The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650 (original) (raw)

“The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 201-236.

The forced migration of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade is traditionally associated with the rise of sugar production in the Old and New Worlds. But, in fact, the slave trade evolved independently of the expansion of the sugar economy. For the first 160 years, the Atlantic boat trade in African slaves was correlated with a host of different factors, from the use of Africans in domestic slavery in Europe and Spanish America, to the evolution of sugar and other products for the European market in the Atlantic islands and America. It is only after 1600 that the movement of Africans across the Atlantic became so intimately tied to the expansion of American sugar production. Moreover, until 1700, Africa earned more from the exportation of gold, ivory, and pepper than it did from slaves. Though of limited importance, slavery still existed in Europe in 1492. Like almost all complex societies in world history until that time, the nations of Europe had known slaves, and slavery in earlier centuries had been a fundamental labor institution. From the sixth century b.c. until the eighth century a.d., under the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire slave labor had been almost as important as peasant labor in the production of goods for local and long distance markets. Under the Islamic states of the Mediterranean world from the eighth century onward, slavery also had been important, though less tied to production and more associated with the state and private household economies. But in fifteenth-century Christian Europe, as in most such societies, slavery was primarily domestic slavery, which meant that the labor power of the household was extended through the use of these workers. Equally, slavery existed in the African continent from recorded times. But like Medieval Christian Europe, it was a relatively minor institution in the period before the opening up of the Atlantic slave trade. It could be found as a domestic institution in most of the region's more complex societies, and a few exceptional