Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  England, its appetite whetted by the wealth of Barbadian sugar, cast its eyes on other Caribbean islands. There was now no avoiding conflict with Spain, which had long occupied the choicest Caribbean real estate. The English finally settled on Jamaica, twenty-six times the size of Barbados. By 1655, the larger island had been raided and its cities burned by both pirates and English regulars on several occasions. In that year, British soldiers invaded it (under the direction of Admiral William Penn, father of Pennsylvania’s founder), and by 1658 they had driven out the last Spaniards. From that moment, the British strove to make Jamaica their sugar pantry, at one point drawing one third of the African slave traffic.71

  Barbados’s heyday was relatively short-lived. After 1680, falling sugar prices, English tariffs, and depleted soil and forests ruined its plantations, and many planters fled to greener pastures in the New World. Modyford, for example, already one of the world’s wealthiest men, went to Jamaica, where he became governor. Others returned as estate holders to England, where they became the prototypical nouveau riche of the eighteenth century, portrayed endlessly in the literature of the period. Yet another group went to an even larger and more promising venue: what is now South Carolina, where they re-created the plantation society they had left behind on the island. This Barbadian heritage manifested itself in the most slave-intensive society on the North American continent, and in a political style that centuries later yielded Fort Sumter and Strom Thurmond.72

  The Portuguese, English, and Dutch operating “beyond the line” in the New World were to become three of the largest consumers of slave labor in the history of mankind. This was an unplanned and unforeseen fallout of the logistics of the plantation economy.

  Growing cane requires vast amounts of manpower, which the European homelands could not supply. As the historian Richard S. Dunn described events in the British Caribbean: “The rape’s progress was fatally easy: from exploiting the English laboring poor to abusing colonial bondservants to ensnaring kidnaps and convicts to enslaving black Africans.”73

  The first workers in the cane fields of the English Caribbean were white freemen, but by the late seventeenth century almost one-third of the field hands were prisoners.74 It was not unheard of for youths to be kidnapped (or “barbadosed,” a term analogous to the more modern “shanghaied”) off the streets of Bristol or Liverpool to work in the cane fields. Even when available, English laborers were often surly and uncooperative; in the best of circumstances they remained on the plantation for only a few years before their indenture, their contracts, their prison terms, their patience, or their lives expired. A more permanent solution was needed.

  Sometime around 1640, a group of Barbadian planters visited Dutch plantations in Brazil and were mightily impressed with the advantages of black slave labor. Africans had for millennia been accomplished farmers; not only were they skilled with plow and hoe, but they were also, unlike the English, well used to the heat and resistant to the great killers of the sugar islands—yellow fever and malaria. Best of all, they were cheap in comparison with free English labor, in terms of both initial price and upkeep. After 1660, plantation crews consisting of scores, and then hundreds, of Africans became the norm.75

  Initially, the Portuguese, who were familiar with the West African coastline, supplied British needs in the Caribbean, but soon Englishmen entered the trade. Just four months after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and in the tradition of the time, Charles II established a monopoly company, jauntily named the “Royal Adventurers into Africa,” to deal in African trade. Its shareholders included most of the royal family, Lord Sandwich, and Lord Ashley, who, in one of history’s more delicious ideological ironies, was the philosopher John Locke’s principal patron and protector. The Company concerned itself mainly with Africa’s major export, gold, but also delivered several thousand slaves to Barbados.

  The chronically mismanaged Adventurers were disbanded in 1672 and replaced with a far more formidable monopoly organization—the Royal African Company (RAC). This time, perhaps tipped off by Ashley about the profitability of traffic in slaves, Locke himself became a minor shareholder. A creature of the monarchy, the RAC did not fare well after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and lost its monopoly a decade later. (With monopolies, timing is everything, and the RAC’s was not good; Charles II had granted it the exclusive right to trade with Africa for a thousand years.) After it lost its slaving monopoly, the RAC did collect a one-tenth royalty on sales by independent slavers—“ten percenters,” as they were known. Before the RAC faded into obscurity in the seventeenth century, it had shipped 75,000 slaves across the Atlantic. Of this number, about one in six did not survive the journey. (The death rate was almost certainly higher among the white crew members, who were not only more susceptible to tropical disease than the slaves but also less expensive to replace).76

  Millions more would follow. Even in the absence of religious and cultural strictures against slavery, it is difficult and expensive to hunt, capture, and transport human beings; the majority of black slaves initially fell into the hands of opposing tribal armies, not slave traders. The Europeans’ susceptibility to infectious diseases dictated a minimal white presence on the African slave coasts, limited to visiting crews and a few permanent agents, whose primary expertise lay in plying local rulers with gifts and bribes of all descriptions.

  Since the local inhabitants of the slaving ports would not countenance such inhuman treatment of their ethnic brethren, the captives themselves had usually passed through several hands before reaching the coast in order to ensure that they were of different tribal origin from their final African jailers. Until well into the nineteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French remained largely unaware of just how their human cargoes had been acquired, and often of their precise geographic origin. Even had they wanted to capture the slaves themselves, Europeans could not have survived long enough to do so. The RAC’s records show that 60 percent of its personnel in Africa died in the first year and 80 percent by the seventh year, and that only one in ten was discharged alive from company service.77 One of the most prominent historians of slavery, David Brion Davis, points out:

  There has long been a widespread mythology claiming that Europeans were the ones who physically enslaved Africans—as if small groups of sailors, who were highly vulnerable to tropical diseases and who had no supply lines to their homelands, could kidnap some eleven to twelve million Africans.78

  Just how did Europeans pay for their slaves? Largely in cloth. The RAC’s records show that in the late 1600s, nearly three-quarters of the value of trade goods bound for Africa were in textiles, mostly of English manufacture, but with a considerable fraction of Indian calicoes as well. The non-textile items consisted mainly of raw iron, firearms, and cowrie shells.79

  After exchanging trade goods for captives, the Europeans continued the barbarity. Each captive was allotted approximately four square feet of shipboard space—about the same as the space per passenger on a packed subway car or commercial airliner, but minus elemental sanitation, ventilation, or relief from a sweltering environment, and not for minutes or hours, but for weeks. Even in the best of circumstances—that is, in the absence of the epidemic diseases that almost always swept the slave holds—the captives were packed together spoon-style in pools of their own waste. Add to this miasma gastrointestinal illnesses and festering open sores from chains and immobility, and the circumstances on transatlantic slavers soon exceeded the bounds of human imagination. Testimony to Parliament from an officer on one ship, the Alexander, revealed that:

  When employed in stowing the slaves, he made the most of the room and wedged them in. They had not so much room as a man in his coffin, either in length or in breadth. It was impossible for them to turn or shift. . . . He says he cannot conceive of any situation so dreadful and disgusting as that of the slaves when ill of the flux: in the Alexander, the deck was covered with blood and mucus, and resembled a slaughterhouse. The stench and foul
air were intolerable.80

  Few subjects carry the emotional freight of the slave trade, and until very recently most of the approximations of its volume, nationality, and mortality reflected the ideological needs of the estimators more than objective reality. Only after 1950 did the subject become an object of serious historical inquiry, as scholars such as Philip Curtin and David Eltis strove to obtain a meaningful and accurate census of the trade.

  The picture their data draw is stunning.81 Between 1519 and the end of the slave trade in the late 1860s, 9.5 million African slaves arrived in the New World; Figure 10-2 plots the annual transatlantic traffic. Since the best estimates of mortality on the middle passage are around 15 percent, this means that eleven million captives began the journey in Africa.

  The majority of the 9.5 million who survived the middle passage cut, crushed, and boiled cane.82 Fully 80 percent of slaves came to Brazil and the Caribbean, while most of the rest went to Spanish North America and South America. So massive was this involuntary migration that as early as 1580, slaves constituted well over half of voyagers to the New World; by 1700, three-quarters; and by 1820, 90 percent. Truly, the settlement of the Americas would not have been possible without black slaves, who constituted fully 77 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic before 1820.83 Only after the mid-nineteenth century, when the institution was finally outlawed, did the majority of immigrants have white skin.

  Figure 10-2. Annual Transatlantic Slave Trade

  Surprisingly, only about four hundred thousand—about 4.5 percent—came to the British North American colonies. Table 10-1, which summarizes the proportions of slaves arriving in the New World according to destination and the proportions of their descendants living there in 1950, lays out the puzzle. First, note that in spite of the fact that the United States and Canada received fewer than one slave in twenty, these two nations now contain nearly one in three of their descendants. The opposite pattern holds for the Caribbean, which received over two-fifths of the slaves, but now contains just one-fifth of their descendants, suggesting that it was difficult to maintain the slave population in the islands.

  How did the slaves manage to increase their numbers in Canada and the United States? The answer is that sugar is the deadliest of crops, and for the most part British North America did not grow it. The cutting, grinding, and boiling meant overwork and an early death for millions of Africans—most of them men, since vigorous males were the import of choice on the plantations. Nothing like the sugar islands, as exemplified by Barbados, Jamaica, the Windwards and Leewards, and Saint-Domingue, had ever been seen before, and hopefully nothing like them will ever be seen again. These societies were peopled almost entirely by black Africans and largely devoted to producing one commodity. The sugar islands thus depended on the importation of food and most other essential items. So ravaged by overwork, malnutrition, and disease were their slave workforces that a constant stream of fresh humanity was required merely to keep their numbers level.

  Table 10-1. Proportions of New-World Slave Imports between 1500 and 1880, and Their Descendant Populations in 1950.

  Proportion of Slaves Imported into New World between 1500 and 1880

  Proportion of New-World African Descendants in 1950

  U.S. and Canada

  4.5%

  31.1%

  Mexico and Central America

  2.4%

  0.7%

  Caribbean Islands

  43.0%

  20.0%

  Brazil

  38.2%

  36.6%

  Other South America

  11.8%

  11.6%

  This was not the bondage of the household or harem slave of the Middle East, who was often treated as a member of the family and allowed to conduct business; nor of the mamluk, who could gain manumission, and even rise to power, through conversion and service. Rather, it was an unrelenting hell of hot, killing work in fields and factories under the hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute supervision of gang bosses.84

  The “grinding season” proved especially deadly. Since cane juice goes sour unless crushed and boiled within twenty-four hours of cutting, the production sequence had to be condensed into round-the-clock shifts of backbreaking work in the fields, at the three-cylinder mills, and in the inferno-like boiler rooms. This put robust male slaves at a premium, and that in turn meant a relative deficiency of women in the islands. A reduced birthrate naturally followed, not merely because there were fewer females, but also because of the social instability resulting from this imbalance. Further, plantation owners had no use for slave children, since they would have to be fed for more than a decade before they yielded economic benefit; it was better to import healthy young males, who could be bought for three or four years’ upkeep. Slave children were so undesirable that an infant sold for one-twentieth to one-tenth the price of an adult.85

  Death on the plantation was sugar’s constant companion, and those colonies that relied most heavily on cane had the most trouble maintaining their slave populations. The black population of British North America, which grew little cane, increased nearly as fast as the white population. The one exception to the pattern of lower mortality among slaves in North America was found in the southernmost parishes of Louisiana, one of the few places on the continent that grew cane. Conversely, one exception to the high mortality among slaves in Brazil was found in the province of Minas Gerais, which was more dependent on “easier” labor: coffee and dairy production.86

  The deadly face of “sugar demographics” is easily seen today in the cultural differences between the black population in the United States and Canada and that in the rest of the hemisphere. British North America, because of its vigorous population growth, required ever-smaller infusions of African slaves. After 1800, the relatively high fertility and low death rates among slaves in the United States meant that southern plantation owners simply did not need to import more Africans. The American prohibition of the slave trade in 1808 easily passed through the southern-dominated Congress for just this reason: the Americans’ abolition of the slave trade crippled their Caribbean and Brazilian competitors. By 1808, almost all North American slaves were native-born, and by the Civil War, relatively little cultural memory of Africa remained.87 The Caribbean islands and Brazil, on the other hand, required a constant flow of Africans; well into the twentieth century, the Yoruba language flourished in Cuba, the last bastion of the New World plantation society, and African influences still pervade Caribbean culture.

  The transatlantic commerce of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries—coffee, cotton, sugar, rum, and tobacco from the New World to Europe; manufactured goods, particularly textiles, from Europe to Africa; and slaves from Africa to the New World—has been described as the “triangular trade pattern” and taught to most schoolchildren. This oversimplified picture neglects the real-world reality of shorter hauls. An English ship might carry indigo from Jamaica to Philadelphia, then corn from there to London, then wool cloth from there to Le Havre, then French silks to Africa’s slave coast, and so on.

  In the East, things did not run as smoothly. Even though Britons might have been crazy for calicoes and besotted by tea, it was more difficult to find trade goods to exchange for them, particularly with the self-sufficient and self-satisfied Chinese. A more even-flowing system, similar to that achieved in the Atlantic, was needed. Just as the slave-trade arm of the Atlantic triangle poisoned race relations for centuries thereafter, so would the inequities of the nineteenth-century India and China trades profoundly affect East-West relations to the present day.

  11

  THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF FREE TRADE

  There is cause for apprehension lest in centuries or millennia to come China may be endangered by collision with the nations of the West.—Kang Hsi, emperor of China, warning of the British presence at Canton in 17171

  On March 30, 1802, William Jardine, an eighteen-year-old Scot, shipped out as a surgeon’s mate on the Brunswick, bound for C
hina. He was typical of up-and-comers in the East India Company (EIC). After the death of his father, a humble Highlands farmer, William managed to make it through medical school at Edinburgh with the help of an older brother.

  In those days, a berth on an Indiaman was a rare plum. Its advantage derived not from the Company’s salary—a miserly two-month £5 signing advance in Jardine’s case, or about $800 in today’s currency—but because of the “privileged tonnage” allotted to crewmen. The EIC granted a surgeon’s mate two tons; a surgeon, three; and a captain, fifty-six outbound and thirty-eight homebound. An Indiaman’s crew members could rent out their personal allowances to private merchants at £20 to £40 per ton, but an enterprising man like Jardine could do far better on his own account. The career of this young medical officer, who later founded one of the modern world’s great trading empires, eloquently portrays the changes that swept through world commerce in the early nineteenth century.

  Though no record of Jardine’s medical ability exists, there is little doubt that he discharged his duties competently and conscientiously, since on the very next passage he was promoted to ship’s surgeon. But his real talent lay elsewhere. On his six voyages to the East with the EIC, he amassed a considerable personal fortune by exchanging silver and merchandise from England and India for Chinese goods, mainly tea and silk.

  By nineteenth-century standards, his fifteen-year tenure in the EIC was fairly routine, despite the fact that four of his six voyages took place in wartime. On his second voyage in 1805, his ship, the ill-fated Brunswick, was captured off Sri Lanka by the French, who transferred him to a prison on the Cape of Good Hope, then controlled by Napoleon’s newly conquered Dutch Republic, and allowed him to return home on an American vessel. Since it was Company policy to pay only those who served on successful missions, his salary for the journey was forfeit.