Transcripts For DW Slavery Routes 20240713

This is the story of a world whose borders and territories were drawn by the slave trade where violence subjugation and profit imposed their own roots this criminal system shaped our history and our world. Unsubtle the portuguese invented an economic model with unprecedented profitability in the sugar plantation. This was the 1st black colony 1st slaves or. Marriage of a black man with sugar cane. In the 16th century other european powers were eager to follow their model their greed would plunge an entire continent into chaos and violence nearly 13000000 africans were cast on to new slavery routes to the new world where the english the french and the dutch hoped to become wealthy in measurably wealthy. Because the caribbean has similar climatic features to sell till may eventually became the principal crossroads of the slave traders routes for people in the western world these islands are today associated with the cation ringback what a loop offers tourists a dream destination sunshine and pristine nature rekindling myths of a lost paradise holiday makers tend to confine themselves to the beaches of the. Un and self. But as this sign indicates they are all too close to another side of the islands heritage that was anything but a paradise. Just a few meters away from the bay there is a burial site where countless. Skeletons were discovered. Between 501000 graves are still buried beneath the sand. The result lare beach is one of 15 slave cemeteries that have been excavated. 15 among the 1000 that exist in the caribbean the. 89 skeletons have been excluded by French Archaeological Research Experts judging by the state of the browns they concluded that these men and women had not reached the age of 30 by the time of their death the toll from working on the plantations had so deformed their bodies that they seemed more like 75 year olds. These people were human guinea pigs for the sugar experiment the Collateral Damage of an unprecedented trade war the sugar war. 74 percent of all slaves carried off. Were cut off because of sugar if you want to understand the slave trade you just need to know but sure. Sugar proved more addictive than pepper or cinnamon from the 17th century onward europeans craved this rare and expensive commodity in london and stood and paris sugar fever was rampant prompting a new generation of adventures to go to any extremes to get ship owners and fitters merchants and pirates all knew that to produce sugar you needed a lot of slaves. John hawkins was one of these new entrepreneurs for whom profit reigned supreme the english privateer was a pioneer in understanding that a fortune could be made by shipping black captives to the new world in the mid 16th century he convinced Queen Elizabeth the 1st to lend him a ship the jesus of lu back for the expedition hawkins conspicuously set the tone by choosing a trussed up black man on his emblem. I do confirm to your highness that i will bring home 40000 marks without any offense of the least to any of your highnesss allies all friends. I will conduct this enterprise and turn it to the benefit of your whole realm with your highnesss consent the voyage i propose is to load negroes in guinea and sell them in the west indies in truck of pearls gold and emeralds that i will bring back in abundance. 1620 a century after sugar plantations were introduced in brazil the atlantic became the Battle Ground for the sugar war england the netherlands and france wants to break spain and portugal had gemini. In the caribbean the dutch took control of congress south sent to his dishes and summertown the french what a loop martinique granada. Sentimental the english occupied the bahamas jamaica. Barbados and. Only cuba and pleasure rico remained under spanish rule. After the extermination of the natives are a lot people the 1st sugar canes flourished on this for thailand the caribbean became a space of conquest for the europeans very early on really was the 1st place that columbus landed in the new world the 1st place that the spanish began to search for gold and the 1st place they began to enslave the indians so they were thoroughgoing spaces created by design of european planters and imperial policy makers and for their profit right there arent so many places where you can completely overlay a territory like that so there are in some ways the caribbean is a space where you find the purest of colonial territories where the masters of the space actually get to create the space to suit their own needs. In one loop every plot of land every single square inch of ground is connected to this violent and deeply rooted history. Today all that is left of the sugar war is a field of ruins. Of the 250 sugar refineries active in the late 1900 century only to remain in operation. In 2017 experts from Frances National institute of preventive Archaeological Research exude the remains of the sun jacques residence and Sugar Refinery in almost atoll a mill stock rooms and 3 rows of socalled negro huts where hundreds of slaves were penned up together. In this brutal work camp human beings were but one choice among others each became a mechanized and they seeded body consumed by work until their final breath. Both the time in which the slaves were digging the cane holes and the times in which their harvesting or really the peak of the labor on a plantation you could almost see the slaves wasting away when they were digging these cane holes because the work was so strenuous and they were getting fed so poorly. Ringback you found women in all the gangs oftentimes doing the hardest dirtiest labor on the plantation alongside the men or even before the men and one of the things that means when you find young women doing this quite ability. Any labor is the birth rates are very low and the mortality rates the infant mortality rate is shockingly high in the mid 18th century people talked about 9 out of 10 infants born to enslave jamaican women dying right within the 1st year so theres no way in which the plantation can reproduce itself under those kinds of conditions. He pulled us forces you to the plantations were managed by overseas who saw the slaves in purely functional terms only exploit this this was absolute exploitation of the workforce it was a very particular society both good because the average race of Life Expectancy on a plantation was extremely low about 8 to 10 years after arriving. The logic of the slave system was one where the ability of the workforce had to be absolute i mean those with as we did and for this man was conceived as an accessory of the land. By god he appeared as such in house him indoors used to this level but as slaves are listed next to records for livestock or manufacturing implements. To us but. Thats the archaic aspect which was put to use by a capitalist system and which largely met market supply and demand with its fluctuations needs in competition free competition. The sugar plantation saw slavery enter a new era the stronger the demand for sugar the more the slave trade expanded and the more the slave traders sought support from banks to finance their expeditions. London is one of the oldest centers of Global Finance the city of london was the 1st to create a Commodities Exchange to develop credit markets and to issue bank notes on a massive scale without the invention of a centralized Banking System the explosion of the slave trade in the 17th century would not have been possible preparing for a slave expedition was expensive and having a financial arsenal deep in lend it decisive advantage over its competitors. Youve got to remember that the state is getting a tremendous amount of revenue from the plantation complex of a have a very strong vested interest in the slave trade if you had gone to the king of england in 1680. And said look im going to give you a choice you can either have these 13 colonies in north america are going to have this one Little Island called barbados you have taken barbados of the split 2nd because of the sugar revenues and this is something thats going to persist as a very important interest for european states up until the very end of slavery. To support the sugar war this city lent money on a colossal scale in the midst of these steel and glass buildings the 2 pillars of the english economy that financed the slave trade are still prominent on the london skyline. At the heart of the financial district is the venerable bank of england the worlds 1st central bank. A couple of blocks away is britains most powerful Insurance Company the prestigious lloyds of london atlantica flavor traders had to take on heavy debts to charter their ships without an Insurance Company most would risk ruin on their 1st expedition. And it would be with. The slave trade years made investments as if playing a game of poker the risks were high but if successful the return would far outweigh any other type of investment insurers like lloyds had everything to gain by participating in this game of chance a successful expedition could yield up to 3 times the initial stake in the lloyds archives little evidence remains of the profits amassed by insuring these high risk expeditions most Accounting Records were lost in a fire in 838. 00 the same year that slavery was abolished in the british caribbean. Ports had to adapt to this initial scramble for africa and the caribbean in london black wall became the slave trade principal wharf. All manner of goods were sold here precious fabrics jewels porcelain weapons and brandy all bought on credit with the banks money a giant port complex gradually evolved a city within a city entirely devoted to this new business. Following london in 1663 other seaports rushed to take advantage of his lucrative trade beyond copenhagen now Rochelle Bristol not want liverpool more deal and work from all over europe slave ships set sail for africa when i began to see slave ships leaving from not just liverpool unarmed but from every port in the atlantic as soon as a port becomes big enough to contemplate the trans oceanic voyage theres a good chance that voyage is going to be a slave trade voyage and we could like 170. 00 separate courts tiny places today theyve got no idea that once upon a time they send out sleigh boy to simply to support in the charles charming place and yet its a slave trade pored. Over a period of 2 centuries more than 3 and a half 1000 expedition set sail from french ports more than half of them left from the part of not the main french hub of triangular trade. The sculpted figures along the kid enough force are fatal island are reminders of an era when the great slave trading families displayed their pride in being the main architects of the citys wealth it was they who made no want frances leading commercial port. That it shows there is wealth came from slavery there were negotiators ship owners and all those who produced food stuffs to keep the. Flour producers fabric producers hardware produce. Your daughter to. The tune of. The atlantic ports also generated well for areas that stretched very far inland as far as oleo in the case of nunzio by exultant they have. The goods were also transported along revis really flown over so the wealth that slavery produced was essential for france. Is so simple. 1669 from no want more dont and after slavery money flowed back up reverse to all well. And. It had such repercussions on inland areas that it became a National Objective look at the 14th knew that to win the sugar war he would need a powerful fleet. The king ordered the construction of 500. 00 galleons the atlantic became the theater of a naval war between france inland and the netherlands a bitter fight in which each sunken ship was a total loss for the respective countries economy. Since it was very expensive to build and equip a 74 gun ship and its crew. If not more ultimately who bore the cost of financing these wars the financing of ships and assholes was mainly footed by french presence also the force here in. The slave trade fleets were protected 16000 gallons were already protecting dutch commercial ships while the 3000 light and fast royal Navy Cruisers terrify their adversaries france paled in comparison to these armada as. Each nation needed a fortress in africa if it were to compete in the atlantic race just like on the caribbean islands these forts were the bastions of the trying. Are treated. As military bases they offered a secure store for bartered goods and captives before departure by scene. In less than 80 years 43 such forts were built from senegal to the niger delta every stone every beam every element of masonry was transported by boat from europe and. Most of these fortresses are built by states individual capitalists or even groups of trading capitalists did not have that kind of money in order to build those sorts of fortresses the english already had 13 the dutch 10 the danish 5 even the prussians with their 3 forts surpassed the french on the gold coast in todays gonna the fantail and ashanti rented europeans plots of land to build their forts the europeans established trading posts and fortresses all along the Atlantic Coast from the a way territory to the congo kingdom Equitorial Africa became the worlds principal source of slaves. In this accounting document written in 1688 we learned that over an 8 year period it shipped 60783 slayings. Each cost the Royal African Company 8 to 12 pounds sterling the equivalent of between 950 and 1500 euros today they were all bought with trade goods the demand for slaves was so high that the europeans pressured their african partners to help them plan and rationalize and industrialized their system of mass deportation. Slaves were often bought on credit. And sold out amount throughout european ships would calm they would have a whole cargo full of textiles different metal ware or. Tobacco whatever and they these would be given to go boucle merchants extended to them on credit and then the merchants would go inland with those goods and buy slaves and come back the biggest impact was the level of of. The level of violence the rising level of violence the level of uncertainty. That permeated society everywhere and also the opportunity for new new big bad. To emerge new powerful leaders somebody gets a hold of more firearms somebody gets more aggressive they build their own personal chiefs of the suddenly theyre powerful. Among these leaders was on to read to a major african trader from calabar in what is now nigeria in his diary he spoke of the methods he used to terrorize kunduz kidnapping detention and murder. About 4 am i caught up awful rain i walked up to the city train asked where i met all the times and. We got many to cut off thats. 5 am when we got the capital to snake. The 50 and sit out that day. That. Very clearly these sacrifices were intended to as a form of terrorism that were meant to make it very clear to the population who was the boss and who was naught the very much the way. The mafioso type organizations. Behave in terms of making sure that the members of the association respect whoever the godfather it was and if anybody steps out of line they can be assassinated or killed and so they dont step out of line obviously. For the benefit. Of a handful of enterprising and unscrupulous profiteers the entire continental economy was transformed on the coast African Brokers knew all of the inner workings of the sugar plantation. A slave ship from some a little. Dot at loango in the kingdom of congo. Its captains drawings provide exceptional details of the negotiations between europeans and africans the merchants from the coast knew that the matthiessen a fix captain was in a hurry he had to arrive in the west indies before harvest time this was the time of year when slaves sold best and when the best sugar was available so they deliberately prolonged negotiations to drive prices up 312. 00 captives were rounded up in 116. 00 days. He said my feet arrived in sound amounting now haiti one year after leaving france only 9 captives had perished a good ratio for the crew who celebrated their success. In the drawings of the matisse afaik no allusion to the slaves suffering appears they were dehumanised shadows tallied and lined up like barrels at the bottom of the hole to. The transportation of human beings turned into a nightmare. Its very important to understand that violence on board slave ships would be used electively in other words no captain wanted to kill the entire allotment of people on board because that voyage wouldnt have no profit so when there was resistance what the captains would do is organize a spectacle in which a small number of people would be executed and if st. Leave vicious horrific ways as a means of terrorizing everybody else all of the enslaved would be forced to come up on deck in order to view these executions one slave ship surgeon said that frequently the decks the main deck of the ship would just be completely awash in blood and the aftermath of one of these failed revolves revolts were common and they were almost always suppressed but the captains would use that situation to kill a small number in order to intimidate everybody else sending the message that if you resist us this will be your fate. Good. Ive also suggested that the slave ship created categories of race for example the multi ethnic africans who are loaded on board a slave ship go aboard as ebo or fun day or men day but when they come off the ship they are unloaded as members of a quote negro race end quote and the same parallel process goes on among the sailors these motley crew zzzzz they are english irish also in some cases african they leave their european port but when they arrive on the west coast of africa they become the white people. On caribbean beaches captives disembarked as blacks in a world dominated by whites. To providing an outlet for a society founded on violence and race the carnival maintains the memory of the days when the super industry imposed its. Rhythms rights and seasons and set the pace for island life. It was an era when drummers announced the end of winter and the resumption of cutting when fleeing slaves covered themselves in the glasses to help prevent their recapture. Civil suit change on its clear version of what progressively distinguished atlanta it slavery what made it different from other systems of slavery was the construction of race silicon solution and a house simplist it was precisely this superimposition that developed between physical appearance with its own term and status few. Feet behind them at the extremities of this continuum of the both status and color there was the white master and the black slave he. Met it lives club. So. The term winds did not exist prior to slave societies. Route them the law into can sleep the chill white developed specifically in the antilles this so you can see our vital this atlanta area words to the construction of the racial categories that we still use now. We use them as though they hadnt changed throughout time when in fact they have. Thought the. Race was a weapon of submission meant to carve into flash the supposed inferiority of some people and the infinite superiority of others. Cut off from their roots and their families the black slaves were reduced to a server mass without names and without orientation. The plantation was a machine that devoured its workforce it needed a constant supply of new arrivals. Land owners want to transform the slaves bodies into tools. On plantations whipping and torture were used to deprive them of their humanity. In this garden of torture the masters authority was absolute. So you take for example a character like thomas this award and you can almost see in his diaries the escalation in the violence that he has to mete out or the things he has to mete out to the enslaved to keep them working on the plantation herb. I arrived as a foreman on the new plantation but in too much he got. A man to carry out justice on the negro who understand. We civilly with him and robbed path and lime juice into his wounds. 3 days later the body of another slave who had a scheme to go to us a cut off his hat i mean the body in public but mostly only way to exalt the control of the neighbors. In this a Family Reason was adopted by all the colonies. In force and condition of the negro not relent to us being knighted only strengthened pardons and all them back. These kinds of tortures and these kinds of punishments this kind of brutality actually became commonplace on these plantations where you had white people working out among armies of slaves who they feared they could not control the sound of the screaming and the stench of the burning bodies that also became a fundamental feature of the jamaican landscape right that is what Plantation Society is its that smell its that sound its that fear and terror thats compelling people to work and to obey their masters theres no way to separate vaca and of terror from the labor on the plantation from the profits that labor produced. But the plantation owners could not squander the slaves they had bought on credit the state had financed the shipment of slaves and wanted its return on investment. And. The Plantation Society relied solely on Market Forces violence was a necessary cost and thats included in Balance Sheets it took 4 years to amortize the price of a slave after that they were valuable only insofar as that they could hold a machete this was the price to pay that europe could each. I dont think that its possible to reduce another human being to a mere cipher to a mere extension of your will and vats where a lot of the tension in the possibilities for slave revolt and resistance come in because if my purpose is to subject you absolutely. But you can never be subjected absolutely were always going to have conflict at the extremes of human domination even in slavery we find there is always resistance there is always tension and theres always struggle. Throughout the caribbean escaped slaves took refuge in the heart of the most remote forests they were called marooned slaves in reference to the spanish word cement on which originally designated cattle that had escaped into the wild in these isolated places they began to organize resistance in jamaica they included captain Leonard Parkinson the leader of the maroons and grandy nanny and a shanty known as the maroon priestess. In barbados noosa an illegal war chief through the rebellion the insurgents found a name and identity. All throughout the mountainous areas of jamaica you have these communities of formally in slave people who have escaped and they learn the territory they learn to cultivate crops there and they learn to fight as well harassing plantations taking gunpowder getting new recruits and maintaining and Building Communities in the mountains where this becomes increasingly a problem for the british and by the 2nd 3rd decade of the 18th century it breaks out into major war and the british arent even sure theyre going to be able to maintain the island. The uprising spread to other islands and then to the coast of africa wars rage in the slave captures hunting grounds notably in senate gambia where muslim religious leaders blamed slave trade goods for corrupting society. These outbursts of violence plunged the sugar industry into a crisis which also had an impact in europe a growing number of voices expressed outrage at the horrors of the slave trade. In all of the major slave trading ports everybody knew the truth of the slave trade and ill tell you one way in which they knew it. Slave trading vessels had a very specific smell and you could never get the smell out of the wood. In fact it was said in Charleston South Carolina which was the major port for the importation of slaves into north america that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way you could smell a slave ship before you could see it what that meant was that in every port these these ships these ships of horror that stank of human misery. That this was all very well or. Certainly information about the slave trade and its characteristics the experiences of enslaved africans in the course of the Middle Passage came increasingly to public attention in the late seventys eightys abolitionists campaign this place particular emphasis on the Middle Passage thats when the polemical arguments began and many pamphlets being published on the case being augie slave owners realizing for the 1st time that theyre going to have to make an argument about the legitimacy of colonial slavery. d within this context in 783 a Court Case Involving lloyds and the slave trade company enjoyed significant publicity in britain. Abolitionists used it as a platform to reveal the slave traders barbaric practices. The socalled saul massacre where is took place in the early seventys and eightys was a very important then it basically consisted of a slave ship captain throwing a group of living africans overboard in an effort to collect insurance money now this was this voyage went on and it only came to court a couple of years later because one of the engines the Insurance Company refused to pay and when this event came to court and abolitionists named Granville Sharp shows up at this court case the question being where they actually property or not and sharps answer is this is mass murder. This is just plain mass murder this is not about Property Rights these are human beings. Ringback and the judge actually up held the Insurance Companies and which refused to pay insurance on the the murdered africans and that was vaso who brought this to the attention of Granville Sharp it was ground will sharpen turned it into a big issue that helped to mobilize Public Opinion in britain. Was one of englands most fervent abolitionists born in nigeria he was deported to the caribbean at the age of 11 at the age of 21. 00 he managed to buy his freedom while passing through england in his autobiography published in 789. 00 he recounted his experience of the Middle Passage down in the hold and delivered an impassioned plea against slavery massa held up a mirror to the nations that had reduced him to the rank the marketable object gentleman. Such a tendency as a slave trade to debauch mens minds and harden them to every feeling of humanity. It is their fate on a day of his mistaken avarice but it drops the milk of human kindness and turns it into god. Which violates not 1st natural right of mankind equality and independence and gives one man and a 1000000 of his fellows which god could never intend. Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters our slaves more useful by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes and they would be suffered to enjoy the privileges of man. Which. By the time gustavo vast spoke out and 7897700000 africans had been deported 1000000 from senegal india. 3. 4000000 from beneath and beyond. 3. 2000000 from Central Africa and close 273000 from eastern africa. While david eltis and the Emory University Research Team have established precise deportation figures the income amassed by the slave trade is still being estimated historians are trying to assess today how much profit the slave trade yielded for banks and Insurance Companies. The slave trade is not only. The foundation of american capitalism it is a foundation of all of european in atlantic capitalism because it created this massively profitable Economic System that link the countries of North Western europe to the americas through the plantation system the great scholar activist c. L. R. James pointed out that the slave system created the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen up to that moment in time and this of course is a very important part of western prosperity. Between 1633 and britains abolition of the slave trade in 1807 english and then British Companies deported 2000000 755830 african captives most of them died on the plantations more now from working in the sugarcane fields only this for the sake of profit. In 2007 londons Westminster Abbey hosted a bicentennial commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in the presence of then Prime Minister tony blair and Queen Elizabeth the 2nd one guest human rights activists toying at the 2 disrupted the ceremony. Certainly. The end of the little. Bit. You were not. In the. Worst crisis nervous system. The. Better not its still no answer. To. What. The. Ok what about. The plantation owners and slave traders could not accept losing the hard won caribbean the immensely lucrative driving force behind the rise of global capitalism. At the beginning of the 19th century they sought to thwart the wave of protest in Civil Society but that time slavery a practice that dated back to the dawn of humanity seemed immoral and to belong to the past britain had understood this before the others and was thus one step ahead of its rivals. It was preparing itself for world domination. Puppet. Puppet. Small acts who can inspire big changes in the people making it possible to go africa fantastic right. Join them as they set out to save the environment learn from one another and Work Together for a Better Future for. Many hot steel but using it for a good. 30 minutes on d w. Parasitic drama competition is why the marketing numbers atmosphere at intuition love hate money. Fans spams and friends told to go off on you tube joining us ringback. This is news line from berlin covered 19 is now threatening densely Populated Areas in the developing world under equipped in under blockade in gaza where access to health care is minimal authorities in the territory are fighting against time to get ahead of the coronavirus. Irans president rouhani urges iranians to adapt to the measures to combat the virus because theyre likely to remain in place for some time but are they enough to stop the spread of the virus