The first thing i want to say about it is we have a big subject. A tremendously important subject, and truly a difficult subject to deal with today. Its importance lies in the relationship to the transformation of the world in the early modern era. By that, i mean three things. First, the origins and the rise of capitalism around the atlantic, beginning in the late 16th century and continuing thereafter to the present. Secondly, the establishment of european dominance around the world. This is another major theme to which the slave trade is connected. Finally, we are talking today about one of the very foundations of American History. America is the result of the meeting of three very old cultures, and you might say continents. People from europe, people from west africa, and people from native america. Today, we are going to talk about one of those three pillars, the african slave trade. I want to begin with a quote by a very eminent africanamerican scholar activist named w. E. B. Dubois. Heres what he said about the atlantic slave trade. The most magnificent drama in the last 1000 years of Human History is the transportation of 10 million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent and into the newfound el dorado of the west. They descended into hell. It was a tragedy that that beggared the greek, and the french revolution. And up people of humanity like the french revolution. I think he is exactly right. This is a stunning drama of Human History, the atlantic slave trade. I would ask you to notice his reference to el dorado. The mythic city of gold sought after by the spanish conquistadors when they came to mexico and peru. El dorado was finally found. Not the actual city, but a slave system that would produce gold and wealth on a scale previously unimaginable. So it is a story about el dorado, after all. Ive said the slave trade is a foundation of American History. I mean that in a very literal sense. Slavery as an institution, the slave trade as something that made that institution possible, are utterly central to American History from the 17th century to the present. This is important to who we are. We can pretend thats not true. That wont help us. So in a way, we are talking today and discussing the atlantic slave trade, about the origins and very nature of america as a human society. This is not an easy subject to discuss, as i suggested, because the slave trade and slavery are both fundamentally premised on violence and terror. You cant coerce people into hard work for their entire lives without a system of violence backing it up. This is especially clear in the slave trade. What we are going to talk about today is difficult, it is painful, and it is not only painful because of the specific history, it is painful because of the truth that this requires us to face. Let me be more specific about that. In this post 9 11 world, we talk a lot about terror, do we not . The question i have is do we have the courage to talk about the terror that was instrumental to the very making and building of American Society . Something not done by others to americans, but done by americans to others. Thats a big question. And i think that question lies at the heart of a test of any society that considers itself to be democratic. In other words, its easy to face all of those glorious things in history, like the exulted ideals of the american revolution. The question is, can you face the dark pages of your history . I would suggest to you that we need to do that, and studying the atlantic slave trade is part of it, because those slave ships of it, because those slave ships that brought millions of people to the americas are still sailing. There are ghost ships that haunt us because we live with the history they created. So lets start with the ship. Im sure all of you have seen these tall ships, the replicas that have been built. They are spectacular. The european tall ship is a majestic thing to see, a beautiful thing to see, but the beauty of it, the way we transformed it into something of a fetish actually hides its history. What i will have you know about this european tall ship is that in fact, this is the technology that allowed europeans to conquer the rest of the world. This thing is a machine. What happened was european shipbuilders found ways to load cannons onto these highly mobile ships, which allowed europeans to fan out over the face of the earth to trade and to make war to enforce their terms of trade. When you look at the earths surface and see how many parts of it speak european languages, think of this, this is why it happened. Happened. But of course, there is a limit to the romance of the sea. And we will explore that today. Even though we love tall ships, it turns out there is one we dont love. Thats the slave ship. In fact, we find it hard to talk about it. But talk about it we must. I suspect most of you would have no way of knowing that this particular tall ship was actually a slave ship. There is a way to tell. If you look closely, you will see just above the waterline, on the side of the vessel in the hull, you will find holes carved into it. These are air ports. If your cargo is textiles, sugar, timber, you dont carve holes into the side of the ship. But if your cargo is 300 human beings to be brought from west africa to some port in the new world, you have a big problem. The problem is ventilation. How to let that socalled cargo breathe. So thats how you can tell it is a slave ship, because of the holes carved in the side. Were going to talk about the slave trade in its largest dimensions, and we will also talk about it concretely. Heres a famous image you may have seen. This is a real ship that sailed out of liverpool for about 20 years in the late 18th century. Ships like this carried, over a very long span of time, beginning around 1514, and carrying on up to about 1866, a span of 352 years, carried millions of people into bondage. One of my points here is we are not talking about a short burst, aroxismies him proxie of violence, we are talking about something that lasted for 3. 5 centuries. We have to take that on board. The countries that took the lead in organizing the atlantic slave trade, first of all, it was portugal. The fairly small nation was the preeminent maritime nation in the 15th century. Their voyages down the coast, here you have europe, heres portugal. This is really a tiny part of the world. These are the countries that would form maritime empires throughout the western atlantic. The portuguese come down the coast, going further and further over time, making contact, first in the southern gambia region. Trading initially for ivory. Then slowly more and more for human beings. Then after 1492, when europeans began coming, especially to the caribbean, and building their new imperial systems, more and more european nations want to get involved in this process. So portugal, spain, those are the leaders. They are followed in rapid succession by the netherlands. Denmark, france, england, and the United States. There is really a mad rush for the wealth to be gained in the slave trade and in the building of these systems of slavery in the americas. This is really critical. We want to talk about numbers. Numbers are important, and numbers when it comes to the slave trade are very controversial. Over many years, there have been wildly varying estimates of how many people were carried out of west africa. Really from gambia down to the coast to southern angola, then eventually into south and east africa. How many people were carried to the new world . It turns out that we know quite a bit about the slave trade, because the slave trade was a big business. And we have an abundance of business records. Those business records, and indeed practically every kind of conceivable record, has now been mined and put together in something called the Transatlantic Slave Trade database. I would recommend it to all of you. A magnificent scholarly achievement. We now have records of something more than 33,000 slaving voyages. Most of which began in europe, some of which began in the u. S. , some of which began in brazil, but which resulted in this Massive Movement of humanity across the atlantic. If you are following that, it is slavevoyages. Org. Or go to any Search Engine and type in slave voyages. The it is a website open to the public, and you can do remarkable things. I would urge all of you thinking of using it for research purposes. The latest findings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database is that over the three and a half centuries i mentioned, somewhere around 10 million to 10. 5 Million People were loaded onto the ships. Somewhere between 8. 8 million and 9 Million People were delivered alive on the western atlantic. You will note there is a very significant difference between these numbers. A difference of about 1. 4 million. Those are the people who died along the way, whose bodies every morning on board a slave ship would be brought up from the lower deck and thrown over the rail to the schools of sharks that would follow the vessels all the way across the atlantic. Thats not the end of the horror. Those 1. 4 million. As we think about the numbers, we also have to bear in mind that an unknown number of people died in wars carried on in the interior of africa. An unknown number of people died after they were enslaved and were being marched from the interior to the coast. And another unknown number of people died in the fortresses and barracuunes awaiting their placement on board slave ships. We have very few records about what happened in any of those circumstances, but a lot of scholars think it may have required to create that 10 million, resulting in almost 9 million delivered alive, to create that 10 million may have required an extra 3 million, 4 million, or 5 Million Deaths in africa. So we are talking about a human catastrophe of truly extraordinary proportions. Again, over a very long period of time. But the carnage was great. Lets talk for a minute about destinations. The primary destination for the slaves who were brought from west africa to the americas was the caribbean. The greater caribbean. Early on, barbados was one of the Great Centers of the slave trade. Jamaica would end up being one of the greatest. Another for the french imperial system, in todays terms, was haiti. The crown jewel of the french system. To the caribbean, almost 5 Million People were shipped. 4. 2 million arrived alive. Thats almost half the total. It is not an accident that this was the great center of sugar production. The sugar industry drove the slave trade for many years. It was an especially brutal regime, as you know. The second most important destination was brazil. Portuguese brazil. Also the home of a very lucrative plantation system. To brazil, roughly 3. 5 million were loaded on the ships, and 3. 2 million arrived. This was about 36 of the total, a little more than one third. Overwhelmingly, the caribbean and brazil are the two most important sites for the slave trade. If you are just keeping track of the numbers i have given to you, you will see that these two areas account for the overwhelming majority of the slaves shipped to the new world. So where does the u. S. Come into this . As it turns out, the United States was a rather minor partner in the slave trade. The current estimates are that maybe 370,000, as many as 400,000 people were on vessels going to american ports. The greatest would be charleston, South Carolina. Somewhere around 310,000 were delivered alive. Thats about 3. 5 of the total. The numbers may be a little higher across the board, maybe 4 . But dont be deceived. The fact that mainland north america received a fairly small percentage of the enslaved africans belies the fact that it is going to become one of the most powerful slave systems over the course of the 18th and early 19th century. The main difference is demographic. The slave population in north america, owing partly to climate, growing season, and the the kinds of staple crops produced, the slave population was able to reproduce itself. That was very uncommon in the caribbean. So those are the numbers. What is the consequence of all those numbers . Here i would quote the great historian and activist clr james, who said the result of all this was the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had ever seen. So these millions of africans shipped on board these vessels across the atlantic come to the new world and create a plantation system which really plantation system which really is el dorado after all. Take the sugar planters, for example. In british society, in which the 18th century, there were enormous accumulations and concentrations of wealth, the sugar planters from places like jamaica were widely known to be the richest of them all. Their carriages were gilded, everything they had suggested opulence. Long trains of servants and slaves followed them through the streets of london. So this is wealth on a truly extraordinary level. So those are the numbers. We cant rest content with the numbers. As important as they are, we have to think about slavery and the slave trade in human ways. I think sometimes we take comfort in abstraction. The Great British novelist barry unsworth, in a novel about the slave trade, has two of his characters who are slave traders sitting in their Lush Liverpool office surrounded by the wealth they have made in the slave trade. He says they really couldnt have pictured what was happening on their slave ship off the coast of africa at that moment. And even if they could, they wouldnt have wanted to, because picturing things can choke the mind with horror. Much better to remain safely in the realm of the abstract, to think about charts and graphs and maps. This is the challenge. Weve got to keep the big picture of the slave trade in mind, but we also have to understand it in human terms. We have to try to understand the slave trade as human experience. For the next part of todays lecture, i want to talk a little bit about just that. The slave trade experience. I want to draw on research i did for a book called the slave ship a Human History. The examples i want to give you are drawn from the british and american slave ships of the 18th century. Beginning about 1700 and going up to the abolition of the slave trade in 18071808. This is regarded by many as the peak period of the slave trade. This is the moment when more people are shipped than in any other. This is the moment of the formation of the american slave system. What i would have you try to do right now, and for the next few minutes, is to imagine what it would have been like to be one of roughly 300 people gathered together and placed on board a slave ship. Maybe this will help you think about it. Imagine that the 300 are going to be drawn from a number of different cultures, a number of different language groups. Know that the 300 will have been enslaved by other africans before they got to the ship. But also understand that they did not all consider themselves to be africans, least of all members of the same race. They were mandingo, fonte, igbo, and to a large extent, the people they enslaved were other Ethnic National groups. Frequently people with whom they had been fighting wars for very long periods of time. So imagine being captured in war, imagine simply being kidnapped by roving bands of marauders. These were probably the two most common means of enslavement. Imagine then being led in a human train and marched, sometimes for very long distances, from the interior to the coast. Imagine being shackled to someone next to you who dies along the way and is just discarded. Imagine arriving at the fortress or the ship and undergoing a truly humiliating medical inspection. You would all be stripped of your clothing, men, women, and children, ostensibly for health purposes, but also because they didnt want any place where a weapon could be hidden. You will be treated like cattle you will be treated like cattle in a market. The slave ship captain will look down your throat, look at your teeth, inspect your muscles, will squeeze them. You are property. You are being purchased. Imagine coming on board the ship. Imagine the moment when the vessel leaves the coast. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence i came across in my research is that when the vessel would actually leave the coast of west africa, from the lower deck like this, a whale would rise up. A pain at the thought of leaving the only place you had ever known, and heading to somewhere unknown to you. To a fate you could hardly grasp. In those circumstances, slave ship captains often wrote that the women slaves sang these deep and mournful songs. Trying literally to remember their lives in africa. To remember who they were, remember their families, so the struggle for memory is there from the beginning. An image like this can help us understand all of this. I mentioned before the slave ship books, this is another drawing of the same slave ship. I want to tell you, it is a real ship, we know a lot about it. I also want to make sure you know this image was not drawn by slave trade merchants, it was not drawn by slave trade captains, it was actually drawn by the people who opposed the slave trade, abolitionists, who wanted to see it eradicated. Wanted to see it eradicated. I had sort of the same task in this book, how to make it real. I want to give you a sense of the dimensions of a real slave ship. This vessel was about 100 feet long and about 25 feet wide. Thats not very big. Think about that. Think about the fact that into that vessel, of that link, 482 men, women, and children have been jammed aboard. Ive counted them. 482. What you would need to know about this image is that this is how many people the slave ship brooks could carry after humanitarian reform had been implemented. Something called the doman act of 1788 made it illegal to carry more slaves than was permitted under law in relation to the tonnage of your vessel. So we actually have a record of this vessel and the voyages it took before the act. On one of them, the number of human beings carried was not 482, it was 609. And these are the precise dimensions, by the way. This vessel was measured. On the voyage before that, not 609, but 638. And on one previous voyage we know through the business records, the brooks carried 740 men, women, and children. Thats 252 more than you see right here. I want you to tell me where you are going to put them. This is the humane version of the slave trade right here. So imagine bodies piled on top so imagine bo