The Slave Trade

With Emancipation Day only three weeks away, we need to be reminded of the Slave Trade that undergirded the “peculiar institution”. The beginning of the European enslavement of Africans actually predated the need for cheap labour in the New World. It actually began in 1442, when two very Christian captains of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator brought back a dozen Africans they had captured. It started a trend. Soon every pretender to nobility had to have his own African slave, and Lagos in Portugal became the prime slave port. Africans were heathens, and the staunch Portuguese Christians asserted that they were saving their souls. It would not have hurt that they also provided free labour.
The Spaniards, therefore, simply turned to a known supply of humans to fill the labour breach when the indigenous Indians inconsiderately died off like flies when they were enslaved in the newly “discovered” colonies after 1492. The Portuguese could not keep up, and contracts (“Asientos”) were issued to other nations. The British got into the act in 1562 when John Hawkins became a subcontractor with Queen Elizabeth as a silent partner. His ship was named, “Jesus”, and one can be sure he prayed for the salvation of his cargo. He was knighted by the good queen after ten years of ferrying souls. The Dutch, French, Danes and other Europeans also rushed in to save souls.
By the beginning of the 18th Century, Britain had emerged and was acknowledged as the official trader of Africans – in a trade which had now grown to gargantuan proportions. In the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Spain signed off on the British monopoly, and the expansion of African slavery became one of the major commercial policy goals of Britain. They were not just a nation of shopkeepers: they played the pivotal role in the international trade in human beings. British ships dominated the market for slaves in the Americas, and supplied African captives to Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies, as well as to the parts of the world controlled by the British Empire. In some 12,000 trips, British ships transported 2,300,000 African souls across the Atlantic.
By the 18th century, when the European “Enlightenment” dawned, the light did not appreciably extend to the conception of who was the African. The Enlightenment thinkers conceded that the African “may” be a species of man. For instance, in 1753, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume declared, “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” The services of “reason” were soon dragooned in a host of social and natural sciences to prove the inferiority of the African on the great “chain of being”. The famous question posed by the chained, kneeling African in the Wedgwood medallion in the anti-slave campaign, “Am I not a man and a brother?” has not really been answered by the Europeans. And the canker of racism has spread into other peoples through the hegemony that they established during the colonial period. We are supposed to fight to determine who is closer to the white ideal.
Another side of the story that is usually glossed over is the ubiquity of the wealth that was built on the backs of the Slave Trade. Institutional investors in slavery included the Royal Family, who followed in Elizabeth’s footsteps; numerous colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities; and even the Church of England. In 1773, the Heywood brothers founded a bank in Liverpool to fund slave expeditions and deposit their profits. Today the firm is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Barclay brothers were involved in the Slave Trade from 1756. The trade paid for impressive projects, such as the cathedral-like library of the most elite All Souls College in Oxford. It was not ironic, but a measure of the intransigence of racism in the modern world that Eric Williams was denied membership to All Souls when he was at Oxford.