The prolific economist
and historian Thomas Sowell has written about slavery in many of his voluminous
articles and books. For Conquests and Cultures: An International History, he devoted fifteen years of research and travel
(around the world twice, no less). Though the book is about much more than
slavery, the author reveals a great deal about the institution that few people
know.
Inland tribes [in Africa] such as the Ibo were regularly raided by their more powerful coastal neighbors and the captives led away to be sold as slaves. European merchants who came to buy slaves in West Africa were confined by rulers in these countries to a few coastal ports, where Africans could bring slaves and trade as a cartel, in order to get higher prices. Hundreds of miles farther south, in the Portuguese colony of Angola, hundreds of thousands of Africans likewise carried out the initial captures, enslavement and slave-trading processes, funneling the slaves into the major marketplaces, where the Portuguese took charge of them and shipped them off to Brazil. Most of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were purchased, rather than captured, by Europeans. Arabs, however, captured their own slaves and penetrated far deeper into Africa than Europeans dared venture.
Over the centuries, untold millions of human beings from sub-Saharan Africa were transported in captivity to other parts of the world. No exact statistics exist covering all the sources and all the destinations, and scholarly estimates vary. However, over the centuries, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million people were shipped across the Atlantic as slaves, and another 14 million African slaves were sent to the Islamic nations of the Middle East and North Africa. On both routes, many died in transit.
The horrors of the Atlantic voyage in packed and suffocating slave ships, together with exposure to new diseases from Europeans and other African tribes, as well as the general dangers of the Atlantic crossing in that era, took a toll in lives amounting to about 10 percent of all slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere in British vessels in the eighteenth century—the British being the leading slave traders of that era. However, the death toll among slaves imported by the Islamic countries, many of these slaves being forced to walk across the vast, burning sands of the Sahara, was twice as high. Thousands of human skeletons were strewn along one Saharan slave route alone—mostly the skeletons of young women and girls…In 1849, a letter from an Ottoman official referred to 1,600 black slaves dying of thirst on their way to Libya.
The prime destination of the African slave trade to the Islamic world was Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, where the largest and busiest slave market flourished. There women were paraded, examined, questioned, and bid on in a public display often witnessed by visiting foreigners, until it was finally closed down in 1847 and the slave trade in Istanbul moved underground. In other Islamic countries, however, the slave markets remained open and public, both to natives and foreigners…This market functioned until 1873, when two British cruisers appeared off shore, followed by an ultimatum from Britain that the Zanzibar slave trade must cease or the island would face a full naval blockade.
From as early as the seventeenth century, most Negroes in the American colonies were born on American soil. This was the only plantation society in the Western Hemisphere in which the African population consistently maintained its numbers without continual, large-scale importations of slaves from Africa, and in which this population grew by natural increase. By contrast, Brazil over the centuries imported six times as many slaves as the United States, even though the U.S. had a larger resident slave population than Brazil—36 percent of all the slaves in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to 31 percent for Brazil. Even such Caribbean islands as Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba each imported more slaves than the United States. – Thomas Sowell
Eighteenth Century Enlightenment ideals that questioned authority and sought to elevate human rights, liberty, happiness, and toleration played a role. So did a Christian reawakening late in the 18th and early 19th Centuries that produced the likes of abolitionists William Wilberforce and others.
The Declaration of Independence pricked the consciences of millions who came to understand that its stirring words were at odds with the reality many black Americans experienced on a daily basis. And as capitalism and free markets spread in the 19th Century, slavery faced a competition with free labor that it ultimately could not win. Exploring the potency of those important—indeed, radical—forces would seem to me to be more fruitful and less divisive than playing the race card, cherry-picking evidence to support political agendas, or promoting perpetual victimhood.
Comments
Slavery has been used across the globe for thousands of years. The best-known example is in the story of Moses, who was called by God to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt. The next best example is the Roman Empire who enslaves conquered populations.
Whenever a conquering king took over another country, the question was what to do with the prisoners of war and the population. There were many examples of these conquered people attempting to harm the “newcomers”. Their reaction to being conquered was to seek revenge. Some kings killed all of those who posed a threat. Some Persian and Greek Rulers allowed freedom and assimilated the conquered. Many Rulers enslaved conquered populations to use as cheap labor. The Romans and others kept their slaves. Later in the 1700s African kings sold their conquered populations into slavery to be moved to plantations in South America and North America. The Civil War ended slavery in the US where slavery is still a crime. We continue to see evidence of modern forms of slavery in other countries where wages are low and escaping is difficult. When the cost of feeding and housing these impoverished people is higher than the economic benefit they contribute, this ends as well.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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