THE
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
AND
THE DEVELOPMENT OF
TROPICAL AFRICA
- A BRIEF SCAN.
by
REGINALD YOUNG
Sociology / History / Development Studies.
The
transatlantic slave trade and the development of tropical Africa - A brief
scan by
Reginald
Young
For Nazma, Mo, Tatiana and Liberty
Copyright
© Reginald Young
1995
All rights reserved.
British
Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A
catalogue record for this book is available
from
the British Library.
Produced
by Reginald Young
March 1995
Printed in the United Kingdom
ISBN 1 899968
01 6
INTRODUCTION
It is beyond the scope of this article to
investigate thoroughly the transatlantic slave trade and the events that caused
it. Moreover, the limitations of historical data that is available and the
interpretation of historical events that occurred in Tropical Africa during the
trans-Atlantic slave trade have been a study of constant debate, controversy
and research among anthropologists, historians and economists.
Since the concept of development is a
modern phenomenon, it is difficult to define what is meant by development
historically in relation to the pre-modern socio-economic systems of slavery
that were prevalent in tropical Africa before and during the advent of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Furthermore because of the different
socio-economic systems (both pre-modern and modern) that were involved in the
transatlantic trade, the definition of slavery and development became complex
and problematic thereby stimulating debates among social scientists as to
whether "development" actually took place in Tropical Africa before,
during, and after the period of the transatlantic slave trade.
Because of the above complications this
article will discuss some mechanisms of
slavery and development to demonstrate that the transatlantic slave trade did
not introduce slavery or slave trading in Africa. Moreover, the factors that
promote or retard the processes of development are inter-related to historical,
geographical, natural, cultural, and economic processes which are global and
dialectical in nature.
SLAVERY
[The discovery of
gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial
hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
production.] - Capital’. volume one, page 775, 1971
According to Dr. Marx, the slave trade was
mainly an economic historical phenomenon that was part of the early development
process of capitalist production.
Here
it must be recognised that since class
analysis is an important feature of Marx’s methodology known as historical
materialism, it cannot be assumed that
the term “black skins” as used by Marx was not referring to the
social class of enslaved exploited labour power wrapped up in “black skins” instead of the essentialised, racialised,
reified and non-class perception of “black
skins” that is void of class content
which does not distinguish but includes
the dominant exploitative elites (including the chiefs or elders of traditional
societies) who colluded with the slave traffickers and merchants from elsewhere
including Europe thereby benefiting enormously by securing wealth, status and
power from the socio-economic slave
systems connected to the Transatlantic slave trade.
Referring to the lucrative profits that
motivated the beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade. Marx quotes T. J. Dunning on page 926
’Capital’. Vol. 1, Penguin, 1976.
[With adequate
profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10%, will ensure its employment
anywhere; 20% certain will produce eagerness; 50%, positive audacity; 100%,
will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300%, and there is not a crime
at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.]
Eric Williams reiterated Dr. Marx’s thesis on the profit motive of the slave
trade. On page 19, ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ Eric
Williams wrote
“Here, then, is
the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do
not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour.”
On page 7 Williams wrote
[Slavery is the
Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has
thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon . . . . . . Unfree labour in the new world was brown,
white, black, and yellow, Catholic, Protestant, and pagan.]
The dynamics of capitalism and the
compelling force of capitalist competition conditioned the capitalists to
concentrate their operations in the remotest regions of the world to monopolise
source of cheap food, raw materials, labour power and markets for manufactured
commodities.
According to Maurice Dobb, page 208. ‘Studies in the development of capitalism’.......
[Slavery in the
colonies was another source of great fortune: sugar, cotton and tobacco
cultivation all resting on slave labour. Of Bristol it was said that ‘there is
not a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave’. In
seventeenth-century England, not only were convicts and pauper children and
‘masterless vagabonds’ shipped to the colonies to swell their labour supply,
but kidnapping for the same purpose became a profitable trade in which
magistrates, aldermen and ladies at Court had a hand].
The transatlantic slave trade constituted
part of a triangular trade in human beings, commodities and luxurious goods
linking Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. Between 1451 and 1600 approximately
275,000 slaves were shifted to America and Europe.
During the seventeenth century western
Europe experienced an economic depression. Agricultural production before 1650
in the Caribbean was dominated by tobacco crops grown in small farms controlled
by European settlers. After 1650 sugar
production on the majority of islands in the Caribbean became the main
agricultural activity organised under plantation systems that demanded and
relied on the importation of slave labour.
While in America tobacco and cotton became
the major crop produced on estates in Virginia and the Carolinas.
The
replacement of tobacco by sugar stimulated the increased traffic in slaves five
times at an estimated total of 1,341,000.
This boom in trade compensated for the losses during the years
of depression in the seventeenth century. Thereafter the slave trade reached a
peak during the eighteenth century.
Between 1701 and 1810 over six million
slaves were imported from Africa to the New World.
According to Eric R. Wolf, page
198-199, ‘Europe and a people without a
history’.
[The trade had
indirect effects on the European countries engaged in it. The commodities
traded for slaves on African coasts had to be produced or paid for in the home
country. Thus between 1730 and 1775 the value of British exports to Africa rose by some 400% . Manufacturers, provisioners, and
sailors all benefited by the trade and at various times petitioned for its
continuance. Moreover, the plantations worked by slave labour were
profitable, and much of the profit returned to the home country.]
The transatlantic slave trade was
organised, controlled, and commanded by an elite who owned and controlled the
means of production, distribution and exchange, and used their political,
military power to subjugate foreign regions whenever possible and made
alliances whenever necessary to defend, maintain, and perpetuate their objectives
in maximising profits.
Indentured labour and the enslavement of
native Indians in America, have extensively been the means of providing labour
in the colonies in the New World, but what made it relatively nonviable was
their ability to organise rebellions due to the location of their communities.
Also
the colonialists feared that certain pacts and alliances with their native
Indian allies could be broken in times of war with other colonists, and the
capturing of runaway slaves by the Indians, if the Indians were enslaved.
According to Eric R. Wolf, page 203, ‘Europe and the people without a history’.
“In 1730, for
instance, the Cherokee signed an agreement to seize and return runaway slaves
upon the promise of a gun and a match coat for each slave delivered”.
The indentured labourers were able to rely
on the support of their bondsmen, but because the slaves imported from Africa
were forcibly transported over long distances and were systematically
conditioned or “broke in” into slavery from different areas, consisting
of different linguistic groupings, they were unable to unite, communicate and
impose a cost on the colonialists. Also when any attempt was made to escape,
the African slave was vulnerable in day light.
To appreciate why the colonialists were
able to obtain so many slaves from so far away despite the disadvantages of
culture, climate, and geography, it is necessary to examine the role played by
the mechanisms of slavery that have existed in tropical Africa.
In 1789, an ex-slave named Adaudah Equiano,
(who later became a leading spokesperson for the so-called “black” community in England
during the 1780’s and 1790’s,) produced an autobiography highlighting forty
years of his experiences as a slave in captivity.
This invaluable documented evidence is
important in confirming the existence of slavery and slave societies in Africa
independent of and connected to the transatlantic Slave Trade. Furthermore, the
significance of Equiano’s account proves
African slavery or more precisely the life of an African slave from an African
perspective.
The transatlantic Slave Trade kept alive
the prevailing external conditions that stimulated the demand for slave labour
that was negotiated along the Atlantic coast of Africa, thereby, impelling the
scale, movement, and ambitions of the African slaving elites who benefited
enormously from the arresting, controlling and slave trafficking of human
beings.
The African slavers extended their slave
trading operations deep into the remotest regions of the African interior.
As
Equiano explained in his report, he along with other captive human beings were
made to enjoy a life of slavery under numerous, intricate, complex networks of
African slave systems before finally arriving at the Atlantic coast, where the
slave traders from Europe and elsewhere became their new captors.
Equiano described how:
["One day, when all
our people were gone out to their work as usual and only I and my dear sister
were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a
moment seized us both, and without giving us time to cry out to make resistance
they stopped our mouths and ran off with us into the nearest woods."]
Captured at a very young age of eleven
years old and after travelling for several months through many African slave
societies, Equiano eventually arrived at the Atlantic coast where he
encountered the slave traders from different alien environments he so vividly
described in his notes.
Equiano
states
["When I was immediately
handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew, and I was now
persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits and that they were
going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, that their
long hair and the language they spoke........united to conform me in this
belief"]. - From Craton et al., ‘Slavery, Abolition and
Emancipation’. pp 38-9. - As cited by James Walvin, ‘Slavery and The Slave
Trade’. - The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1983, page 44.
The societies in Tropical Africa were
organised on an uneven, varied and complex basis, forming a ‘tribal mosaic’
consisting of communities ranging from hunters and gatherers, nomadic-pastoral,
horticulturists, to peasant and state structured societies. It was a common
feature of societies in Tropical Africa that the political, economic, and
social structures were organised on a complex pyramidal basis.
At the top, was the royal court, from where
the divine kings ruled. Their authority was based on ancestral supernatural
powers, which they were supposed to personify.
The royal court was responsible for the
controlling of the strategic resources, gold, iron ore deposits, salt and
slaves. Paying allegiance to the royal court were the elders who represented
and managed the various related lineage, and by a system of kinship
arrangements controlled land and labour.
The elders also shared political authority
with the trading and warring elites who participated in long distance trading
and warfare to enhance their status and promote their alliance with the elders
in their service to the royal court.
The contact with merchant traders from
Europe and elsewhere provided the ruling elites of the pyramidal socio-economic
structured societies with instruments, hardware, textiles, rum, tobacco,
firearms and gun powder, although guns had already appeared in Africa before
the development of the transatlantic slave trade.
According to Eric R. Wolf. Page 210, ’Europe and the people without a history’.
“By 1730 the annual import of guns to West
Africa had reached the figure of 180,000; between 1750 and 1807 gun imports
oscillated between 283,000 and 394,000 per annum”.
The Asante who dominated the gold coast during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries had successfully established themselves as a military and commercial
entity by acquiring guns from European traders.
The Asante conquered Western Conja between
1722 and 1723, Eastern Gonja between 1732 and 1733, Accra in 1723, Akyem
Abuakwa in 1744, and Mamprussi between 1744 and 1745, thereby exported a large
number of slaves.
On page 212 Eric R. Wolf asserts that
[The dates of the
military successes of the first half of the eighteenth century are mirrored in
the large number of slaves exported from the Gold coast at that time. With each
victory, the Asante acquired slaves in the form of war captives and tribute. .
. . . It would seem that as long as the
slave trade prospered, the military orientation of the Asante state received
strong reinforcement. Merchants remained under state control, and an
independent class of traders was not allowed to develop.]
Another mechanism of slavery was the
system of bride wealth and pawnship.
According to Orlando Patterson, page 167, ‘Slavery and social death’
[Perhaps the most
dramatic case of acquisition of slaves through bride wealth was that of the
Nkundu of the Kongo, a primitive tribe among whom slavery was traditionally
indispensable, . . . . no marriage was truly legitimate until the bride price
was completed by a payment of the Bosongo (which comprised, on average, two
slave women, but in some cases as many as five to ten slaves. ‘The strength of
the marriage is to be found in the slave'- a traditional Nkundu saying)].
Lineage elders wielded much power and
control over women as bride wealth and slaves under polygamy and the pawnship
system.
As Mary Douglas explains on page 208, ‘Europe and the people without a history’.
[A pawn woman produces lineage segments of
other clans who can be expected to reside in his ( the owner’s ) village and
remain under his control. He can offer her daughters to his young clansmen as
wives and so build up his local clan section. Her sons, who will also be his
pawns, he can persuade to live in his village. By offering them wives from his
own clan he can counteract the tendency for men to join their mother’s
brothers. Pawn owners can also make elaborate alliances between their pawns of
different clans.]
The system of pawnship was widespread in
tropical Africa.
The
person was exchanged as payment for debt. The creditor, having received the
person as means of payment, assumes complete control and dominance the
reproductive abilities and labour power for a time.
In other instances like extreme social or
natural crises such as famine, people have been known to pawn themselves or
their relatives for food and security. The use of slaves in the system of
pawnship and bride payment was related to the system of using slaves as money.
On page 168, ’Slavery and social death’, Orlando Paterson asserts
[In both pagan and
modern Africa, slaves were often used as money. Among the Nendi of West Africa,
slaves were exchanged for bags of salt and cattle. A single slave was worth
from three to six cows and a man, woman or child, were all considered as one
‘heap’ of money. This was equivalent later in the century, in 1890, to three
pounds sterling. Slaves were similarly used in Yoruba land and parts of central
Africa.]
Another mechanism of slavery was the
judicial process of the traditional political, economic
and social order dominated by a trading and warring elite sharing political
authority with the elders.
The
political and social order was based on kinship and was structured along
lineage lines. Any infringement on the established norms was regarded as
disobedience towards the divine laws and customs of the ancestors and the
supernatural.
The
punishment for crimes was harsh, usually the guilt of a person was established
by mere speculation, fear, or superstition and often the victim of lineage conspiracy
to absolve the accused lineage, the condemned person was banished to a life of
servitude or sold onto slavery.
The mechanisms of slavery, as features of
state societies based on peasant agriculture was typical in tropical Africa.
These societies evolved from a complex
process of historical events on the continent of Africa through various
colonising interests, and the dynamism of some socio-economic structure
producing surplus wealth to maintain a ruling class thus creating the conditions
necessary for the origin of classes, class inequality, and class struggle in
Africa.
Long
before the transatlantic slave trade began in the seventeenth century Africa
was invaded and colonised by Islamic slave states and the resulting slavery was
exploited by elites within and without Africa as far as Asia.
According to David Brion Davis, page 45-46,'Slavery and human progress’.
".[.. Islamic conquests of Egypt and Tripoli, the Nilotic and central
Sudanese states regularly delivered slaves to the north as part of a commercial
pact or as a form of tribute. . . . . Muslim domination of the Long Red Sea
coast ensured a continuous shipment of black slaves to Yemen, Arabia, Iraq,
Iran and eventually Muslim India, a trade that was greatly supplemented by the establishment
of Quanbalu and other commercial centres south of the Horn of Africa on the
Swahili coast. Meanwhile, as Berber tribes gradually converted to the new
faith, the trans-Saharan caravan trade became Islamised. . . . . In the period 900-1100
the numbers of black slaves exported by the trans-Saharan trade rose from a previous annual average of
approximately 3,000 to 8,700, or to a
total 1,740,000 persons for the two centuries.. . . . . The key point is that
the importation of black slaves into Islamic lands from Spain to India
constituted a continuous, large scale migration that in total numbers may well
have surpassed, over a period of twelve centuries, the African Diaspora to the
New World.]
THEORISTS
ON SLAVERY AND DEVELOPMENT.
Walter Rodney writing on the effects of the
slave trade on the development of Africa, described the slave trade as a
disaster for the African continent.
His analysis was based on the transatlantic
slave trade which was a late, temporary phenomenon concentrated on certain
regions in Tropical Africa, and as such, underestimated the effects of the
Islamic slave trading systems that were endemic on a wider continental scale
and endured for a longer period of time, supplying the demand for slaves in the
eastern markets. (D. Brion Davis, 1984.)
The European involvement in the slave trade
in Africa was exaggerated not only in scale when compared to slave trading as a
whole in Africa, but also in value, since most of the profits were made from
the trading in Europe in the commodities that the slaves produced.
According to Eric Williams, page 210. ’Capitalism and Slavery’
[The commercial
capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of
slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial
capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned around and destroyed the
power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its work.
There is evidence which suggests the
contrary to Eric William’s thesis, that the power of commercial capitalism has
not been destroyed but in fact developed and expanded. Also, although the slave
trade played a partial role in nourishing the process of the development of the
industrial revolution in Britain. It was not the primary source of capital
accumulation that fuelled the historical, inherited cultural socio-economic
structures that were intrinsic, and latent in the dialectical processes that
provided the conditions for the birth of the industrial revolution.
According to Eric R. Wolf, page 199. ‘Europe and the people without a history’,
“The home market
was important, and English exports to Europe exceeded in value those going to
Africa and the Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”.
It is more likely that the dynamic nature
of capitalism with its monopolistic, expansionist features that managed to
extract maximum value from international trade by colonisation policies that
exploited enslaved human labour power, rather than simply relying on the revenue
acquired from the exchange of human cargoes captured and supplied to the
trans-Atlantic slave trade which was one of a multitude of economic means of
procuring a profit.
The
merchant capitalist did not rely solely on the slave trade to generate surplus
wealth. The transatlantic slave trade was a means of obtaining cheap labour
power that could be exploited by producing commodities (such as sugar, tobacco,
and cotton which were more valuable than the slaves) that were in great demand
in world markets.
The political, cultural and socio-economic
structures in tropical Africa restricted the growth of a dynamic capitalist
class with a vision of global conquest, a motivation to organise production for
a profit and a free proletarian class available to work for a wage.
The ruling elites were parasitical, they
appropriated wealth from labour of
slaves and the peasantry through brute coercive force and engaged in the
trading of human and material commodities.
It
was the ruling elites of tropical Africa who relied on the transatlantic slave
trade for desperately needed imported goods, hardware and guns from Europe and
elsewhere.
Since slaves were easily available, and was in
great demand in the capitalist world market, the transatlantic slave trade
provided the ruling elites of tropical Africa with opportunities to increase
their military might to appropriate and secure commercial trade by establishing
new socio-economic states while distorting the economy of other societies in
Africa.
In other words, as far as the slave based
plantation owners, controllers and investors were concerned the source of their
lucrative profits came from the export of commodities (produced by the
plantation economy and eventually exported to well-established capitalist commodity
and financial trade markets in Europe) such as tobacco, cotton and sugar that were produced by the labour
power of the slaves and not from the direct sale or appropriation of human
beings from tropical Africa.
In
fact (contrary the Eric William's thesis which asserted that the profits of the
slave trade stimulated the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth
century), the main beneficiaries of the slave trade on the coasts of tropical
Africa were the ruling trading elites and their allies involved in the actual negotiation and
transaction of human cargoes that were exchanged for imported goods (such as
luxury items, guns, linen and tools) essential in increasing their political
power, wealth, prestige and influence over their communities, other
socio-economic environments and slaves that were casualties of the ensuing
raids and conflicts resulting from the expansion of slave trading
interests.
The new socio-economic process that
evolved, linking intrinsically the economic foundations of tropical Africa to
the world capitalist economy on an unequal, dependent, and exploitative basis
benefits the international elites and alienates the population of the world by
limiting their rights to access wealth.
The depopulation of tropical Africa and its
adverse effects on peasant societies that were labour intensive is not the main
cause but in some ways the effect a cause or causes that were historically,
culturally, materially, and geographically more complex than the previous writers,
Walter Rodney and Eric Williams was prepared to consider.
David Brion Davis presented a vivid and
impressive account that the effects of the Islamic slave trade had had on the
demographic landscape in Africa centuries before the dawning of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade and the unquestionable culminating ecological degradation that
ensued.
As far as the effects of the transatlantic
slave trade on the development of tropical Africa are concerned, it is
necessary to appreciate pre-modern historical and socio-economic processes that
predate the era at the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade during which
modern socio-economic processes that give rise to concepts such as development
was non existent.
Hence the term development is historically
inappropriate when describing, analysing and referring pre-modern
socio-economic processes especially when the complications that derive
from the scarcity of research material
are considered.
Furthermore, development theories have been
implicated for introducing elitist eurocentric values and criteria in studying
the unequal evolution, development and status of individuals, nations and
regions where precapitalist and capitalist socio-economic systems interact in
complex ways constituting an interdependent global free market economy.
In other words, the concept of
under-development employed by Rodney to
analyse the effects of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade (dominated by
trading elites from Europe and tropical Africa) on the populations and
socio-economic structures of the affected communities in Africa, is
meaningless, inappropriate and lacks socio-historical specificity, especially
regarding the prevailing socio-economic relations, the nature, role and
difference of the various dominant tribal elites, the uneven stages of
socio-economic development achieved by the various prevailing societies
interacting with each other and ultimately with the new socio-economic
processes stimulated by the transatlantic slave trade.
Theoretically, therefore, the concept of
under-development is specifically meaningful when analysing the dialectical
relative interdependent relationship of contemporary communities with the developed world.
Dependency theorists of development,
however, do not envisage circumstances whereby the populations and communities
of pre-literate and pre-modern societies
can foster conditions for capitalist mode of development with advanced
developed capitalist economies. (Marx,
Rodney, Larrain.)
Universally, human beings as individuals or communities from all cultures and
societies, at all times have appreciated
self esteem, freedom and life sustenance as the gist of understanding the
meaning and strategy of development
policies. ( Todaro, page 89, 1989. )
Despite the debates stimulated by the use
of the term development in describing
the unequal economic status or condition of individuals, nations and regions,
no country in the world today can claim to achieve the core values of the "inner" meaning of development for their
populations that was described by
Michael P. Todaro.
Historically, the progressive
dynamic productive forces of the capitalist mode of production and the
development of technology and science which ensued have made it possible, on
one hand, to exploit and dominate the outmoded and relatively inefficient mode
of production system of slavery that fostered the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
and on the other, incorporating the obscurantist, traditional, retarded
cultural, socio-economic structures with new expanding socio-economic class
formations on local and national basis, thus forming a complex hierarchy of
socially stratified elites, both traditional and modern, that was linked in a
dependent socio-economic alliance with an international bourgeoisie commanding
global market institutions and socio-economic relations. This process was well
documented as imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism. (Hobson,
Nkrumah)
To some theorists the trans-Atlantic slave
trade was a necessary, inevitable stage in the development of capitalism that
brought modernisation to Africa and the world. (Marx, Williams.) To others the
transatlantic slave trade was an unnecessary, immoral exercise that contributes
to the under-development of Africa.
(Rodney)
In other words the slave, socio-economic
system of slavery, slavery and the slave trade was connotated, defined and
stigmatised narrowly with populations
having "black" coloured
skins, thereby further implying that the source of exploitation and profit
originated in the colour of the slave and not in the enslaved, degraded and
exploited labour power of the slave.
This crude interpretation of the multiple
complex, historical, political, cultural, socio-economic and ecological
processes that influenced the development of slavery and the slave trade across
the Atlantic ocean resulted in the heartless discrimination, exclusion and rejection
of millions of individuals simply because their enslaved labour power were
wrapped in "white" coloured skins.
Dr. Marx brilliantly illustrates this
unjust policy and deconstructs the afrocentrism of such historical interpretations of slavery
and the trans-Atlantic slave trade when he wrote:-
["Whilst the cotton
industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave the United States a
stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal
slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery
of the waged-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and
simple in the new world."] - Marx page 785, Capital Volume One.
Marx, E. Williams and M. Dobb's statements
regarding the economic value of the potential labour power of the individuals
classified as slaves played a primary role in motivating the slave traders and their accomplices as participants in the
notorious Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, besides other indirect factors such as
biological specification, skin
colour, ethnicity, age, socio-political
status and national or regional identity
of the enslaved's origin are validated
by Sir Harry H. Johnston's thesis.
According to Sir Harry H. Johnston
["In 1667 an act was passed for 'the
better ordering and governing of negroes.' It commences, 'Whereas the plantations and
estates of this Island cannot be fully managed and brought into use without the
labour and service of great numbers of
negroes and other slaves . . . 'All
through the second half of the seventeenth century there were of course many
English, Irish, and Welsh indentured apprentices (practically slaves) and
political prisoners who were sold as slaves by the British Government and were
worst treated than were the negroes."] page 212-213, 'The Negro in the New World',
1910.
CONCLUSION
This issues discussed in this article were
intended to illustrate the role of energy in the form of labour power in the
complex dynamics of the socio-economic processes involved in sustaining slavery
and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
In other words labour power plays a primary
role in the socio-economic processes of exploitation irrespective of the
biological specification, (i.e, colour of the skin, hair, and eyes),
ideological orientation, cultural geography, climatical conditions and
ecological variation.
It is real individuals occupying
strategic social class or status positions in particular historical unequal socio-economic hierarchical structures that legitimise exploitation
not the "colour"
of the skin.
Enslaved labour power under the
"white" skin is as wretched as enslaved labour power under the
"black" skin.
Labour power under the "black"
skin cannot be liberated while labour power under the "white"
skin remains enslaved.
While the debates rage on, the implications
of slavery, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of capitalism
have far-reaching implications not only for Africa, the Atlantic world and ultimately the survival of all life
systems within the biosphere, but also for individuals active in social
movements, social policy implementation, planning, research and development and
the politics for social democracy.
Furthermore,
the dynamic processes of global capitalism unleashes an enormous material wealth creating potential
thereby implicating some negative features such as imposing a high cost on
human, social, animal and ecological environments, ( Marx ) increasing the
socio-economic inequality and insecurity for alienated powerless and
propertyless subordinated social classes, plus the spectre of racialised social
conflicts and the subsequent impact on human social relations popularly
perceived as “race” riots or
deterioration of good “race relations".
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Paterson.
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