Why did the colonial powers develop a need for African Slavery?
Why did the colonial powers develop a need for African Slavery?
The European colonial power's reliance and use of the African slave trade has become notorious for the vast scale of its commercial operation that relied on inhumane and destructive principles.1 In it we see societies at the apparent height of civilised progress devise a highly brutal system of human trade. Why colonial powers developed a need for African slavery is an analysis of colonialism, wealth, Africa and a consideration of the ideology of institutions that could obstruct or promote it. The ascendancy of economic and political freedoms, specifically those geared to capitalism, would fuel the development of desire for African slaves with the ideological blessing of both Church and State.
An examination of first British and then Iberian colonies in the seventeenth century proves an excellent analysis for why a colonial power developed a need for slavery. Initially demand for workers in the New World was satisfied by white 'servants' and preferential demand was given to them over non-whites for their civility and common language; both crucial if their employers were to gain maximum productivity from them.2 While blacks first arrived in Virginia in 1619 they enjoyed the same legal status as any white servant due to a lack of legislation to even define them as slaves. After their term of service ended they were free men as no indefinite or hereditary law existed to chattel them any further. The 1660s saw definite changes to this and the beginnings of a gulf between blacks and whites. The very preference for white servants would extend differing attitudes towards Africans to point of establishing laws in favour of better treatment for whites. The desperate need for new colonists was not helped by rumours of indefinite servitude of whites. Legislation was brought in to promote the image that they would have a future by limited their service to a maximum of six years. The other side of the legal coin was a demotion of black rights. A Maryland law of 1663 decreed: "All Negroes or other slaves within the province and all Negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the province shall serve durante vita; and all children born of any Negro or other slave shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives."3 From this the legislative floodgates were opened to suppress further ambiguities or rights blacks had in the New World.
In the American colonies of the 17th century one sees an entirely new economy of large scale agricultural production for pure profit beginning, unrestricted and unchecked by traditional British institutions. Both Church and Crown were in retreat in their power to limit personal success and mobility, especially across the Atlantic. For the first time it became possible for wealth to be created by those with no hereditary status. Land was both cheap and plentiful and capital costs low, all that remained was a satisfaction of the demand for cheap labour. Precipitating the 1660s wave of legislation concerning African slaves was economic strife in the emerging global economy. Tobacco prices slumped through over production while distribution channels were narrowed and costs driven up by the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1661. A fall in profit margins in any business causes its management to reduce expenditure. Labour was the obvious target, demand and supply of slaves soared while legislation facilitated an easy procurement.4 By the late seventeenth century it became unthinkable due to the economic absurdity to establish a plantation using white servants let alone wage labourers.5
The guarantee of a slave's labour for life and that of their offspring would have profound effects on developing a need for slavery. The disadvantage of black's need of education and training compared to white's ability to an immediate service was abolished for a master now had the luxury of time to do this. A second generation of native-born English speaking blacks had reached a workable age and had been prepared throughout childhood for work on the plantation. Further legislation in 1667 and 1671 was passed to remove any bearing conversion to Christianity might have on a slave's status. A drive for greater efficiency and profitability resulted in the law supporting the serving of an almost unchecked level physical discipline on any slave. By reducing slaves to personal property and a commodity good the colonial power's need for them was raised another level due to the ease of acquisition and the rising profits of use.6 They became intrinsic to the very fabric of international trade and British economy.
Juxtaposed with Britain was the already institutionalised existence of slavery in Spain and Portugal. Laws and customs with many cultural and traditional links to the classical era had existed for centuries. Thus the arrival of African slaves in the fifteenth century to Iberia would be aided by existing legal and social frameworks. Despite this legal 'head-start' over the British colonies Spain remained distinctly 'medieval' and hardly favourable to wide scale African slave use. Stability was still guaranteed by a state and church alliance, the former stood out in its monarch's economic power and the latter in its control ...
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Juxtaposed with Britain was the already institutionalised existence of slavery in Spain and Portugal. Laws and customs with many cultural and traditional links to the classical era had existed for centuries. Thus the arrival of African slaves in the fifteenth century to Iberia would be aided by existing legal and social frameworks. Despite this legal 'head-start' over the British colonies Spain remained distinctly 'medieval' and hardly favourable to wide scale African slave use. Stability was still guaranteed by a state and church alliance, the former stood out in its monarch's economic power and the latter in its control of free-thinking religion. The king's reluctance to promoting the slave trade only gave way in the wake of growing economic need for them. The Spanish Church, with its position as moral leader of society, took a contradictory but proactive role in slavery by morally condemning it while awkwardly accepting its inevitability as a labour system. Germain Fromageau, a doctor of the Sorbonne, stated in 1698 that "one can neither, in the surety of conscience, buy nor sell Negroes, because in such commerce there is injustice."7 Unfortunately, like Walter Raleigh in England, he was an isolated voice for his time. Had the Church condemned slavery as immoral it would have condemned itself by announcing Christendom's overseas dominions to be in sin. The Church by choosing the lesser of two evils could at least oversee the workings of the system. None the less the ideology of the Western Church as a whole to African slaves would fuel the need for them further. Its wider role in granting the system legitimacy cannot be under-estimated.
How the very option of African slaves to become desirable or a need is in part answered by a discussion of western theology. For many colonists in the New World would develop a need for slavery with the blessing of The Bible, itself a pro-slavery work. At no point in the Old or New Testament is slavery stated as immoral, in many instances it is supported: Paul's order to the converted slave Philemom to return to his master Onesimus is one of a multitude of examples.8 The Church Council of Gangra in Asia Minor enshrined in law a slave's Christian obligation to accept the authority of their masters as they accepted the authority of God. The Council decreed in 340 A.D: "If anyone, on the pretext of religion teaches another man's slave to despise his master, and to withdraw from his service, and not to serve his with good will and respect, let him be anathema." Sixty years later Augustine would reinforce the protection of the institution of slavery. Rome's association with slavery was thus validated and the philosophy of accepting one's position promoted by canonising both of the above. Pope Gregory I gave papal sanction to racial discrimination in 600A.D: "a hidden dispensation of providence [produced] a hierarchy of merit and rulership as a result of sin, different classes of men have been produced, and that these differentiated classes are ordained by divine justice." The twelfth and thirteenth century crusades saw Roman conceptions of who may be enslaved swelled by the inclusion of those captured during war, imprisoned, sold in destitution and those born of slaves. Initially this made no distinction to those who were Christian but the Church would threaten those caught enslaving their own with excommunication. On the eve of the colonisation of the New World Pope Alexander VI in 1493 gave Spain and Portugal, "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be... and reduce their persons into perpetual slavery." From before the fall of Rome we see the Church accepting the existence of slavery into its constitution and while not extending it directly at least sanctioning others God-given right to do so. The Church, while supported existing rights of those within slave or serf systems, never led or gave religious blessing to any attempt to achieve liberty. Nor would they attempt to erode the universal conviction that institutional slavery was acceptable. Religious justification and foundations were laid for the Colonial powers to develop their need for African Slaves and extend it with no moral inhibitions dictated from above by Church or State. Indeed, State adoption across Western Europe of much of Roman law in, and prior to, the fifteenth century meant they absorbed a legal code that intrinsically accepted slaves within its framework. Ideology was systematically making the use of forced labour socially acceptable or even desirable given circumstance.
George Fitzhugh's 1854 work, 'The Sociology of the South' controversially argues in favour of a need for slavery in order to establish the most productive use of labour for its masters while being the most socially beneficial form of governance for slaves. For total slavery dispenses with class and capitalist antagonism by promoting the protection of the weak and poor who would otherwise suffer, "slavery is the very best form of socialism, the ordinary wages of common labour are insufficient to keep up separate domestic establishments for each of the poor... starvation is in many cases inevitable." The alternatives of liberty can only result in "the dissociation of labour and the disintegration of society." Fitzhugh shrewdly saw slavery as only viable if society is either working towards total enslavement of the weak or has achieved it. Capitalist notions of political economic freedom are in the long run set against slavery's survival, free labour was a prerequisite to class war. While Fitzhugh was an intellectual pariah in his time his words shed excellent light on the developing need for slavery in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. These were times when hierarchy and subjection were natural aspects of mankind's social arrangements and the total enslavement of blacks in the colonial world a truism. Additionally fledgling modern racial hierarchies and the beginnings of an innate belief that whites were a superior breed of men whose right it was to use blacks for their own economic ends were emerging. The consensus of belief that enslavement was the best possible way towards providing blacks with all their humanitarian needs transcended all of Christendom. Further justification that society benefited came under the mask of converting the heathens and spreading superior Christian values to them.
Aside from the want for religious freedom, the colonisation of the New World was motivated by a desire to get as much profit out of it as possible. Slavery would be both the obvious and convenient method. The expense and difficultly of the Atlantic crossing meant that settlers could ill afford to employ labour even if it were available. From the outset in the early sixteenth century well into the nineteenth, regardless of labour supply, the demand remained statically high or rose further. A consensus quickly rose that wealth generation was restricted exclusively by the limitation of this supply and the cost of it both in transport and support once acquired. The need for slavery and a slave trade so as to drive down these costs made the most rational economic sense. Innate in a typical colonist's mind was the need to force others to work for him for the custom of his homeland promoted it in long established hereditary doctrine. It was in the minds of men that a perception of a need for slavery was born.
European serfdom was in various stages of decline by the time of the American discoveries however this proves to be irrelevant; the heritage and legacy of Europe sanctioning the use of un-free labour was alive. Where it had been explicitly abolished as in England the legal tradition and contemporary practicalities of agricultural life meant support for such labour systems was far from dead. The consensus of Lords, intellectuals, Church and State was still one of support towards at least elements of the serf system. In North and West Europe serfdom replaced slavery after the fall of Rome due to the seldom needed trade of labourers as demand was met by the populous of the local commune. Serfdom became part of the increasingly entrenched system of bondage and service that grew up in the millennium predating the need for slaves in the New World. It was designed to maximise labour output of the serf and restrict his or her legal freedoms, especially movement. Crucially it was both hereditary and involuntary. Pioneers of the New World could do nothing but naturally desire an element of forced labour for it was deeply engrained in their own as well as their nation's psychological makeup as a mechanism for wealth generation. In the absence of legal rights for workers across the Americas it is again natural for overseers to stifle attempts to introduce them (a rarity) and promote legislation to chattel slaves further.
Where slavery had survived in Southern Europe its introduction to Iberian colonial powers was all the more eased. 9 Methods of slave trading and management were well established while routes and techniques along the Mediterranean and Black Sea were easily adapted to include the more profitable Americas. When British and French colonists faced a colonial labour supply problem Spain and Portugal could be seen to offer an all too easy solution. The operation of these trading enterprises rested on the supply of slaves from Africa as the virtues of the African slaves over the enslavement of Indians or Europeans were numerous. The unsuitability of white serfs rested on their ascendancy towards political economic freedom, an increase in their legal rights and the unviable notion that a system of mass deportation to the colonies could be constructed. Native Indians would prove difficult to educate, be prone to die of disease and revolt against their captors. Black Africans in contrast offered no vices other then transportation logistics. They were physically strong, adaptable to not dissimilar methods of work the colonies demanded, perceived to be outside the sphere of contemporary morality, already widely used in slavery either in Southern Europe or within Africa and were easily obtainable. Once in the colonies their lack of any institution to protect them from abuse and their skin colour as an obvious marker of status proved attractive and beneficial to their masters.
Why a need for African slavery developed is answered by not only a consideration of the demand for it but by an analysis its supply. The potential ease, readiness and volume of supply would help create and develop that need. The same wickedness that allowed western traders to buy slaves was matched by the wickedness of the African slave traders prepared to sell their piers. While slavery was inconsistent across Africa as to its existence in all their societies slavery on the continent as a whole is regarded for its widespread nature and establishment.10 Its success came down to its excellent ability to generate wealth for a powerful few. African legal systems did not permit the use of land for wealth creation; the only method of profit through agriculture was ownership of the peoples who worked the land. These owners were most likely merchants and state officials, the groups with long distance connections thus ability to trade with Europe. Their willingness to adapt and galvanise their systems to supply colonial powers virtually unlimited volume proved chillingly simple.
The development of an increasingly global economy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century would do much to develop Colonial power's need for African Slaves still further. The ability to supply their home nations with luxuries such as sugar and tobacco led the birth of consumer society. Surges in demand as imports came to be perceived as a necessity, not a luxury, could only be met by more plantations and hence more slave imports. A virtuous economic circle albeit dependant slavery. European nation's maritime power and colonies would allow them to skew world markets in their favour. This dynamic of wealth generation would rely increasingly on their control and development of the slave trade to the point that it had to continue perpetually to meet the needs of colonist and consumer.
Economic logic dictated that the development of a need for African slaves had a ghastly inevitability. Institutions designed to protect their own citizens such as the Church or the Aristocracy had no power or desire to limit the development of a need for slavery. Indeed they would be instrumental in bringing about its operation. In an absence of legislation on slavery in the colonies those who required forced labour were also in the position of power to develop and gear a new legal system to the procurement of it. The British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne opinion encapsulates the elevation of the importance of profit above all else in developing a need for African slavery, "religion, morality, law, eloquence [and] cruisers will all be ineffective when opposed to a profit of a cent per cent and more." Slavery would only begin to ebb with the fall of profits associated with the trade. Yet slavery did continue in areas long devoid of its financial benefits for reasons of social prestige or ideological entrenchment. In these cases great shifts in political and intellectual philosophy would bring its downfall. An ideological tradition made the acceptance of slavery possible in the first place. Profit motive would develop that possibility into a desire and consequentially a need for African slavery.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conniff, Michael L., Davis, Thomas J., Africans in the Americas. A history of Black Diaspora, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994.
Blackburn, Richard, The making of new world slavery, Introduction, 1997 (Photocopies).
Rice, Duncan, The rise and fall of black slavery, Macmillan Press Ltd, 1975.
Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery. A problem in American institution and intellectual life, The University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Walvin, J, Black Ivory. Slavery in the British Empire, (second edition). Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Fitzhugh, G, Sociology for The South, Electronic Edition, 1998, www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/city/fitzhugh/george.html
Foultz, David Theology of Slavery: Western Theology's role in the development and propagation of slavery, 2000, www.quodlibet.net
Figures vary from 8 to 15 million as to the number of African slaves deported, 12 Million being widely accepted. This says nothing as to the millions born into it.
2 The earliest planters of colonial Virginia were particularly noted for their preference for servants from England, Scotland and Ireland.
3 Hurd, Law of Freedom and Bondage, p 249.
4 In addition to committing imported Africans to a lifetime of slavery the formation in 1662 of the Royal Company of Adventurers for the importation of Negroes showed the Crown's expectations of the coming flood in their supply.
5 The tobacco slump recovered by 1680 through increasing demand and undercutting competitors not a restoration of price. Hence profit margins remained low but workable due the quantity sold.
6 Virginia's 1705 made them a qualified form of real estate.
7 Rinchon, La traite, et l'esclavage, p. 148.
8 Philemon 1: 1 - 21.
9 In 1565 there were 6,327 slaves out of a population of 85,538 in Seville. Conniff & Davis, Africans in the Americas, 1994, p 41.
0 Societies of Upper Guinea and the area from Cape Mount to the Gambia knew nothing of slavery until Europeans demands produced it. Rice, The Rise and Fall of Slavery, 1975, p 18.
Alex Shawcross 02/03/03
st Year History 1 Period IV Tutorial Essay
