We are by no means saying that the views given in this film are our exact views. We simply wanted to show these films as a good example that was historically based and dealing with the problems of slavery and commerce in the 18th century.
Month: January 2015
Carl’s Blog Post #1: The Driving Force of Commerce
Outsourcing, insourcing, or slavery—commerce was and is the driving force behind the three. Well before America was founded, commerce played a major roll in the economic development of Britain. As pointed out in the first post on this blog, trading goods came before enslaving Africans. Even the African people dealt in trading with other countries such as India, China, and European areas. The goods sold and/or traded were, sugar, cotton, tobacco among other things that one have in their land. There was money to be made and goods to be sold at a profit.
During the 18th century, it is estimated that 38.4 million (in pounds) was made and continued to rise to about 102.7 million (in pounds) toward later part of the 18th century. Look at the chart below:
COMMODITY COMPOSITION OF BRITISH IMPORTS FROM THE AMERICAS (Through or pass Africa)
Products 1663-1669 1752-1754 1804-1806
Share of Total over Time (Percentage):
Sugar 60.8 48.5 35.6
Tobacco 16.4 20.9 3.1
Cotton 2.1 24.5
Coffee 0.1 12.9
Rice 6.2 0.9
Others 22.8 22.2 23.0
100.0 100.0 100.0
Official Value of Total (1,000’s pounds):
Sugar 256 1,302 6,689
Tobacco 69 560 591
Cotton 56 4,605
Coffee 3 2,414
Rice 167 166
Others
421 2,684 18,782
Sources: Ralph Davis (1969a p. 96, 1969b p. 119, 1979 pp. 114-5).
This means all of Africa participated in the trading/commerce during the 18th century. The encounter with the people of Africa happened by chance during the 15th and 16th centuries. Europeans traveled through the Sahara and along the Nile, thereby giving them access to West Africa. In addition, once they begun to sail the African coast—they were able to go deeper into Africa’s trading routes. Europeans learned through trading with the Africans that, there was a language barrier and they could use the Africans against each other to build upon their commodities. Those commodities would not only add money to the traders but to the farm owners in America. Now we have slavery. A commodity that burdened Africans and made some White Americans rich.
Portuguese and Spanish seafarers shipped enslaved African people to Spain and Portugal and to their islands in the Atlantic, but slaves were only a small part of what interested these adventurous traders: gold, spices, dyes, and timbers, ivory – a host of African commodities – were far more attractive.
But all those were pushed aside, after 1600, by the lucrative development of plantations in the America. Henceforth, humans, not inanimate commodities, were the greatest commercial attraction for European traders along a vast stretch of African coastline, from Senegambia to Angola.
Jaymee’s Blog Post 1: A Horrible Upheaval
On April 18, 1752, 160 Africans first glimpsed the New World, sailing into Bridgetown, Barbados, aboard the Liverpool ship Africa, captained by Thomas Hinde. Uncertain of their fate, the captives perhaps took comfort in sighting land after the traumatic Middle Passage, or possibly they simple feared what new hardships might await them. A boat from shore arrived with the first fresh food and water the captives had tasted in weeks. It was surely a welcome change for most, but some suffered too much from intestinal ailments to take comfort in the improved diet. Most likely, all were eager to escape the confines of a ship and to feel solid ground beneath their feet. (William and Mary Quarterly)
From 1500 to 1900, somewhere between ten to sixteen million Africans were taken from their homes, stuffed into tight quarters beneath the deck of a ship, and sailed across the Atlantic. As astonishing as that figure is, it vastly underestimates the number of Africans that were taken across the Middle Passage as a means of commerce to be enslaved in the New World.
To begin with, white men from Great Britain would come to these peoples’ homeland. I will not call them slaves at this point because up until the traders, kidnappers, and businessmen arrived these Africans were free men, women, and children. They owned land, homes, and were active in a trade between many other countries, such as China. This was not some place that was overrun by savage tribes full of men and women who needed saving by some “benevolent institution.” The real savages were the ones who implemented, robbed, stole, and enslaved the African people the sake of commerce. White men first came to the shores of Africa in search of goods and to trade with Africa, in the same manor they traded with other countries. Instead, what happened was something of an African Holocaust (in my opinion). Children as young as the age of five were taken from their homes and put to work on plantations after experiencing the grueling Middle Passage – if it did not kill them on the way. According to Ruth Sawh and Alice M. Scales in their essay Middle Passage in the Triangular Slave Trade: The West Indies, these children often held the same job that they began at the young age for as long as their work allowed them to live. Slaves were measured in value by the work they excelled or produced for the rest of their lives. Slaveholders put no thought into the person behind the work, yet simply the work itself. It is a widely wondered phenomenon how the perpetuators of such a horrific upheaval of one ethnic group could sleep soundly in their beds. Their reasoning behind it was simply this: Africans were inferior and Europeans ruled the world during this time period.
All for the sake of commerce in the beginnings of society’s “want, want, want” mentality, humans took other humans for the sake of an extra buck. There was absolutely nothing “benevolent” about it. According to the official Civil War website, many slave owners held fast to that idea despite nothing to justify it. The horrors that the Africans had to face in order to be “fed, clothed, and taught the Good News” in no way even out the good that they may have received in America. In fact, Robert C. H. Shell informs readers in his article Slave Mortality on the Middle Passage to the Cape, 1685-1808, a slave’s life span was drastically shortened by the trauma they experienced on the ride from their motherland.
There is absolutely no evidence anywhere given to support the reasoning behind the white man’s use of force and brutality in taking innocent African’s from their home. I found myself becoming emotionally overwhelmed while researching for this post. The idea that my ancestors could have done such a thing in order to save the privileged few from doing their own work or paying people to help them with is really hard to swallow despite the fact that I have known about it my whole life. Slaves were killing themselves on the ships in one last attempt to preserve their dignity; they may not have known what was going to happen to them once they made it to land, but they obviously knew that they had only experience have of the horror on The Middle Passage. Much like in Oroonoko, Europeans and Americans tore lovers from one another, mothers from their children, and people from their homes with no justifiable reason and nothing we can do in the now can change what was done in the past. I only hope that relations between people, we are all the same after all, can continue to mend.
18th Century British Literature Ideology 