Slavery: The Full Story

Sheldon Stern has a piece in the latest issue of Academic Questions (highly recommended journal, by the way) on “The Full Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade."

Note the qualification already in the title. Many people seem to believe that slavery was almost uniquely a thing done by white-skinned Europeans, or even Americans, to dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans. But this was only one slave trade; slavery and slave trading has been common throughout history. What is most notable about the European experience is that the countries of Europe were the first to prohibit slavery.

But there are many more common misconceptions. For example, how many realize that even the slave trade to the Americas was not primarily to the British colonies or to the North American continent? Brazil was the primary destination; continental North America accounted for only about 8%.

Nor did the African experience of slavery begin with the Europeans. Slavery was a long-established practice in Africa when the Europeans arrived. Exporting slaves was also well-established—over the Sahara to Muslim countries. Indeed, someone has estimated that, up until the nineteenth century, there were more Europeans enslaved in Africa than Africans enslaved in the Americas.

Most of the slaves sent to the Americas were enslaved by fellow Africans. Those for export were then marched to the coast. About half of all captives—a total of ten million people--died on this march, before they ever saw the ships. When they arrived, those the Europeans chose not to buy were often beheaded on the spot.

This was, to the African elites, a major source of income. When, in the early nineteenth century, Britain banned the slave trade in all its possessions, there were protests in Nigeria.