Why Europe chose slavery
Jun. 17th, 2021 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungAnother thinky thought post brought on by a video seeking to answer the question why Europeans enslaved Africans specifically.
And while the video didn't contain any misinformation, it felt a bit incomplete because I've recently read David Graeber's "Debt the first 5000 years," and because of a recent post on the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Blog which talked about slavery in the process of critiquing a world conquest strategy video game
So, first, "Debt" points out that before the colonial period began, slavery had been nearly eliminated from large parts of Europe (as well as China and India), but no one is sure quite how - it wasn't ever made illegal, it just stopped being a thing. Yes, feudalism put restrictions on the freedom of peasants to move about and so forth, but in most places, they were not enslaved. The millennia old traditions of enslaving debtors and captured enemies died out in the West after the fall of Rome, despite the best efforts of the nobility and the clergy to keep them alive. Without those sources of enslaved people, the institution became moribund.
Then, in the late medieval period, the Portuguese started sailing across the ocean. They weren't, at first, interested in finding a water route to Asia, but rather in finding the source of the gold dust that merchants in Morocco used to pay for European goods, which came from somewhere south of the desert (this from J H Perry's "Discovery of the Sea", a rather annoying book that celebrates colonialism but I don't have any other history that deals with the same topics in detail).
In the process of bypassing the Arab and Berber traders and finding the source of that African gold, the Portuguese also came across some islands in the Atlantic - The Canary islands had been known and inhabited for a long time, and were a conquest rather than a colony, but Madeira and Azores were new and uninhabited at the time the Portuguese found them. Within just a decade of its discovery in 1419, Madeira had its first sugar plantation. Sugar was a high end luxury good in Europe at the time, which commanded extremely high prices. And the disruption of the Black Death had left the sugar industries of North Africa (mainly Egypt) in disarray. Europe proper was too far north to grow sugarcane, but a few islands in the Mediterranean and these new islands out in the Atlantic were ideal for it, and with African supplies of it becoming iffy, Europeans were eager to grow their own.
Around 1450, Portuguese sailors, still looking for the source of that gold, finally got past the hostile desert coasts of Africa and stumbled upon the fertile regions between Senegal and Nigeria. The peoples there panned gold dust from rivers and streams.
At this time, Western Europe was a miserably poor backwater that produced very little which the wealthy empires of the Arab world, or for that matter China and India beyond them, wanted to buy (Morocco was an exception). Since Europeans desperately wanted to have nice luxury goods (spices, but also many other things) that the East produced, but had almost nothing to trade with, Europe had a seriously negative trade balance, sending out far more gold and silver than it brought in.
The people around the Gold Coast of Africa, however, were *not* wealthier than the Europeans, and were keenly interested in buying things the Europeans had - mainly horses but also stuff like fabric, copper, and glass, things that they would pay gold for. Those West African nations also had a tradition of enslaving captured enemies.
The thing I haven't been able to find out is exactly how and why sugar plantations started using enslaved labour. It wasn't because Africans were able to resist (mainly mosquito borne) tropical diseases that slaughtered Europeans - that was a factor a century or so later in the Caribbean and Central/South America, but the islands where the European sugar industry got started were Mediterranean rather than tropical in climate.
It might be, however, that there's not much to explain - the nobles and merchants who set up those first sugar plantations on Madeira, being able to do so in empty territory, without a pre-existing society to build upon, simply organized things in a way that worked best for their pocketbooks. The West Africans south of the Desert were willing to trade several enslaved people for a single horse. With free labour near at hand and easily obtained, importing a paid labour force to Madeira or the Azores made little sense.
Well before Columbus stumbled upon the islands of the Caribbean, well before slavery and sugar were more than sidelines (the main goal in this period was to buy as much gold from West Africa as the Portuguese possibly could), the pattern had been set: Independent West African nations went to war against their neighbours using horses bought from the Europeans, then sold their defeated enemies to the Europeans, who forced them to work on sugar plantations on the lands they had recently colonized.
In the following centuries, slave-based European empires expanded from a few small islands to an entire hemisphere, the slave trade grew from hundreds to millions of enslaved people ripped from their homes and sent to a life of misery and an early death, and the money involved grew from a sideline to the main source of revenue for those European kingdoms. The only real change in that time, comparing the Discovery of the Sea book to the Pedantry blog, involved guns. Once European firearms became vaguely reliable and cheap (say around 1550-1600), they displaced horses as the primary thing that the North African kingdoms wanted and would trade enslaved people for.
Lastly, have a table from Debt, showing just how miserably poor Europe was compared to essentially everyone else in Eurasia, even when comparing them to nations from centuries or millennia previous. Crappy climate > low agricultural productivity > low population densities > few and small cities > economic backwater.
Copying just one column of data from a table showing population and tax revenue for several ancient and early medieval nations:
Persia 350 BCE, 41 grams of silver per person per year
Egypt 200 BCE, 55 grams,
Rome 1 CE 17 grams,
Rome 150 CE 21 grams,
Byzantium 850 CE 15 grams,
Abbasids, 850 CE 48 grams,
T'ang, 850 CE 43 grams
France 1221 2.4 grams
England 1203 4.6 grams
And while the video didn't contain any misinformation, it felt a bit incomplete because I've recently read David Graeber's "Debt the first 5000 years," and because of a recent post on the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Blog which talked about slavery in the process of critiquing a world conquest strategy video game
So, first, "Debt" points out that before the colonial period began, slavery had been nearly eliminated from large parts of Europe (as well as China and India), but no one is sure quite how - it wasn't ever made illegal, it just stopped being a thing. Yes, feudalism put restrictions on the freedom of peasants to move about and so forth, but in most places, they were not enslaved. The millennia old traditions of enslaving debtors and captured enemies died out in the West after the fall of Rome, despite the best efforts of the nobility and the clergy to keep them alive. Without those sources of enslaved people, the institution became moribund.
Then, in the late medieval period, the Portuguese started sailing across the ocean. They weren't, at first, interested in finding a water route to Asia, but rather in finding the source of the gold dust that merchants in Morocco used to pay for European goods, which came from somewhere south of the desert (this from J H Perry's "Discovery of the Sea", a rather annoying book that celebrates colonialism but I don't have any other history that deals with the same topics in detail).
In the process of bypassing the Arab and Berber traders and finding the source of that African gold, the Portuguese also came across some islands in the Atlantic - The Canary islands had been known and inhabited for a long time, and were a conquest rather than a colony, but Madeira and Azores were new and uninhabited at the time the Portuguese found them. Within just a decade of its discovery in 1419, Madeira had its first sugar plantation. Sugar was a high end luxury good in Europe at the time, which commanded extremely high prices. And the disruption of the Black Death had left the sugar industries of North Africa (mainly Egypt) in disarray. Europe proper was too far north to grow sugarcane, but a few islands in the Mediterranean and these new islands out in the Atlantic were ideal for it, and with African supplies of it becoming iffy, Europeans were eager to grow their own.
Around 1450, Portuguese sailors, still looking for the source of that gold, finally got past the hostile desert coasts of Africa and stumbled upon the fertile regions between Senegal and Nigeria. The peoples there panned gold dust from rivers and streams.
At this time, Western Europe was a miserably poor backwater that produced very little which the wealthy empires of the Arab world, or for that matter China and India beyond them, wanted to buy (Morocco was an exception). Since Europeans desperately wanted to have nice luxury goods (spices, but also many other things) that the East produced, but had almost nothing to trade with, Europe had a seriously negative trade balance, sending out far more gold and silver than it brought in.
The people around the Gold Coast of Africa, however, were *not* wealthier than the Europeans, and were keenly interested in buying things the Europeans had - mainly horses but also stuff like fabric, copper, and glass, things that they would pay gold for. Those West African nations also had a tradition of enslaving captured enemies.
The thing I haven't been able to find out is exactly how and why sugar plantations started using enslaved labour. It wasn't because Africans were able to resist (mainly mosquito borne) tropical diseases that slaughtered Europeans - that was a factor a century or so later in the Caribbean and Central/South America, but the islands where the European sugar industry got started were Mediterranean rather than tropical in climate.
It might be, however, that there's not much to explain - the nobles and merchants who set up those first sugar plantations on Madeira, being able to do so in empty territory, without a pre-existing society to build upon, simply organized things in a way that worked best for their pocketbooks. The West Africans south of the Desert were willing to trade several enslaved people for a single horse. With free labour near at hand and easily obtained, importing a paid labour force to Madeira or the Azores made little sense.
Well before Columbus stumbled upon the islands of the Caribbean, well before slavery and sugar were more than sidelines (the main goal in this period was to buy as much gold from West Africa as the Portuguese possibly could), the pattern had been set: Independent West African nations went to war against their neighbours using horses bought from the Europeans, then sold their defeated enemies to the Europeans, who forced them to work on sugar plantations on the lands they had recently colonized.
In the following centuries, slave-based European empires expanded from a few small islands to an entire hemisphere, the slave trade grew from hundreds to millions of enslaved people ripped from their homes and sent to a life of misery and an early death, and the money involved grew from a sideline to the main source of revenue for those European kingdoms. The only real change in that time, comparing the Discovery of the Sea book to the Pedantry blog, involved guns. Once European firearms became vaguely reliable and cheap (say around 1550-1600), they displaced horses as the primary thing that the North African kingdoms wanted and would trade enslaved people for.
Lastly, have a table from Debt, showing just how miserably poor Europe was compared to essentially everyone else in Eurasia, even when comparing them to nations from centuries or millennia previous. Crappy climate > low agricultural productivity > low population densities > few and small cities > economic backwater.
Copying just one column of data from a table showing population and tax revenue for several ancient and early medieval nations:
Persia 350 BCE, 41 grams of silver per person per year
Egypt 200 BCE, 55 grams,
Rome 1 CE 17 grams,
Rome 150 CE 21 grams,
Byzantium 850 CE 15 grams,
Abbasids, 850 CE 48 grams,
T'ang, 850 CE 43 grams
France 1221 2.4 grams
England 1203 4.6 grams