DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
A Global Phenomenon Transported to America
Throughout history, many civilizations have employed slave labor
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Man has enslaved his fellow man since prehistoric times. While the conditions of servitude varied, slave labor was employed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, in classical Greece and Rome, and in pre-Colombian America by the native Aztec, Inca, and Mayan empires. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians used Hebrew slaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt, used slaves of their own. Early Christianity accepted the practice, as did Islam. North and East African Arabs enslaved black Africans, and Egypt and Syria enslaved Mediterranean Europeans, whom they captured or purchased from slave traders and typically employed to produce sugar. Many Native American tribal groups enslaved members of other tribes captured in war.
A number of factors combined to stimulate the Atlantic slave trade. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprived sweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by the Portuguese, Europeans began to explore the West African coast and to purchase slaves from African slave traders. After Christopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of the New World, European colonizers imported large numbers of African slaves to work the land and, especially in the Caribbean, to cultivate sugar. Caribbean islands soon supplied some 80 to 90 percent of Western Europe’s sugar demand.
It is difficult in today’s world to understand the prominent role that crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and spices once played in the world economy. In 1789, for example, the small colony of Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti) accounted for about 40 percent of the value of all French foreign trade. The economic forces driving the Atlantic slave trade were powerful. In all, at least 10 million Africans endured the “middle passage.” (The term refers to the Atlantic Ocean segment — the second and longest — of the triangular trade that sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton to Europe.) Most arrived in Portuguese Brazil, Spanish Latin America, and the various British and French Caribbean “sugar islands.” Only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africans were brought to British North America. Even so, the African-American experience differed profoundly from those of the other immigrants who would found and expand the United States.
