We have seen in Chapter 10 how the dramatic expansion of European powers, primarily from Iberia, heralded a period of new pantropical and extratropical global contacts and exchanges between the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some recent treatments have stopped the story there, suggesting that early interactions and geographical “chances” wholly determined the rest of history as we know it. However, this ignores the ongoing colonial, imperialist, and capitalist processes that were only just beginning. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, a variety of European and, later, northern North American leaders, landowners, merchants, and investors increased their attempts to control and exploit the environments and peoples of the tropics. During this period in the tropics, we see some of the earliest, but also worst, impacts of unchecked, unregulated flows of capital on human bodies, cultures, and landscapes in world history. We see the consolidation of a global, racialized trade in forced human labor. And we see the appearance of the first documented recognition that human impacts on the environment could have regional consequences for the climate. These economic and political processes were both resisted and exploited by societies and individuals from the tropics. They also eventually led to some of our modern laws on human rights and international property. However, in the end, they created a new and monstrous redistribution of wealth, away from the tropics and into the hands of the western half of Europe, the United States, and Canada. They altered tropical landscapes beyond all recognition, leaving conservation challenges for many nations today. And they sprouted the roots of racial discrimination and violence that continue within many Euro-American societies in the twenty-first century.2
We now turn to the latest historical, archeological, paleoecological, and anthropological research exploring how tropical forests became key witnesses to this new global order. They were home to millions of Africans forced from their homes in West and Central Africa as local raids and European demand for labor drove the transatlantic slave trade. These enslaved individuals were also transported to tropical forests that were cut back as the increasingly monoculture sugar plantations, particularly in the Caribbean and South America, had violent, expanding impacts on Neotropical environments. Later in time, as global markets for varied tropical crops solidified, tropical forests watched as Brazil’s crucial resource of rubber was planted elsewhere, as India had its own cotton sold back to it, and as farmers in Myanmar cleared entire river deltas to plant sweeping fields of rice to fuel the Western world and an ever more unequal distribution of global wealth. Landscapes previously home to tropical forests provided the tea, coffee, potatoes, and bananas that stocked increasing numbers of Euro-American kitchens. This is the story of how the world we know today emerged from the tropics, alongside the stories of the people and plants that watched it happen. It is the tale of enslaved individuals, laborers, merchants, and empires experiencing and maneuvering in a rapidly changing world of global economics and cultures and of the tropical plants that now line our cupboards and wheel our cars and bikes. It forces us to confront the origins of globalized issues in sustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, political disputes, warfare, and racism that face not just tropical nations but our entire world in the twenty-first century.
AT THE CLOSE of the twentieth century, archeologists excavating at the Spanish colonial Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales (now San José de los Naturales Royal Hospital) in Mexico City, in preparation for the construction of a new subway line, uncovered a mass burial of human remains. Many of the discovered individuals were Indigenous people, buried after succumbing to the rampant spread of diseases that arrived with Europeans. However, scientific research published in 2020 showed that three of the individuals, dating to the very earliest phase of the hospital in the sixteenth century, had a very different origin altogether. Analysis of their preserved DNA, strontium isotope analysis of their tooth enamel (which reflects the geology of where an individual lived during the formation of the tooth), and studies of deliberate cultural dental modifications showed them to all be men, to all have been between twenty-five and thirty-five years old at death, and to all have come from sub-Saharan Africa, over 10,000 kilometers away. At another burial ground near the seventeenth-century Dutch capital of Philipsburg on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, archeologists uncovered individuals with genetic affinities to people living in tropical Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana. Likewise, at British-constructed Newton Plantation in Barbados, dated to between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, disinterred individuals had strontium isotope signatures that showed they spent their childhoods in West Africa. How and why did these people move from one tropical continent to another? The answer is one of the largest, most inhumane sets of forced migrations in human history. From some of the first Africans to arrive in the Neotropics, courtesy of Iberian colonialism in the sixteenth century, to those made to work for expanding Iberian, Dutch, French, and British global economic powers two centuries later, these individuals were all firsthand witnesses to the transatlantic slave trade.3
Figure 11.1. Map of the transatlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1870. The colonized areas of Britain, Portugal, France, Spain, and the Netherlands are shown in the Americas, as well as key locations along the Atlantic coast of Africa. The number of Africans forcibly abducted and transported to the Americas along different routes is shown. Arrows show the trade routes of different products and materials, with a focus on Britain, as discussed in Chapter 11. Adapted from Pearson / Desai / Science / Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database / Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
As we saw in Chapter 10, although Europeans initially sought to force Indigenous populations, including the Guanches of the Canary Islands, the Taíno of the Caribbean, and the Tupí in northeastern Brazil, to work their newly conquered lands in the Neotropics, the impacts of devastating diseases left them with a demand for other sources of labor. This was particularly the case given desires to extract mineral wealth and to transform tropical landscapes into monoculture plantations of crops, such as sugar, to cheaply stimulate and satisfy the growing demand back in Europe. Sugar, in particular, necessitated not only the widespread clearance of trees for planting and fuel for processing but also a large workforce that could ensure efficient harvesting and conversion into molasses. On the Atlantic islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa, Europeans determined that enslaved Black Africans abducted from tropical portions of the continent could, thanks to early exposure, resist tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever that were creeping into the Americas and destroying European migrant workers and Indigenous populations alike. Although enslaved Africans had been arriving on the shores of the Americas since shortly after Columbus’s arrival on Hispaniola, the expansion of sugar plantations across the Caribbean and Neotropics throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese thrones in 1580 saw demand for and extraction of African labor rise progressively. Between 1550 and 1650, Iberian ships had already transported over half a million enslaved Africans to colonies in the Americas. Although slavery had existed in various forms in societies around the world until this point, this new, European-driven trade saw two significant shifts. First, enslavement became a global endeavor, based on violence against both Black African bodies and tropical landscapes. Second, although it drew upon existing economic structures and political conflicts, the earnings and wealth resulting from the increasingly dispassionate, mechanistic, profit-driven exploitation of this expanded trade in enslaved labor flowed primarily into the hands of Europeans.4
Working with sugarcane was notoriously brutal, requiring constant attention, heavy labor, tropical lumber, and dangerous refining through boiling and distillation. Add to this the abuse, malnutrition, and unsanitary conditions forced upon enslaved individuals by plantation owners. The demands placed on the new arrivals to Neotropical shores saw many enslaved peoples worked to death within a mat
ter of years. Yet this trade was only in its infancy. By the seventeenth century, sugar plantations established along the Portuguese-controlled coast of Brazil, such as at Pernambuco and Bahia, produced most of the sugar exports to Europe—something that other European nations sought to change. The Dutch West Indies Company, after a failed attempt to take control of this emerging “sugar coast,” worked its way into the lucrative sugar business by other means. Namely, it invested in the dedicated shipping of enslaved individuals from Africa to the Caribbean to work on the plantations of others. By the end of the seventeenth century, the British Empire had colonized a number of islands in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Antigua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados, that the Spanish had largely neglected due to their lack of ore resources. Here, the British established colonies, not to settle or to control but rather to extract, rolling out the sugar plantation as a concept based on chattel slavery across tropical landscapes to make maximum profit. The French founded a colony on Saint-Dominigue (now Haiti) based on a similar economic system. Although British people launched slave raids in West Africa as early as the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British Royal African Company, as well as a number of French companies, sought greater control of plantation workforces and challenged Iberian and Dutch monopolies by increasingly specializing in a trade in enslaved Africans. At the same time, racist theories, supported by prominent philosophers, served to make associations between concepts of enslaved labor and Black African bodies particularly rigid in English social and cultural discourse. By the eighteenth century, the “triangular trade,” as it became known, not only had enveloped the entire continent of Africa in its demand for labor but also saw African individuals shipped to European colonies and business ventures in the Americas, South Asia, and the Pacific as part of economic extensions that spread well beyond sugar plantations (e.g., mining and other crop monocultures) and the Atlantic Ocean—all to meet an increasingly coordinated, global flow of investment that had become disturbingly mechanical. Other European countries, including Denmark and Norway, became involved. So did an independent Brazil in 1822, as well as other American-based trading polities. Smaller private merchants, alongside the wealthy elite and large companies that had thus far dominated coordination of the trade and ownership of plantations, also played an increasingly large role. These merchants ensured a flow of wealth into cities like Liverpool, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Nantes, managing the shipping of cloth to African merchants in exchange for enslaved individuals, the shipping of enslaved individuals on to the Americas, and the return of sugar, as well as cotton, tobacco, and other plantation goods. The human cost of these increasingly formalized and racialized flows of capital is shocking. By the time an independent Brazil became the last country in the Americas to ban slavery in 1888, anywhere between 10 million and 20 million Africans had been forcibly uprooted from their—primarily tropical—homes and families and transported across the Atlantic.5
Many of them died before they even stepped ashore. The eighteenth-century Portuguese shipwreck of the São José–Paquete de Africa, uncovered by underwater archeologists off the coast of Cape Town, is a haunting graveyard of iron bars and copper nails that shackled more than four hundred trapped African men, women, and children on their way to Portuguese-controlled Brazil until stormy waters took them to their deaths. Firsthand written accounts by freed Black African enslaved individuals such as Olaudah Equinao (Gustavus Vassa) and Ignatius Sancho highlight both the terrors faced in capture and transport and the racist and capitalist treatment by Europeans selling people as commodities. As Sancho wrote, “Look around upon the miserable fate of almost all our unfortunate colour… [S]ee slavery and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labour.”6 Although the degree remains debated, the transatlantic slave trade certainly impacted West and Central African societies and polities over the long term. Using historically recorded and estimated numbers of enslaved individuals to show how this trade resulted in depopulation and severely imbalanced ratios of men to women, African historians such as Walter Rodney and Joseph Inikori have argued that it was a major factor, alongside droughts and famine, in changing demographics in sub-Saharan Africa between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, the increasingly active meddling of European powers in African politics and sponsoring of local slave raids to obtain captives for trade played an important role in further stimulating a long history of ethnic and religious violence in West and Central Africa, leading to the movement of populations further into mountain or forest settings, preferences for isolated villages as a key form of safety from attack, and the creation of political and cultural fault lines still exploited today by modern terrorist groups such as Boko Haram in the tropical forests of southern Nigeria and northern Cameroon.7
Traditional approaches to the transatlantic slave trade have often framed Africa as a land of passive victims, perpetuating colonial stereotypes that still depict the continent as isolated and impoverished. Much of this is a product of the fact that most of the historical records used to understand West and Central Africa at the time of European involvement were written by Europeans or Arabic traders and scholars. Meanwhile, as seen in the recent controversy of the “Benin Bronzes,” preserved material culture highlighting the diversity and wealth of precolonial African states was removed from the continent by European colonizers. Nevertheless, the last thirty years of historical revisionism has presented a more active African role in an increasingly globalized world. As in Europe and the Mediterranean, capture and trade of enslaved individuals was prevalent in many parts of Africa at the time of European arrival on its shores. Trade across the Saharan caravan routes and through the Red Sea or Indian Ocean saw many enslaved peoples traded with Muslim powers from the first millennium AD. As we saw in Chapter 10, from the beginning, the Portuguese relied upon African political goodwill and traditional marriage networks to access slaves who were already being captured and traded throughout the region as part of warfare and regional demands for labor and prestige. In the fifteenth century, thriving local kingdoms, such as those of Kongo and Benin, actively exploited or resisted new European contacts, setting prices, limiting the numbers of enslaved people taken, and making economic and religious demands. Indeed, through the transatlantic slave trade, European merchants and captains were only likely to succeed if they tailored the goods they brought with them (e.g., weapons, cloth, pipes) to the luxury tastes of their regional partners, with whom they often formed close, personal relationships. Africans meanwhile incorporated and used Europeans in their geopolitics, as demonstrated by the fact that European traders built their houses alongside African elites and merchants at sites such as Elmina in Ghana and Savi in Benin. Even when Europeans did actively take part in raids in the interior, they relied on allies and could quickly succumb to a changing of political allegiances. This was amply demonstrated when Queen Nzinga (Njinga Mbande) of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba (modern-day Angola) shifted from acting as an ambassador for the Portuguese in the region to being their staunch enemy after aligning with the Dutch to further the independence and stature of her own realm.8
Just as we should not reduce Africa and its diverse states and polities to a passive clay molded by Europeans, we should also not forget the individual examples of resistance to the transatlantic slave trade. Increasingly recognized numbers of escapees, slave mutinies on Atlantic voyages, and rebellions across the Americas, including, notably, in Haiti, highlight the ongoing powerful, determined resistance of Africans and their descendants to horrendous conditions between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Free “maroon” settlements of former enslaved peoples, and sometimes also Indigenous communities, developed across the Caribbean, Central and North America, and South America and, as in the famous case of the Quilombo dos Palmares of Brazil, could provide staunch militant resistance to imperial powers. Away from these more dramatic events, Dr. Alicia Odewale of the University of
Tulsa has also examined historical records and material remains left behind in the ground to study the everyday experiences of enslaved communities living in the Danish-controlled, Christianized, and sugar-oriented urban center of Saint Croix in the Caribbean. These communities negotiated and resisted their condition through their daily activities and use of mundane items such as pottery. At the tropical urban site of Saint Croix, enslaved communities made significant use of undecorated and handmade ceramic wares, alongside European pottery, as part of a growing reliance on skills developed within the enslaved community for daily survival. At Saint Croix and elsewhere in the Caribbean, enslaved communities also coordinated informal trading systems that saw tobacco, pipes, pottery, and glass exchanged between communities as part of the negotiation of new identities and connections. As Alicia puts it, “Even under the immense structural power of imperialism and slavery, enslaved communities still expressed their own power and transformative capacity.”9 Beyond slavery, numerous diasporic African voices are also now beginning to be heard as merchants, voyagers, investors, and crucial workers in the formation of globalized, and later industrialized, cultures across Africa, the Americas, and Europe. There were far more Africans who were captured and brutally transported to the Americas than there were Europeans who arrived on those shores prior to the nineteenth century. In many parts of the Caribbean and South America, they outnumbered Europeans by as much as 25:1, and people of African heritage still make up a considerable portion, or even the largest portion, of populations in many Caribbean and South American countries today. It is no exaggeration to say that the mixed cultures, demographies, economies, and societies of the new globalized world were built upon their shoulders.10
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