Thereafter to the present. Secondly, the establishment of european dominance around the world. This is another major theme to which the slave trade is connected. Finally, we are talking today about one of the very foundations of American History. America is the result of the meeting of three very old cultures, and you might say continents. People from europe, people from west africa, and people from native america. Today, we are going to talk about one of those three pillars, the african slave trade. I want to begin with a quote by a very eminent africanamerican scholar activist named w. E. B. Dubois. Heres what he said about the atlantic slave trade. The most magnificent drama in the last 1000 years of human transportation of 10 million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent and into the newfound el dorado of the west. Hell. Escended into it was a tragedy that bickered the greek that beggars the revolutionthe french. I think he is exactly right. Drama of stunning human history, the atlantic slave trade. I would ask you to notice his reference to el dorado. The mythic city of gold sought after by the spanish conquistadors when they came to mexico and peru. El dorado was finally found. But a slaveal city, system that would produce gold and wealth on a scale previously unimaginable. So it is a story about el dorado , after all. The slave trade is a foundation of American History. I mean that in a very literal sense. Slavery as an institution, the slave trade as something that made that institution possible, are utterly central to American History from the 17th century to the present. This is important to who we are. True. Pretend thats not that wont help us. So in a way, we are talking today and discussing the atlantic slave trade, about the origins and very nature of america as a human society. Subject to an easy discuss, as i suggested, because the slave trade and slavery are both fundamentally premised on violence and terror. You cant coerce people into hard work for their entire lives without a system of violence backing it up. Clear in theially slave trade. What we are going to talk about today is difficult, it is painful, and it is not only painful because of the specific history, it is painful because of the truth that this requires us to face. Let me be more specific about that. Talkis post 9 11 world, we a lot about terror, do we not . Is do weion i have have the courage to talk about the terror that was instrumental to the very making and building of American Society . Something not done by others to americans, but done by americans to others. Thats a big question. And i think that question lies at the heart of a test of any society that considers itself to be democratic. In other words, its easy to face all of those glorious things in history, like the exulted ideals of the American Revolution. The question is, can you face the dark pages of your history . I would suggest to you that we need to do that, and studying the atlantic slave trade is part because those slave ships that brought millions of people to the americas are still sailing. There are ghost ships that haunt us because they live with the history they created. Ship. s start with the im sure all of you have seen these tall ships, the replicas that have been built. They are spectacular. Ship is aan tall majestic thing to see, a beautiful thing to see, but the beauty of it, the way we transformed it into something of a fetish actually hides its history. What i will have you know about this european tall ship is that in fact, this is the technology that allowed europeans to conquer the rest of the world. This thing is a machine. What happened was european shipbuilders found ways to load cannons onto these highly mobile ships, which allowed europeans to fan out over the face of the and to make war to enforce their terms of trade. When you look at the earths surface and see how many parts of it speak european languages, think of this, this is why it happened. Limit course, there is a to the romance of the sea. And we will explore that today. Ships,ough we love tall it turns out there is one we dont love. Thats the slave ship. In fact, we find it hard to talk about it. But talk about it we must. Most of you would have no way of knowing that this particular tall ship was actually a slave ship. There is a way to tell. If you look closely, you will see just above the waterline, on the side of the vessel in the hull, you will find holes carved into it. These are air ports. Textiles,rgo is carve timber, you dont holes into the side of the ship. 300 humanr cargo is beings to be brought from west africa to some port in the new world, you have a big problem. The problem is ventilation. How to let that socalled cargo breathe. So thats how you can tell it is a slave ship, because of the holes carved in the side. Were going to talk about the slave trade in its largest dimensions, and we will also talk about it concretely. Heres a famous image you may have seen. This is a real ship that sailed out of liverpool for about 20 years in the late 18th century. , over ake this carried very long span of time, beginning around 1514, and 1866, a on up to about span of 352 years, carried millions of people into bondage. One of my points here is we are not talking about a short burst, or peroxide is him of violence, we are talking about something that lasted for 3. 5 centuries. We have to take that on board. Took the leadthat in organizing the atlantic slave trade, first of all, it was portugal. The fairly small nation was the preeminent maritime nation in the 15th century. Voyages down the coast, here you have europe, heres portugal. This is really a tiny part of the world. These are the countries that were formed would form maritime empires throughout the western atlantic. The portuguese come down the coast, going further and further over time, making contact, first in the southern gambia region. Trading initially for ivory. Then slowly more and more for human beings. Europeans 1492, when began coming, especially to the caribbean, and building their new imperial systems, more and more european nations want to get involved in this process. So portugal, spain, those are the leaders. They are followed in rapid succession by the netherlands. France, england, and the United States. There is really a mad rush for the wealth to be gained in the slave trade and in the building of these systems of slavery in the americas. This is really critical. Numbers. O talk about numbers are important, and numbers when it comes to the slave trade are very controversial. Over many years, there have been wildly varying estimates of how many people were carried out of west africa. Gambia down to the coast to southern angola, then eventually into south and east africa. How many people were carried to the new world . It turns out that we know quite a bit about the slave trade, because the slave trade was a big business. Abundance ofn business records. Those business records, and indeed practically every kind of conceivable record, has now been mined and put together in something called the Transatlantic Slave Trade database. I would recommend it to all of you. Really significant scholarly achievement. We now have records of something more than 33,000 slaving voyages. Europe,which began in some of which began in the u. S. , some of which began in brazil, but which resulted in this Massive Movement of humanity across the atlantic. If you are following that, it is slavevoyages. Org. Or go to any Search Engine and type in slave voyages. Open to thewebsite public, and you can do remarkable things. I would urge all of you thinking of using it for research purposes. The latest findings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database is that over the three and a half centuries i 10tioned, somewhere around million to 10. 5 Million People were loaded onto the ships. Somewhere between 8. 8 million and 9 Million People were on the western atlantic. There is a very significant difference between these numbers. A difference of about 1. 4 million. Those are the people who died bodieshe way, whose every morning on board a slave ship would be brought up from the lower deck and thrown over the rail to the schools of sharks that would follow the vessels all the way across the atlantic. Thats not the end of the horror. Those 1. 4 million. Numbers,nk about the we also have to bear in mind people unknown number of died in wars carried on in the interior of africa. Of people dieder after they were enslaved and were being marched from the interior to the coast. Of another unknown number people died in the fortresses unes awaiting their placement on board slave ships. We have very few records about what happened in any of those circumstances, but a lot of scholars think it may have that 10 to create million, resulting in almost 9 million delivered alive, to create that 10 million may have 3 million, 4xtra million, or 5 Million Deaths in africa. About a humaning catastrophe of truly extraordinary proportions. Again, over a very long period of time. But the carnage was great. Lets talk for a minute about destinations. The primary destination for the slaves who were brought from west africa to the americas was the caribbean. The greater caribbean. Early on, barbados was one of the Great Centers of the slave trade. Jamaica would end up being one of the greatest. Another for the french imperial system, in todays terms, was haiti. The crown jewel of the french system. To the caribbean, almost 5 Million People were shipped. 4. 2 million arrived alive. Half the total. Accident that this was the great center of sugar production. The sugar industry drove the slave trade for many years. It was an especially brutal regime, as you know. The second most important destination was brazil. Portuguese brazil. Also the home of a very lucrative plantation system. Millionil, roughly 3. 5 were loaded on the ships, and 3. 2 million arrived. This was about 36 of the total, a little more than one third. Overwhelmingly, the caribbean and brazil are the two most important sites for the slave trade. If you are just keeping track of the numbers i have given to you, you will see that these two areas account for the overwhelming majority of the slaves shipped to the new world. So where does the u. S. Come into this . As it turns out, the United States was a rather minor partner in the slave trade. Thaturrent estimates are 000, as many as 400,000 people were on vessels going to american ports. The greatest would be charleston, South Carolina. Somewhere around 310,000 were delivered alive. About 3. 5 of the total. The numbers may be a little higher across the board, maybe 4 . But dont be deceived. The fact that mainland north america received a fairly small percentage of the enslaved africans belies the fact that it is going to become one of the most powerful slave systems over the course of the 18th and early 19th century. The main difference is demographic. The slave population in north america owing partly to climate, growing season, and the kinds of stable crops produced, the slave population was able to reproduce itself. That was very uncommon in the caribbean. So those are the numbers. What is the consequence of all those numbers . Here i would quote the great historian and activist clr james, who said the result of all this was the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen. These millions of africans shipped on board these vessels across the atlantic come to the new world and create a plantation system which really is el dorado after all. Take the sugar planters, for example. In british society, in which the 18th century, there were enormous accumulations and concentrations of wealth, the sugar planters from places like jamaica were widely known to be the richest of them all. Gilded,rriages were everything they had suggested opulence. Long trains of servants and slaves followed them through the streets of london. So this is wealth on a truly extraordinary level. So those are the numbers. Content with the numbers. Are, wetant as they have to think about slavery and the slave trade in human ways. Takenk sometimes we comfort in abstraction. The Great British novelist barry unsworth, in a novel about the slave trade, has two of his characters who are slave traders sitting in their luch liverpool auto Lush Liverpool office surrounded by the wealth they have made in the slave trade. He says they really couldnt have pictured what was happening on their slave ship off the coast of africa at that moment. And even if they could, they wouldnt have wanted to, because picturing things can choke the mind with horror. Remain safely in the realm of the abstract, to think about charts and graphs and maps. This is the challenge. Weve got to keep the big picture of the slave trade in mind, but we also have to understand it in human terms. We have to try to understand the slave trade as human experience. For the next part of todays lecture, i want to talk a little bit about just that. The slave trade experience. I want to draw on research i did for a book called the slave ship a human history. The examples i want to give you are drawn from the british and american slave ships of the 18th century. Beginning about 1700 and going up to the abolition of the slave 18071808. This is regarded by many as the peak period of the slave trade. This is the moment when more people are shipped than in any other. This is the moment of the formation of the american slave system. What i would have you try to do right now, and for the next few minutes, is to imagine what it would have been like to be one of roughly 300 people gathered together and placed on board a slave ship. Maybe this will help you think about it. Imagine that the 300 are going to be drawn from a number of different cultures, a number of different language groups. Beenthat the 300 will have enslaved by other africans before they got to the ship. But also understand that they did not all consider themselves to be africans, least of all members of the same race. Ibo,were mandingo, fonte, and to a large extent, the people they enslaved or other Ethnic National groups. Frequently people with whom they had been fighting wars for very long periods of time. Warmagine being captured in , imagine simply being kidnapped by roving bands of marauders. These were probably the two most common means of enslavement. Imagine then being led in a and marched, sometimes for very long distances, from the interior to the coast. Shackled tog someone next to you who dies along the way and is just discarded. The fortressing at or the ship and undergoing a truly humiliating medical inspection. You would all be stripped of your clothing, men, women, and children, ostensibly for health purposes, but also because they didnt want any place where a weapon could be hidden. Treated like cattle in a market. The slave ship captain will look down your throat, look at your teeth, inspect your muscles, will squeeze them. You are property. You are being purchased. Board theming on ship. Imagine the moment when the vessel leaves the coast. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence i came across in my research is that when the vessel would actually leave the coast of west africa, from the lower deck like this, a whale would rise up. A pain at the thought of leaving the only place you had ever known, and heading to somewhere unknown to you. To a fate you could hardly grasp. In those circumstances, slave ship captains often wrote that the women slaves sang these deep and mournful songs. Trying literally to remember their lives in africa. To remember who they were, remember their families, so the struggle for memory is there from the beginning. An image like this can help us understand all of this. I mentioned before the slave ship books, this is another drawing of the same slave ship. I want to tell you, it is a real ship, we know a lot about it. I also want to make sure you know this image was not drawn by slave trade merchants, it was not drawn by slave trade captains, it was actually drawn by the people who opposed the slave trade, abolitionists, who wanted to see it eradicated. With the truly brilliant idea of representing the ship in order to make people understand what that social reality was like. To make it real for people. I had sort of the same task in this book, how to make it real. I want to give you a sense of the dimensions of a real slave ship. This vessel was about 100 feet long and about 25 feet wide. Thats not very big. Think about that. Think about the fact that into link, 482l, of that men, women, and children have been jammed aboard. Ive counted them. 482. What you would need to know about this image is that this is how many people the slave ship books could carry after humanitarian reform had been implemented. Something called the doman act of 1788 made it illegal to carry more slaves than was permitted under law in relation to the tonnage of your vessel. So we actually have a record of this vessel and the voyages it took before the act. On one of them, the number of human beings carried was not 482, it was 609. And these are the precise dimensions, by the way. This vessel was measured. Nothe voyage before that, 609, but 638. Voyage we previous know through the business carried 740 brooks men, women, and children. Thats 252 more than you see right here. I want you to tell me where you are going to put them. Ofs is the humane version the slave trade right here. Piled on topdies of bodies. In order to understand how it worked, here is the lower deck. Thats what you see right there. Disc on a superimposed top of this. This is a platform built into the lower deck so you can get more people aboard. Heres how it looked. They had the lower deck, there is the platform. What thexactly distance was between those two decks. Inches. T eight you werens that if under a platform or on a platform, you had about two feet, eight inches headroom. Which meant that for the months you would be on this vessel, at night, sometimes 16 hours a day, sometimes in bad weather 24 hours a day, you were in a situation where you could not sit up. And the vessel is rolling. There are a lot of descriptions of the way in which the skin would be worn off of the elbows, the knees, and the hips. This is not easy. I warned you. I also want you to imagine this inlity of this many people the tropics. Call the torrid zone. I want you to imagine the heat. I want you to imagine the human perspiration. Smell you to imagine the that the human body makes under conditions of great fear. There is a particularly pungent smell that we make. Factt you to imagine the that people got sick. People got seasick, but there were also epidemic diseases that ravaged these decks. If this had been truly accurate, something that would have been pictured on the lower deck, what they call necessary tubs, the places people had to get to stepping over and usually on bodies in order to relieve themselves. Imagine the excrement. Imagine the smell of death. Because people died at alarming rates. For the full 350 years of the slave trade, the average mortality was about 12 . In the 17th century, it was considerably higher. On certain voyages, it can be 50, 60 , 70 , 80 . And sum this up for charleston,said in South Carolina, in the era of the slave trade, that when the wind was blowing off of the water a certain way, you can smell a slave ship before you can see it. That. Gine i also want you to imagine the impact of all of this on the human ability to breathe. Asian. Died of a 60 people died of a 6 sphyxiation. People were grabbing onto the hatches and they would grab the hatchway and try and get a breath of fresh air from up above. The slave ship captain would tell the crew to beat them back down into the hole, because they are blocking the air for everybody else. When in fact, they were. This in human terms. Consider the availability of oxygen. Consider the sounds of the slave ship. Consider what it sounded like. Consider those women singing. Consider the shrieks of the terrified. Consider the groans of the dying. Consider all of this, then consider this question. What would you do . What would you do in this situation . Question,y real because people have to answer that question, each and every one of them, every day when they found themselves in this reality. Im sure some of you people are thinking to yourselves i wouldnt have accepted this, i dries up in rebellion. You know people did that, but that brings us to another part of the social reality of the slave ship. Was defined by terror. It was literally ruled by terror. Inror and violence were used calculated ways by the ship captain. Usually selecting those few who might be rebellious and doing truly horrific things to them as , way of terrorizing the rest cowering the rest. Ruling through the horrible example. Bookhave argued in this that the slave ship itself was one big instrument of terror. Up of many was made small instruments of terror. One of which was the cat of nine tails. Was the ultimate instrument of authority on board a slave ship. It is a whip. Athas nine tails with knots the end to make the laceration of human flesh more efficient. Some captains actually threaded to makerough the cords them cut better. Used in many circumstances, simply just to move people around, and certainly be used in truly terrible punishments. Side, we have a page from a book by the abolitionist thomas clarkson, a british man who devoted his life to the abolition of slavery. He went around in liverpool and collected this hardware bondage. Down below, we have leg shackles. Usually it was only the men who were shackled, but if women showed a predisposition to resist, they would be shackled. Usually it was one person to another person. Right ankle to another persons left ankle, right wrist using manacles to the other persons left wrist. It meant those two people had to coordinate their every movement down below deck, or the ironwood eat intoe iron would your flesh. Thumbis a pair of s screws. Standard equipment on a slave ship. It is an instrument of torture. Anyone found guilty in taking part of a conspiracy or rebellion might be tortured using thumbscrews in order to make them confess. The way it works, the thumbs are slipped under this metal, and the key is turned, producing truly unbearable agony. It literally crushes the thumb. Then there is this piece of technology. It is called the specular speculum oris. It was something very important to a slave ship, because, and we will say more about this in a moment, there were a lot of hunger strikes on board. The captains could not permit hunger strikes, because this was valuable property, after all. So they carried the speculum oris. You have to imagine these prongs in a closed position. They would be put down the throat of someone refusing to eat. The key would be turned, that persons throat would be opened wouldm within, and grool be poured down their throat in an effort to keep him or her alive to the port of delivery. I ask you a moment ago what would you do . Those who entertained ideas of rising up, i just want you to know what your fate would be. Seize who dared to try to the ship would be made an example before all of the rest. Just think it challenges the human imagination. Thingsize what kind of slave ship captains did to those who rebelled. Im talking about chopping people up joint by joint, strangling them until their eyes popped out. Horrible to do to those who dared to resist this fate. Do knowing allou of that . What would you do . K, tore we come, i thin one of the most interesting parts of history. The choices people made. What did they do . Choicesink about the that everybody on board made, not just the enslaved. Lets think about the sailors who ran these ships. Why were they there . What choices did they make . Lets think about the captains who commanded this little kingdom. Who were they, and why were they there . It in human terms. This man was one of the very few people to write about the slave ship and the slave trade from the perspective of an enslaved african. He wrote a spiritual autobiography published in 1789. He recalled as a child being taken aboard a ship. He was 11 or 12 years old, and he remembered the first moment he saw the slave ship. He said i was astonished. He had lived inland, he had never seen a ship before. He was just amazed at this technology. Quickly, my very astonishment turned into terror. Thats the reality. Why was he there . Because he was captured by a , it was presently nigeria, taken down the rivers and loaded on a slave ship. His voice is important, because it is so rare. Part of the violence of the slave trade is we dont have very many records by people who knew about it first hand. There is a controversy now about iboher equiano was born in land, or whether he was born in South Carolina as he himself wrote on a couple of occasions. You might want to read about that. I can give you the references. From my money, he is who he says he was. I dont think theres any way he could have known what he knew about the culture growing up in South Carolina. If you grew up in virginia, he may have known, because there was a Huge Population around the time he was born, but not in South Carolina. So i think he is who he says he was. Many of you have probably heard of him, but i suspect almost none of you have heard of this man, james fields stanfield. He was a common sailor on board a slave ship. He had sailed around the world. He was actually welleducated. He had been studying to be a priest in france. He was an irishman, by the way, from dublin. And he had a kind of personal rebellion against the church. He went away, he deserted the church, he went to see. He sailed around the world. Finally, he went on board a slave ship. We dont know why he did it. I suspect he was pretty desperate for money. This in fact is the main reason why a lot of sailors signed on board these ships. Sailorsality rates for were just as high as the rates for the insane for the enslaved. This is not widely known. The reasons are different. Much has to do with the malaria of the west coast of africa, which made it the white mans grave. That peoplea place would usually choose to sail to, unless they were very ambitious knowing that mortality around officers and captains made it possible to move up in the slave trade, but also knowing you are risking your life if you did so. The other thing you need to know about sailors and why they were there is quite a few of them were not there by choice. Many of them had fallen into debt or had been thrown into jail, where slave ship captains would come and bail them out, saying i will give your advanced wages to the innkeeper if you come with me on this voyage. Wayhere a very interesting in which sailors on slave ships themselves were not agents of choice. But stanfield is interesting. What he did, he made the slaving voyage, it was a peculiarly deadly voyage. Of the 34 crew members who went out on his voyage, four of them made it home. He was one. He left the slave trade, he left the sea, he became an actor. A few years later, when the Abolitionist Movement began to emerge, thomas clarkson, who i mentioned before, got in touch with James Stanfield and said would you be willing to write about your experiences as a sailor . Stanfield said i would. He wrote a series of letters describing the slave trade and describing its horrors for both , whonslaved and sailors were themselves victims of an extremely violent shipboard regime. Some of the very best writing done about the slave trade are the letters that James Stanfield wrote about it. It really comes across in all its graphic horror. He was an actor, he had a sense of drama, he knew how to convey it. Hes a very important figure. The way he joined the Abolitionist Movement and educated the middleclass abolitionists about what actually happened on those ships. Finally, we come to a slave ship captain, john newton. John newton is known to you, if not by name, then by something he wrote, because john newton was a slave ship captain who wrote one of the most famous hymns in all of world history, something called Amazing Grace. And there is a story about Amazing Grace out there, which goes like this. John newton was working in an ungodly calling, the slave trade, and had a visitation from god, and he left the slave trade and later wrote Amazing Grace as an act of penance. Its a nice story, but thats not how it happened. John and newton did have a christian conversion while working on a slave ship, but continued to work in the slave trade for several more voyages. He got a promotion to captain, he went as a devout christian to west africa, he completed the voyage. He did it again, completed another voyage, completed that voyage. He was going for a fourth slaving voyage. All the while writing letters to people saying i do have a godly calling now. As he was carrying people into this killing bondage. But before that fourth voyage, he had a stroke. He was prevented from going to sea by his doctor. 19 years later, he wrote Amazing Grace. 13 years after that, he made his first public criticisms of the slave trade. It didnt happen quite as the myth would have it. I would also say that when john newton turned against the slave trade, he was a very effective witness against it, because he knew what would happen on those vessels. He testified before parliament that some captains used those dreadful things called thumbscrews. Usedesay he did know they them, because if you read his journal on one of his voyages, he describes using thumbscrews himself on children. The last thing i want to say about these three figures, equiano, stanfield, and newton, you can read what they wrote. Through the pit library, we have all of these documents. You can read it for yourself. This is part of the excitement of doing history. Go to the library and learn. Thats my point. So we spent this part of the lecture talking about this regime of violence and terror. There is another important part of this story, and that is the resistance to the violence and terror. To the shipboard regime, we must counter pose the fact that on the lower deck, something extraordinary was going on. There was a kind of cooperation, a kind of communication, and a fragile process of building a new kind of Community Among the diverse africans who were on board these vessels. It is an absolutely fascinating thing to behold. We dont have evidence to study it as fully as we would like, but we do know what was going on. Let me give you examples of how it happened. First of all, even though these africans on the lower deck of any given ship would have been of numerous different ethnicities and languages, there was one language they all understood, and that was the language of resistance. When you fought back against the people who ran that ship, everybody understood what you were doing, no matter who they were. And one of the things that really impressed me in the course of my research is there were all kinds of resistance. I will tell you the story of one man who embodied several different kinds. We know this because a slave ship surgeon wrote it. He was called attend to a man one night who had cut his own throat. The physician said i sewed him back up as well as i could. The next morning, he had cut the other side of his throat and ripped out the stitches. The surgeon had the sailors go in search of the mens compartment for a hardedged tool he had used to slit his throat. They couldnt find anything. So what does the doctor do . He looks and finds flesh and blood under the mans fingernails. He had ripped his throat apart with his own fingernails. So they tied his arms behind his back, trying to keep him alive, because hes a big investment. Then he decided he was not going to eat anything. He went on a hunger strike. Another major form of resistance. And nothing they could do could keep him from choosing not to be a slave. Stories like this are very common on board the slave ship. The biggest resistance of all comes in those very frequent moments when people managed to get out of their chains and rise up to try and capture the ship. Resistance is very creative. It binds people together into something new, some new group. Theres one other thing i would have you know about, on the lower deck of these ships, something is being formed that anthropologists call sick to kinship. Orderede all kinship societies. When people were enslaved, their worlds were shattered. So what they start doing, and i find this amazing, needing kinship back together on the ship knitting kinship back together on the ships. They start to call each other brother and sister. They call each other shipmate. You are my shipmate. When shipmates go ashore, whether in virginia, jamaica, or brazil, if they marry and have children, are they will have their children call other shipmates and aunt or uncle. It is extraordinary. Under the mostn difficult of circumstances. Thats one of the things i would have you remember. Violence, terror, extreme terror, and in the middle of all that, somehow, creativity. Human creativity. Doing something new. Hearing these kinds of uprising, on those holes of the ship, on that lower deck, you have the origin of what is today africanamerican culture. Thats its origin. Something new built out something new, something defiant. It begins on the ship. One of these questions i am sure is on your mind as a normal, cendant human sentient normal, human being is, how could anybody do this . Revulsion when we learned about this history. So we wonder, how could that happen . How could it go on for three and a half centuries . Well, the history of slavery and the slave trade is very complex, but this part of it is not. There is an there is an easy answer to that question. It went on because it created profits. It went on because it made some people rich. Createdon because it wealth on an extraordinary scale. Sladen you think of the trade, dont think only of blackandwhite, think of green. Think of money. The slave ship was an economic institution. The plantation was an economic institution. Slavery itself was an economic institution. Grew up alongside it, in an effort to rationalize its power and profit making potential. Those of you who are interested in the rise of the world market, here is a crucial part of it. The rise of capitalism, where we began. Freetrade, free trade in human beings, and it still goes on, by the way. Dont think all this is over. There are slave trades in many parts of the world today. I urge you to learn about them. New view growing up among historians, not only historians, more broadly as well, that when we think about the slave trade and slavery, we are not just talking about an unfortunate moment in human history. We are not just talking about a tragedy. We are talking about something we can now label as crimes against humanity. Right that down down, crimes against humanity. A crime against humanity is something that affects an entire society over many generations. Effects its effects are not over when the thing itself has ended. Slavery officially ended with the emancipation proclamation, 1863, but the effects of slavery remain, and i daresay they remain here, now, in our city of pittsburgh, and throughout the country. On in discrimination. They live on in poverty. They live on in massive structural inequality. The is the afterlife of slave trade and the slave system. Those slave ships are still sailing. They are still haunting us. Said, this was a great drama, violence, terrorfilled drama, but also i drama featuring heroic resistance. Of thend with an image slave trade created by a patient artist, a man named france zeffe ran, who has painted the slave ship brooks. This painting is done of the year 2007. It says brooks, liverpool. The crew has been depicted as and the front of the vessel is a voodoo deity announcing the arrival of new souls to send to what will become haiti. The deitysround is boat. In haitian creole, it says on the sale, we are in a lot of trouble. The artist has a sense of humor. Of the enslaved peering out from this dungeonlike vessel, and those who have been changed to the outside of the ship. The artist said there is a belief in haiti today that rebellious slaves were chained to the outside, to be food for the sharks. Across actually came anyone being chained to the outside of the vessel in my research, but i did see people thrown to the sharks while alive, in order to make a point, that point being terror. So there is an interesting truth to this. People had broken free of the chains. The artist told me this is to leader ofthis is the the great revolution that began in 1791 and ended in 1804. And this is a very eminent man from the same revolution, who led the rising on the north plane of haiti in 1791 that inaugurated on the north plain of haiti in 1791 that mark in many ways the beginning it of the end of the institution of slavery. This haitian artist, we see the violence and terror and also see the resistance, and dubois the drama w. E. B. Was talking about. We will stop there, and lets talk. Questions. If you have questions about a particular slide, we can go back to it. [indiscernible] were there anyone policing that, was it enforced . Goodssor rediker very question. There was actually a government apparatus to check this, because they would make surgeons keep reports. This was a required part of the documentation of every voyage. That doesnt mean they didnt cheat, but there was also a possibility or vessel could be intercepted by the royal navy, at which point they might ask precisely how many you had on board. I think there was some policing, i think it would be fair to say there was also teaching also cheating. Lso [inaudible] south american countries and Central American countries like [indiscernible] professor rediker that is another good question and will be explored. One of the ironic things about in,r sleep systems is that for example, cuba and brazil, the two societies that continued to have booming slave economies long after the others, in other words, slavery wasnt abolished in cuba and brazil until the 1880s, 25 years after the u. S. , even though there is still a great deal of structural members of our History Department have written about that and i can give you those references to make comparisons, even though that is the case, those countries had more fluid racial systems than we do in the u. S. Orh more racial intermixed more racial mixture, for example, that goes way back. It is an interesting question why. In the u. S. , we had a sleep system that depended on the idea of one drop of blood, meaning one drop of african blood, and you would be characterized as orican, or africanamerican, black, whatever the terminology. Very different systems of classification, much more complex, existed in other parts of the americas. So we have to account for both the militaries and differences between these slave the similarities and differences between these slave systems. [indiscernible] the abolitionists, or was it the economy . Professor rediker there has been debate. There were economic roots to the abolition of the slave trade, but the prevailing you among scholars these days is that abolition took ways first and foremost in great britain. They were first to abolish the slave trade, at least those involved in a major way. In the 18th century, the british carried as many people into slavery as anybody else, maybe the portuguese carried a few more, but there were major slave traders, and a social movement grew up that brought it to an end, while it was still profitable. End the sleepet system in the british colonies, that would take 25 or 30 years, beginning in 1834 and then finally, in 1838, slavery will be abolished in britain, quite a bit before the u. S. But the prevailing view now is that it was a social movement of many different kinds of people who brought a profitable slave trade to an end. That is hopeful thing, that people could get together and make significant change. [indiscernible] professor rediker africans were in control of the african sources of slave supply, from the beginning to the end. I think there were some europeans to wished they could have gone ashore and handled the slave trade, and they did build fortresses in places like ghana. You have probably seen the massive fortresses. They did have settlements ashore, but the death rate for europeans in african societies was so high, largely because of thenia, that it was known as the white mans grave. Did, beingropeans unable to organize the trade themselves, was they made deals. Found coastal groups along west end West Central Africa who were willing to enter into an and engageth them, in trade that would be mutually beneficial. Infrequently, elements of this trade were, the europeans would provide not only textiles and consumer goods, but firearms, gunpowder, which this client state would then used to attack its traditional enemies, and then bring those people back to the coast, trade those people to slave ship captains, frequently for more ammunition and guns and gunpowder, so this creates what historians call the gunslave cycle. African a very powerful dimension to this, but bear in is organized through a divide and rule strategy on the part of the europeans. They were very good at that. When they passed the 310,000 to america, where they all from africa, or the caribbean as well . Professor rediker this would include just direct imports from west africa, but a very important addition you make to the discussion, a significant number of slaves brought to north america were those reshipped from the caribbean. South carolina was basically formed as a plantation economy by people who emigrated from barbados. It took them a wild to find their staple crop, eventually there are a great many regional slave trades which augment that number i gave, which seems small. The other thing to bear in mind is that there is a reproduction process which causes that slave population in the u. S. To grow by leaps and bounds in the 18th and 19th century, providing the label power labor power the slave trade had to provide in places with different demographic machines different demographic regimes. They can, everybody. See you next time. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] lectures inatch history every weekend on American History tv. Collegeyou inside classrooms, to learn about topics ranging from the American Revolution to 9 11. That is saturday at 8 00 p. M. And midnight eastern on cspan three. War began 70 years ago on june 25, 1950. It ended with an armistice about three years later, in july 1953. Next, an oral history interview mary reid. She talks about her experience in korea serving as a u. S. Army nurse. The project was underwritten by south koreas ministry of patriots and veterans affairs. Is mary reid. Maruy. R mary my middle name is elizabeth. Interviewer elizabeth. Mary and my last name is
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