A Black Chapter in History

...Indeed, as Thomas himself observes, cotton goods sold for slaves accounted for a third of Manchester's total output (by value) in 1770...

...But in comparison with black people, as Thomas puts it, "both indigenous Indians and Europeans seemed feeble...

...Insofar as these daring, cruel men had an interest in Africa, they sought gold, of which it was the main source...

...In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that slavery hindered economic progress because "A person who can acquire no property can have no...

...Later on the privileged enterprises had difficulty defending their exclusive claims against freebooters who here, as elsewhere in the economy, competed in defiance of the law...

...Since Indian fabrics were popular in West Africa, factories in the North of England began to manufacture cheap imitations of them to sell for slaves...

...Yet Prince Henry the Navigator sent his captains southward, starting early in the 15th century, to find a sea route to India and the "spice islands," not slaves...

...By the 14th century some of them were put to work on the sugar plantations proliferating in Sicily, Portugal and the Atlantic islands it discovered en route to the Indies...

...West African jihads continued throughout the whole period of the trade, particularly during the Muslim revival of the 18th and 19th centuries...

...European slavers maintained that their chattel came on the market as a result of internal warfare in Africa...

...In the earliest days, the businessmen in Portugal who financed all this included many members of two groups experienced in operating far-flung commercial networks: Italians resident in Lisbon as representatives of Genoese or Florentine firms, and Portuguese Conversos...

...Williams quite unconvincingly dismisses this notion without argument...

...If by this Williams meant that slavers invested in cotton factories (as the reference to "capital" seems to imply), the idea is perfectly plausible, but he makes no serious effort to prove it...

...And yet, as Williams also argues, the further development of capitalism in Britain led it to abolish its own slave trade (in 1807) and slavery itself in the British Empire (in the 1830s), as well as to take the lead in the effort to eradicate both everywhere else...

...Hugh Thomas, in The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster, 908 pp., $37.50), argues rather that "the expansion of Muslim power in West Africa" in the 14th and 15th centuries is what promoted "an expansion of a trade in black slaves northwards...

...These factories had settled in the North, primarily the area around Manchester, to escape the guild regulations that hampered innovation in traditional clothproducing towns...

...It may seem outrageous to think of slavery as in any way legitimate, but it was a well-established institution, particularly in Africa...

...Merchants—first in Portugal, and later in Spain, England, France, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, the United States, Brazil, and Cuba—shipped Western products to Africa...

...It was their discovery of Brazil in 1500 that created the trade in its classic form...

...There and in the Spanish colonies, Europeans first attempted to enslave the indigenous population...

...On the European end, at least, there is a clear starting point: Portugal showed the way and transported the largest number of victims—upward of 4.5 million...

...In the late 18th century, he notes, the Kings of Dahomey and the Ashanti, when questioned by Europeans, replied that they "had their own political motives for their conflicts...

...They themselves obtained most of their human merchandise from dealers, and ultimately wars, much further inland...

...More Negroes started reaching Islamic and Christian lands, via the Sahara, from Western and Central Africa...

...They may have been lying, but it is unclear why they should have done so...

...In late medieval and early modern times, governments preferred to grant monopoly privileges to large, privately owned consortiums that could be taxed easily...

...After all, the slavetrading entrepreneurs of Lisbon and Rio, or Seville and Cadiz, did not finance innovations in manufacture...

...Powerful African kingdoms, notably those of the Ashanti, the Congo and Dahomey, dominated the part of the business involving face to face contact with white men and similarly profited from it...

...This was not, as the 19th-century Irish historian William Lecky wrote, to Thomas' evident approval, "among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages in the history of nations...

...Whatever the case, Africans clearly share responsibility for the slave trade with the Europeans, the North and South Americans, the Turks, and the Arabs...

...Half of its total output was exported to the Caribbean and North America, chiefly to clothe slaves...

...Slaves were a normal article of commerce for them and they wanted to be the suppliers...

...But were the conflicts of those days, as the Abolitionists contended, mostly provoked by the requirements of the slave trade...

...Certainly these two businesses provided economies of scale that promoted the substitution of machines for manual skills and of steam for natural sources of power...

...The interior of Africa, the real source of most of the slaves reaching Western markets, is largely unknown to us...

...He does claim that in the mid18th century "capital accumulated by Liverpool from the slave trade poured into the hinterland to fertilize the energies of [nearby] Manchester...

...The historian Basil Davidson has suggested that the slave trade with the North developed because West and Central Africa were overpopulated...

...Europeans soon learned to prefer this, for African— and subsequently mulatto—intervention speeded up the whole process...

...By the 18th century "free trade," in this limited sense, won out: Believing that the growth of commerce was more important than raising revenue, governments abandoned the effort to maintain monopolies...

...Another advantage of chartered companies was the fact that in the beginning, at least, smaller operations would not have had the resources to create and supply a network of forts along Africa's Atlantic coast...

...But it was the only reparation Britain could really have made...

...Of course, one reason may be that then annual incomes from the slave trade were about five times higher than the total incomes of the wealthiest Englishmen...

...For the past generation, the main battleground of academic studies on the slave trade has been the thesis of Eric Williams (a former prime minister of Trinidad) that it played an important role "in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England...

...The Portuguese in Africa started dealing in slaves in the 1440s, as one kind of goods among several...

...though Muslims would not enslave one another, their religion encouraged them to enslave pagans...

...interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible...

...These were exchanged for slaves, who made the middle passage across the Atlantic and were sold in the Americas for locally produced sugar, tobacco and raw cotton that was then carried to Europe...

...Writers & Writing A BLACK CHAPTER IN HISTORY By Roger Draper It is no wonder that black people feel angry about their fate in the past half-millennium and ask themselves, accusingly, Who is to blame...

...There were thought to be several legitimate sources of slaves: people captured in war, born to an enslaved mother, punished for a crime, sold by their parents, or those who voluntarily accepted servitude...

...During the Middle Ages, Thomas points out, new slaves typically had been captives in holy wars...

...The real importance of the relationship between slavery and cotton was their mutual dependency at the very dawn of the Industrial Revolution...

...The great evil was critical to the economies of two European countries, Portugal and then Britain, which became the main slaving nation in the 18th century...

...Everywhere, though, it was a big business that directly reflected the chief economic trends...

...Just as economic liberalism was encouraging competitive forces in the slave trade, there was a revolution in the means of turning out one of the chief articles used to conduct it: cotton cloth...

...Thomas, who says meeting Williams 33 years ago inspired his own interest in the subject, calls the latter's "shocking argument" in Capitalism and Slavery "no more than a brilliant jeu d'esprit...

...Nevertheless, slavery now began to be associated with blacks—not, as of old, with Slavs (the source of the word...

...Thomas doubts it...

...Nonetheless, the equation of slavery and backwardness is hardly justified by the historical record...

...Thomas does an especially good job of describing these developments...

...He does, however, show conclusively that slave plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and eventually the United States supplied almost all of the raw material consumed by Manchester firms...

...Actually, it is apparent that from 1760 to 1790, as the English cotton industry blazed the way toward the Industrial Revolution—much as Portugal had led Europe into Africa more than 300 years earlier—cotton was becoming the single most important slave-produced crop...

...As usual with questions of ultimate responsibility for great evils like slavery, the list of candidates is long...

...except for Portuguese Angola and Mozambique—in reality mere coastal settlements—there were no colonies until fairly late in the 19th century...

...The European forts along the West African coast, where slaves were stockpiled, existed solely by consent of African rulers...

...It is far from impossible that then, as now, wars involving large-scale violence against civilians raged throughout Central Africa...

...Moreover, Manchester's "foreign market meant chiefly the West Indian plantations and Africa," and "Manchester goods for Africa were taken to the [West African] coast in the Liverpool slave vessels...

...Although European slavers initially obtained Africans not only by purchase but also by kidnapping, local rulers were strong enough to exert control almost immediately...

...There are no such pages...

...Yet they could not really know: African rulers prevented them from moving beyond the coast and the mouths of the continent's great rivers...

...Thus emerged the famous "triangular trade...

...In fact, the early 19th-century Abolitionist leader Thomas Clarkson very nearly inverted the Williams thesis by attributing Liverpool's prosperity to the abundance of cheap manufactures from Manchester...

...Williams never said they did...