (or Creoles) descendants of those victims of the slave trade. Little surprise then, that "African" became a degrading term. "Negroes" is a Spanish word that both acknowledge the Spanish history of enslaving Africans and distinguished the English from the people they enslaved. The use of the word helps reinforce the distance between skin color and identity. The word "Black," then and now, was ambiguous, and in England (though less so in the Caribbean) it referred simultaneously to people of African descent, American Indians and those from South Asia. The meaning of skin color and race were initially two separate ideas. English participation in the slave trade and slaveholding labor linked those ideas, but in the beginning they were distinct.
Over the course of time the intensification of the Atlantic slave trade, and other factors, helped produce a conventional image of Africa in the Western imagination as a primitive and pagan place. Africans, according to this view, were a savage people who existed outside of the narratives of Western progress. The "Negroes" were viewed as a non-human "thing," a chattel, a piece of property. They would keep them illiterate and teach them how to hate themselves by admiring the whites.
Although those first Africans may have come to the Virginia colony as indentured servants that semi protected status was no longer available after a short while to them. The Virginia colony would designed laws to hold Africans in eternal slavery -- not because they were accused and found guilty of crimes, but because they were Africans. A slave labored under the burden of knowing that his children, even those yet unborn, were destined to be slaves for the span of their natural lives. They went as far as creating laws prohibiting the use of the drums. A precious commodity in the culture of the Africans.
Ambitious Europeans powers were expanding their Caribbean interest during the period noted above. But by 1777 a phenomenal change was on its way for that most modern and freedom-loving of European nations, Great Briton.
The following is a chronology of main events of the British's involvement in the slave trade:
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1562-63. Sir John Hawkins' first English Atlantic slave voyage.
1607. English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia 1619. First blacks sold in Jamestown, Virginia 1632. Establishment of Maryland 1625-55. British settle their own Caribbean islands: Barbados 1625 - Jamaica 1655 1663. Settlement of Carolina. (Split into two in 1713.) 1672. Foundation of Royal African Co. to control British slave trade. 1730-40. First Maroon war (Cudjoe), Jamaica. 1735-36. Tackey's revolt, Antigua. 1739/ Stono rebellion, South Carolina. 1750-86. Thomas Thistlewood kept diary of life among Jamaicans 1756-63. Seven year War, which Treaty granted Grenada, Dominica, St. Vincent and Tobago to Britain 1760. Tackey's revolt, Jamaica 1771-72. Somerset case: Lord Mansfield decides that a slave cannot be removed from England. Signals end of slavery in England 1776-83. War of American Independence. 1780. Gordon riots in London. 1783. Zong case: insurance claim for the loss of 131 slave thrown from slave ship in 1781. 1787. Foundation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 1789 French Revolution 1789. Former slave Olaudah Equiano publishes autobiography. |
1791. Slave revolt in St. Domingue (Haiti).
1792-1815. Revolutionary and the Napoleon Wars 1795-96. Second Maroon War, Jamaica. 1795-97. Fedon's rebellion, Grenada. 1800. Gabriel Prosser's revolt, Virginia. 1804. Haitian independence. 1807. Abolition of slave trade by Britain and USA. 1816. Bussa's rebellion, Barbados. 1819. Establishment of Royal Navy anti-slave trade squadron off West Africa. 1822. Denmark Vesey's revolt, South Carolina. 1823. Slave rebellion, Demerara (Guayana). 1823. Founding of Anti-Slavery Committee London. 1831. Nat Turner's revolt, Virginia. 1831-32. 'Baptist War'; slave revolt in Jamaica. 1834. Slavery replaced by apprenticeship in British colonies. 1861-65. American Civil War. 1865. Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in USA. Slavery abolished in Cuba. 1888. Slavery abolished in Brazil. |