When thinking about slavery today, many people automatically assume that the origins of slavery were rooted in racial discrimination and the quest for European supremacy. Surprisingly, however, upon closer inspection we find that the catalyst for the initiation of the West African slave trade was not racism but greed. In the fifteenth century, Portugal has embarked upon a serious quest for gold and the institution of slavery was simply a means to that end. The connection between slavery and racial degradation would not be solidified until later. To the Portuguese slavery simply made good business sense.
As European countries began to expand into the New World in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, however, the need for manpower to work the plantations in the Americas began overshadow the gold trade in terms of potential profits. Slavery was not unknown among African tribes and it was somewhat commonplace for chieftains to sell prisoners of war taken during conflicts with enemy tribes into slavery or to enslave those tribe members who had committed crimes or had unpaid debt. Tribal leaders, however did not generally view this type of slavery as a purely money making venture and most slaves eventually either gained their freedom at the end of a specified period of involuntary servitude much like indentured servants in Europe or became assimilated in the tribes of their masters.
This system began to evolve, however when the Portuguese and later other European countries began to implement the system of Elmina Castle. European traders would then bring manufactured goods such as cloth, liquor, tobacco, metal goods and guns from Europe to these trading posts where they would exchange these articles for African slaves.
The slaves would then be loaded onto ships and transported to America. This journey came to be known as the Middle Passage since it represented the second or middle leg of the triangle. With unsanitary conditions, poor ventilation and lack of food and water it is estimated that between 10 and 20% of the captives did not survive the trip succumbing either to disease or suicide.
Upon reaching America the slave ships would then trade their human cargo for the raw materials like cotton, sugar, molasses and tobacco that were produced with slave labor on the plantations. The ships then returned to Europe with these raw materials which they would exchange for manufactured goods so that the Triangular Trade process could begin anew.
Ironically, the concept of the racial inferiority of Africans seems to have been fabricated after the fact in order to justify the institution of slavery. That is, black Africans were not enslaved initially because they were black; it was simply a matter of accessibility. The Triangular Trade route was effective and efficient and Africans represented a ready source of human resources. Traders found that the Native Americans already in America were not well suited as a source of manpower since many knew the land so well that they could easily escape and elude recapture. But with the cooperation of rival African tribal leaders, Africans could be more easily procured that either poor Europeans for Native Americans. Once transported to a completely foreign land so far from their homes and given that skin color and distinct features made the Africans more conspicuous in areas populated mostly by whites, their ability to escape and avoid recapture was severely limited.
While traders and plantation owners were initially motivated by profit but by the 1700s religious groups such as the Quakers had begun to become more vocal in their opposition to slavery. Much like today, when opposing political forces engage in the public relations “spin doctoring” to justify their positions, those who were profiting from the slave trade sought to convince the public at large that slavery was justified.
The ideas that “slavery was part of God’s plan” or that the “African is not fully human and therefore incapable of surviving without a master to rule over him” was simply part of the propaganda designed to ensure that the economic security to traders and plantation owners that the institution of slavery provided would continue. The mistreatment and denigration of the slaves themselves was also an integral piece as well. Without promoting both fear and internalized feelings of inferiority among black slaves, the threat of a major slave uprising could have proven even more fatal than the opposition of the Abolitionists.
Slavery began to decline both in Europe and the northern parts of the United States with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, but persisted in the South because of the importance of agriculture to the southern economy. Perhaps by more thoroughly educating both African-American and white citizens about the true origins of slavery and the reasons that the myths of racial inferiority were created we can finally begin to move beyond the ongoing racial conflicts in America.
