Lecture Overview: Slavery, Race and Colonialism

Overview: Slavery, Race and Colonialism

1.Transatlantic Slave Trade2.Defining ‘Race’3.The Scramble for Africa

Kingdoms in Pre-colonial Africa

Major Regions and Ports Involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Triangular Trade

Enslaved Africans disembarked in the Americas, 1501-1866

Destination Number% of Caribbean

sub-total% of total for the

Americas

British Caribbean 2,318,252 48.32% 22.00%French Caribbean 1,120,216 23.35% 10.63%Spanish Caribbean 805,424 16.79% 7.64%Dutch Caribbean 444,728 9.27% 4.22%Danish Caribbean 108,998 2.27% 1.03%

Caribbean sub-total 4,797,618 100.00% 45.53%Brazil 4,864,374   46.16%

Spanish Mainland 487,488   4.63%North America 388,747   3.69%

The Americas - total 10,538,227   100.00%

Total of enslaved Africans taken to the Americas = 12,331,637

Enslaved Africans disembarked in the Americas, 1501-1866

Caribbean45%

Brazil46%

Spanish Mainland5%

North America4%

Volume and Direction of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

/www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html

Revolts during the Middle Passage

Types of Revolt

Types of Revolt

Defining race

• A political and social construction, rather than an biological fact.

• A marker of human difference based on physical criteria (skin colour, nose shape, type of hair).

• Classifications based on physical criteria are entangled with value judgements about social status and moral worth.

• Closely associated with colonialism and imperialism.• The body is a key site in racial discourse.

Fear and Persecution of ‘New Christians’

The psycho-cultural argument

In the writings of several of the church fathers of western Christendom…the colour black began to acquire negative connotations, as the colour of sin and darkness…The symbolism of light and darkness was probably derived from astrology, alchemy, Gnosticism and forms of Manichaeism; in itself it had nothing to do with skin colour, but in the course of time it did acquire that connotation. Black became the colour of the devil and demons.

Jan Pieterse, White on black (1992), p. 24.

Negative connotations of blackness in the European imagination

The socio-economic argumentA racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan…Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor…The features of the man…his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: the colonies needed labor…

Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (1944), pp 7, 19, 20.

African slaves as cheap labour

Race and slavery• Dark skin colour, particularly blackness, did have negative cultural associations in pre-modern Europe (the psycho-cultural argument).• Nevertheless, demands for labour were colour blind during the initial stages of the colonisation of the Americas, e.g. unfree indigenous labourers, white indentured labour in the Caribbean (the socio-economic argument).• Crucially, as labour was supplied by first indigenous peoples, and then increasingly by enslaved Africans, being a ‘slave’ and being ‘non-white’ became intertwined.

Race and slavery

Ideas about race

The practices of

unfree labour

Race and slavery• Dark skin colour, particularly blackness, did have negative cultural associations in pre-modern Europe (the psycho-cultural argument).• Nevertheless, demands for labour were colour blind during the initial stages of the colonisation of the Americas, e.g. unfree indigenous labourers, white indentured labour in the Caribbean (the socio-economic argument).• Crucially, as labour was supplied by first indigenous peoples, and then increasingly by enslaved Africans, being a ‘slave’ and being ‘non-white’ became intertwined.

The socio-racial structure of a Caribbean plantation society, c. 1830

Whites

Free people of colour

Slaves

Complex racial classifications in early nineteenth century Jamaica