Slave Trade in Africa and Europe Before and After 1550

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Table of Contents

Free vs. Unfree Labour
Slave culture
The era of Indentured servitude
How did West Indian Company introduce slavery?
Building colonies for Indentured Servants
References
Footnotes

The transatlantic slave trade initiated in 1502 when South American colonies and Portugal were united with Spain. Many researchers believe it initiated during the 1500s in the kingdom of Kongo¹. The commonalities between the period 1550 and after 1550 was that of the concept between Indentured servitude and slavery. This perception of slavery emerged when merchants started to get a license to trade slaves to their colonies in the form of labour and debt bondage to produce goods and services for consumption that has been a central concern of Western society.

Before 1550 slavery was conducted without a license or official permit. However, after 1550, indentured servitude served as a way to license and enabled the reason to question the terms of labor, agreements, and the arrangements under which labor arranged to produce with others. Labour was the main criterion against which Africans were traded easily and through the lens of labor, we can see slavery as the initial form of indentured servitude.

However, through indentured servitude slavery got a pace since it allowed partial freedom to the workmen. It was slavery before 1550 that transformed into servitude after 1550 and never allowed the socially deprived class to make any attempt to question the arrangements of any legal bindings, necessary for skilled or unskilled laborers.

Lovejoy (2000) relates slavery with bondage and provides an African-centered focus of slavery where black slaves were made to use systematically with the West Indian Company. Lovejoy (2000) gives a particular account of the difference between slavery and servitude by pointing out that men resisted slavery at the point of enslavement particularly when they found themselves enslaved on a huge board ship with the first cargo of 11 Africans. Later it was amalgamated by British Caribbean colonies resulting in the concept of racism. Later slavery was used as a weapon to subjugate the workforce to serve political purposes or for judicial or religious reasons².

Free vs. Unfree Labour

History reveals that European employment in the slave trade was developed on the grounds of skilled vs. unskilled labor. Unfree labour referred to the forced labor which applied to traditional slavery and occupied a central position in the medieval labor system. Although legal status was rare at that time it gradually made its way in England in the form of indentured servitude where the labor was not considered unfree anymore.

Free labor was subjected to be acquired as indentured servants who were offered depressed wages and after a limited period, their freedom was decided by their master. Indentured servants were considered as skilled and were often deployed after the movements of anti-slavery broke out, whereas slaves were unskilled and raw and were supposed to work throughout their lifetime. Historians have differentiated indentured servitude and slavery based on a form of contractual and noncontractual labor. Though such labor in both cases was not free, traditional slavery took place after Americans and European tradespeople witnessed a profitable venture.

That was after 1550 when many believe that slavery was initiated in Europe after seeing a profitable venue of American black slaves. Even the work in European colonies was different from that of English labor since it was heavily regulated for the public authorities and was entitled to fix wages³.

Atlantic slavery adopted the first legal system of domination which was fostered throughout the European settler colonies in America to enhance a vast economic complex. This involved opportunities not only to the merchants but also to the societies and governments to interact with each other and maintain friendly relations from Scandinavia to southeastern Africa. Started in the sixteenth-century transatlantic slave trade became the reason for involving participants that not remained limited to traders, merchants, and planters from Massachusetts to Mozambique⁴.

Slave culture

Palmie (1996) pertains slave community to a cultural survival which helped in the reconstitution of African cultures. This culture before 1550 reshaped African traditions towards a new slave religion based on magical shamanism⁵. We can still see a glimpse of slave culture in American society where various emotional experiences are from African customs. Throughout the centuries of slavery, it was through slave religious and cultural traditions that slaves were able to survive the abrasiveness and misery with a smile. Many slaves after witnessing the death of their loved ones put off their customs while others adapted and blended African religious rites that gave them a new form of religion.

After 1550 racism arrived with a glance of tastelessness in exposing Western oppression of New World cultures. Class division prevailed after the 1550s and was among the early English culture which responded to homelessness in the form of tastelessness and helped shape the New World labor force in the short term. Thereafter halted the transition escorting to other capitalist forms of wage-labor in the long term⁶.

The era of Indentured servitude

After 1550, England witnessed some changes in the unfree labor where it was considered as a universal legal form restricted by various punishments in the English law which if violated were followed by imprisonment. For instance, it was not until 1550 that legal punishments were implemented either for wages or for violating the transatlantic transportation rules. Masters held the right to imprison their workers until they were willing to complete the service contract (indentured servitude) or return to their employers for the period they had agreed upon (slavery).

Critics claim the English law to be responsible for initiating unfree labor since it embedded concepts about liberty, labor, religious church teachings, gender specificity, and observations of other European New World colonies, into the New World. Authors believe that Europe followed the roots of enslavement of Africans for practical reasons and adapt the initial origins of slavery in Europe⁷.

How did West Indian Company introduce slavery?

Indian indentured migration is recalled for the Caribbean sugar and Indian cotton as they were a cause for the British Empire to procure anti-slavery, free trade, and free-labor ideologies while Indian overseas workers remained under the indenture⁸. Dutch West India Company (WIC) was initiated in 1621 after the failure of bringing agricultural laborers from Holland to the Netherlands. When Dutch arrived in America they aimed to gain benefits of piling up money. WIC turned to slavery despite the fact it was engaged in importing slaves to other Caribbean colonies.

The WIC in the era of the mid-1600s was the most dominant European slave trader in Africa who at times bought 6,900 captives on the African coast⁹. These slaves were kept in the companys colonies in the West Indies but from other stations like Angola, WIC imported slaves to the Netherlands for other purposes like clearing forests, laying roads, building houses and structures, and grow food. WIC laid the foundation of personalized slave labor that later went to flourish modern New York by building its fortifications and making agriculture as trade.

Modern economic development in the pre-colonial era witnessed an accurate shortage of agricultural workers¹⁰. The WIC took a stand in a different direction and this time it allowed New Netherlanders to trade their products to Angola, meanwhile taking Negroes back home to fulfill the shortage of cultivation in their lands. WIC cleverly waive the profit for the sake of spreading slavery in New Netherlands and getting the slave colony settled and even allowed private owners to exchange slaves they were dissatisfied with for company slaves. Within years after finding slave agriculturalists, the price of skilled men in New Netherlands rose about 300 percent and by the time the British got hold of the colony in 1664 slaves sold in New Amsterdam for double the price¹¹.

Over time the economic status of slavery in New Netherlands conflicted with that of the religious British citizens who followed the Dutch into the north Atlantic colonies. It is considered that racism started when free blacks intervened with whites during the military since the desperate Indian war of 1641 was on its way and whites were busy conducting revolts. WIC after acknowledging that slaves had worked hard issued them a certain grant over time which slaves considered as half freedom.

Indentured Indians were migrated from India to all parts of the British Empire on depressed wages which often lead to the start of many movements. Northrup (1995) suggests Serial indentured contracts had a long history in British colonies in the Americas where more than half of the European migrants to British colonies were estimated to have been indentured¹². Abolitionists despised slavery because they thought it was something devilish as it contravened human decency as well as the teachings of the Christian religion¹³. The solution they thought to legitimize slavery was through free labor.

Indentured servants gained significance in shaping the early economy of the colonial Chesapeake Bay region where in exchange for transportation to the new world and the eventual opportunity to establish themselves in the colonies, indentured servants were supposed to supply labor to tobacco farmers who were seeking labor. Historical analysis of indentured servitude denies traditional slavery methods and witness the accustomed master-servant relationship as a simple exchange of service for transportation. Servants were upkeep and freedom dues were paid in terms of corn, food, or clothing¹⁴. On the contrary, for slaves, the master-servant relationship was nothing but human abuse and maltreatment.

Building colonies for Indentured Servants

Building colonies in exchange for labor depended on the nature of the servant trade and contract where the economic contribution of servants to the tobacco-growing regimen and the economic impulses that encouraged the transition from servant to slave labor took place in the late seventeenth century. Settlement patterns regarding the significance of servants to population growth and family formation were depicted in context with other social and behavioral aspects of the servant experience¹⁵.

The result of such profitable deals made the New Englanders contemplate developing new ideas of slave trade what came to be known as the Triangular Trade. European troops and ships carried sugar from the plantation colonies of the Caribbean to New England where colonists purify it into rum. New Englanders then further put this rum to African passage where in exchange the merchants get slaves¹⁶.

Employment under a system of indentured servitude as compared to traditional slaves has little evidence in history. However, liberated blacks who embarked in New York for Abaco were indentured to some of the white loyalist refugees whom they accompanied. The reasons for indenturing free blacks and the terms of their indenture are still unknown, nevertheless the indenturing of free blacks had however a contemporary parallel.

It happened in 1780 when in Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Law was introduced as a system of indenture for former slaves that created a substitute form of labor that in some ways was more efficient than perpetual servitude¹⁷. The American Loyalists migrating to Abaco were probably anxious to guarantee labor services for themselves in an unfamiliar environment as they turned to a system of unfree labor that predated chattel slavery as the predominant labor system in the British-American colonies.

The years after 1550 further promoted the system of indentured servitude and provided employers with an institutional legal alternative to slavery as a method of commanding and controlling labor¹⁸.

However, it is difficult to measure the extent to which the system of indenture was adopted because according to Johnson (1996) references to its existence appeared primarily in advertisements concerning runaways in the colonys newspapers that was an indication that the system was used to bind both free nonwhites and whites to regular employment in the rural as well as in the urban one¹⁹. By the year 1750 provincial rulers with a large number of slave soldiers monopolized the African kings of Congo resulting in maintaining a social order based on slavery²⁰.

References

Anonymous, (2005) New England and the African Slave Trade, Social Education. Volume: 69. Issue: 6, p. 338.

Cawley. Alexa Silver, (1999) A Passionate Affair: The master servant relationship in seventeenth century Maryland, The Historian. Volume: 61. Issue: 4, p. 751.

Cefalu A. Paul, (2000) Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeares the Tempest, Captain John Smiths Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy, Shakespeare Studies, p. 85.

Drescher Seymour, (2002) The Mighty Experiment: Free labor vs. Slavery in British Emancipation: Oxford University Press: London.

Heywood, M. Linda (2009) Slavery and its transformation in the Kingdom of Congo: 1490-1800. Journal of African History, 50, pp. 1-22.

Johnson Howard, (1996) The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933: University Press of Florida: Gainesville, FL.

Kale Madhavi, (1998) Fragments of Empire: capital, slavery and Indian indentured labour migration in the British Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lovejoy, E. Paul, (1989) The Impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa: A review of the literature, Journal of African History, 30, pp. 365-394.

Lovejoy, E. Paul, (2000) Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, Continuum International Publishing Group.

Miller M. Randall, (1999) The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies, The Historian. Volume: 61. Issue: 2, p. 437.

Northrup David, (1995) Indentured labour in the age of imperialism 1834-1922, Cambridge University Press.

Palmie Stephan, (1996) Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, University of Tennessee Press.

Saunders Kay, (1984) Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920. Taylor and Francis.

Slavery, 2009a. Web.

Steinfeld J. Robert, (1991) The Invention of Free labour: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870: University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC.

Footnotes

Heywood, 2009.
Lovejoy, 2003, p. 4.
Steinfeld, 1991, p. 3.
Drescher, 2002, p. 3.
Palmie, 1996, p. 37.
Cefalu, 2000.
Miller, 1999.
Kale, 1998, p. 12.
Slavery, 2009a.
Lovejoy, 1989, p. 366.
Slavery, 2009a.
Northrup, 1995, p. 4.
Saunders, 1984, p. 6.
Cawley, 1999.
Cawley, 1999.
Anonymous, 2005.
Johnson, 1996, p. 25.
Johnson, 1996, p. 25.
Ibid.
Heywood, 2009.

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