The World That Trade Created by Pomeranz Kenneth Topik Steven

Author:Pomeranz, Kenneth,Topik, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317453826
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

5.1 The Logic of an Immoral Trade

America was created by immigrants. We have all been taught that their hard work and ingenuity carved civilization out of the wilderness. Where did the early immigrants come from? In fact, before 1800 perhaps as many as three out of every four people who crossed the Atlantic came from Africa. Some 10 to 15 million people were herded onto the cruel slave ships and transported across the Atlantic.

We are all at least vaguely familiar with the transoceanic slave trade. Yes, it was horrible, and yes, it was profitable. But one question is rarely considered: why did Europeans take Africans all the way across the Atlantic to use in the Americas in the first place, rather than simply engage them in Africa itself? After all, the trade had a very high “leakage.” It has been estimated that for every 100 Africans purchased as slaves in the interior of Africa, fewer than thirty survived the Atlantic crossing and the first three years on the new continent. Moreover, one-fifth of the sailors died in transit. Surely, using slaves in African colonies would have been more efficient. They would have known the climate, crops, and technology. Slavery itself was a long-standing and widely used institution in Africa. Why then move them to another world?

The answer appears obvious: Europeans already had colonies in the New World and not in Africa. But that situation was as much a result of the slave trade as its cause. Why did not Europeans colonize Africa first? After all, Europeans had a much longer acquaintance with Africa. The Saharan trade had provided most of Europe’s gold for hundreds of years. And the first modern European colony on another continent was in Africa’s Ceuta (next to modern-day Morocco), which the Portuguese conquered in 1415. Navigation of African waters was known earlier and better than the seas of the New World.

Certainly parts of Africa were appropriate for European exploitation. The first large-scale sugar plantations were built on African São Tomé. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries some 100,000 African slaves worked its fields and refineries, as its fazendas became the prototypes for Brazil’s vast export complex (which eventually demanded some 40 percent of the Atlantic slave traffic).

Geography, history, and logic seemed to point to European use of slaves in Africa rather than the building of a new world in the American tropics. Yet that did not occur on any substantial scale until after 1880 when the slave trade was abolished. Why not?

In part, the answer lies in the large states and sophisticated warfare that Africans could use to defend themselves against imperialists. Long enjoying the horse, the wheel, and iron as well as obtaining firearms in trade, African soldiers were virtually on a technological par with Europeans. The cannon gave a slight edge to the northerners, but, as Joseph Conrad poignantly showed in Heart of Darkness, cannons could reach only a short way into the continent.

Still, this answer does not completely convince. The Aztecs and Incas,

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