The Atlantic Slave Trade발음듣기
The Atlantic Slave Trade
This is Crash Course World History and today we're going to talk about slavery. Slavery is not funny.발음듣기
I'm going to help you understand what pre Civil War Americans, often euphemistically referred to as the "peculiar institution."발음듣기
(fast lively music) Slavery is as old as civilization itself, although it's not as old as humanity, thanks to our hunting and gathering foremothers.발음듣기
From 1500 to 1880 C.E. somewhere between ten and twelve million African slaves, were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americans.발음듣기
I know you're saying, that looks like a very nice ship, I mean, my God, it's almost as big as South America. Yeah, not to scale.발음듣기
In all, forty eight percent of slaves went to the Caribbean, and forty one percent to Brazil.발음듣기
Although few Americans recognize this, relatively few slaves were imported to the US, only about five percent of the total.발음듣기
It's also worth noting, that by the time Europeans started importing Africans into the Americas, Europe had a long history of trading slaves.발음듣기
The first real European slave trade began after the fourth crusade in 1204, the crusade that you will remember as the crazy one.발음듣기
Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenians, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy.발음듣기
Sugar is, of course, a crop that African slaves later cultivated, in the Caribbean. Camera two side note.발음듣기
None of the primary crops grown by slaves, sugar, tobacco, coffee is necessary to sustain human life.발음듣기
In a way, slavery is a very early human by product, of a consumer culture that revolves, around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure but not sustenance.발음듣기
One of the big misconceptions about slavery, at least when I was growing up, was the Europeans somehow captured Africans, put them in chains, stuffed them on boats, and then took them to the Americas.발음듣기
But Africans were living in all kinds of conglomerations, from small villages, to city states, to empires, and they were much too powerful for the Europeans to just conquer.발음듣기
Because trade is a two-way proposition, this meant that Africans were captured by other Africans, and then traded to Europeans in exchange for goods.발음듣기
In many places, slaves were one of the only sources of private wealth, because land was usually owned by the state.발음듣기
If we're going to understand the tragedy of slavery, we need to understand the economics of it.발음듣기
We have to see slaves both as they were, as human beings, and as they were viewed, as an economic commodity.발음듣기
Right, so you probably know about the horrendous conditions, aboard slave ships, which, at their largest could hold four hundred people.발음듣기
It's worth underscoring that each slave had an average, of four square feet of space. That is four square feet.발음듣기
As one eyewitness testified before Parliament in 1791, they had not so much room as a man in his coffin.발음듣기
Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves were sold in a market, very similar to the way cattle would be sold.발음듣기
After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession, on the cheeks, again, just as they would do with cattle.발음듣기
Slaves did all types of work, from housework to skilled crafts work, and some even worked as sailors.발음듣기
The worst part of this job, which is saying something, because there were many bad parts, was fertilizing the sugar cane.발음듣기
This required slaves to carry eighty pound baskets of manure, on their heads up and down hilly terrain.발음듣기
This meant that slaves would often work forty eight hours straight, during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses, where the cane would be crushed in hand rollers and then boiled.발음듣기
Slaves often caught their hands in the rollers, and their overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations.발음듣기
Given these appalling conditions, it's little wonder that the average life expectancy, for a Brazilian slave on a sugar plantation in the late 18th century, was twenty three years.발음듣기
Things were slightly better in British sugar colonies, like Barbados, and in the US living and working conditions were better still.발음듣기
This may sound like a good thing, but it is, of course, its own kind of evil, because it meant that slave owners were calculating, that if they kept their slaves healthy enough, they would reproduce and then the slave owners, could steal and sell their children.발음듣기
Either way blah! Anyway, this explains why even though the percentage of slaves, imported from Africa to the United States was relatively small, slaves and other people of African descent, came to make up a significant portion of the US population.발음듣기
The brutality of working conditions in Brazil, on the other hand, meant that slaves were never able to increase their population naturally.발음듣기
Like Stalin forced millions to work in the gulags, but we don't usually consider those people slaves.발음듣기
So was Darth Vader. But Atlantic slavery was different and more horrifying, because it was chattel slavery.발음듣기
Doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo (singing) Stan: That's a fine approximation of ballet music.발음듣기
More importantly, slave, you are constantly used, in political rhetoric and never correctly.발음듣기
There's nothing new about this, witness, for instance, all the early Americans claiming that paying the stamp tax, would make them slaves.발음듣기
Here, I have written for you, a list of all the times that it is okay, to use the word slave.발음듣기
Well, definitions are slippery, but I'm going to start with the definition of slavery proposed, by sociologist Orlando Patterson.발음듣기
It is the permanent, violent, and personal domination, of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.발음듣기
According to this definition, a slave is removed from the culture, land, and society of his or her birth, and suffers what Patterson called social death.발음듣기
In many ways, Atlantic slavery drew, from a lot of previous models of slavery, and took everything that sucked about each of them, and combined them into a big ball, so that it would be the biggest possible ball of suck.발음듣기
(bell ringing sound) Nice! Okay, to understand what I'm talking about, we need to look at some previous models of slavery.발음듣기
Most Greek slaves were barbarians, and their inability to speak Greek, kept them from talking back to their masters, and also indicated their slave status.발음듣기
Aristotle, who despite being spectacularly wrong about almost everything, was incredibly influential, believed that some people were just naturally slaves.발음듣기
Saying, "It is clear that there are certain people, "who are free, and certain people who are slaves by nature.발음듣기
The Greeks popularized the idea that slaves should be traded from far away, but the Romans took it to another level.발음듣기
Slaves probably made up thirty percent, of the total Roman population, similar to the percentage of slaves in America, at slavery's height.발음듣기
The Romans also invented the plantation, using mass numbers of slaves to work the land, on giant farms called Latifundia.발음듣기
The Judeo-Christian world contributed as well, and while we are not going to venture into the incredibly complicated role, that slavery plays in the Bible, because I vividly remember, the comment section from the Christianity episode, the Bible was widely used to justify slavery, and in particular, the enslavement of Africans.발음듣기
Both ideas serve as powerful justifications, for holding an entire race in bondage. Thanks thought bubble.발음듣기
For instance, Muslim Arabs were the first to import, large numbers of Bantu speaking Africans into their territory as slaves.발음듣기
The Muslims called these Africans Zanj, and they were a distinct and despised group, distinguished from other North Africans by the color of their skin.발음듣기
The Zanjian territory held by the Abbasids, staged one of the first big slave revolts in 869 C.E.발음듣기
It may be that this revolt was so devastating, that it convinced the Abbasids, that large-scale plantation style agriculture on the Roman model, just wasn't worth it.발음듣기
But by then, they'd connected the Aristotelian idea, that some people are just naturally slaves, with the appearance of sub Saharan Africans.발음듣기
The Spanish and the Portuguese you no doubt remember, were the Europeans with the closest ties to the Muslim world, because there were Muslims living on the Iberian Peninsula until 1492.발음듣기
So it makes sense that the Iberians would be the first, to absorb these racist attitudes toward blacks.발음듣기
As the first colonizers of the Americas, and the dominant importers of slaves, the Portuguese and the Spanish helped define the attitudes, that characterized Atlantic slavery.발음듣기
Beliefs they'd inherited from a complicated nexus, of all the slaveholders who came before them.발음듣기
It's tempting to pin all the blame for Atlantic slavery, on one particular group, but to blame one group is to exonerate all the others, and by extension, ourselves.발음듣기
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