The Atlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course World History #24

In which John Green teaches you about one of the least funny subjects in history: slavery. John investigates when and where slavery originated, how it changed over the centuries, and how Europeans and colonists in the Americas arrived at the idea that people could own other people based on skin color.

Slavery has existed as long as humans have had civilization, but the Atlantic Slave Trade was the height, or depth, of dehumanizing, brutal, chattel slavery. American slavery ended less than 150 years ago. In some parts of the world, it is still going on. So how do we reconcile that with modern life? In a desperate attempt at comic relief, Boba Fett makes an appearance.

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Resources:

Inhuman Bondage by David Brion Davis: http://dft.ba/-inhumanbondage

Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington: http://dft.ba/-upfromslavery

Hi, my name is John Green.

This is Crash Course:
World History, and

today we’re going to
talk about slavery.

Slavery is not funny.

n fact,

it’s very near the top of the list
of things that aren’t funny,

so today’s episode is gonna
be a little light on the jokes.

But, I’m gonna help you
understand what

pre-Civil War Americans often
euphemistically referred to as

the “peculiar institution.”

[music intro]

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[music intro]

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[music intro]

Slavery is as old as civilization itself,
although it’s not as old as humanity –

thanks to our hunting and
gathering foremothers.

But the numbers involved in

the Atlantic Slave Trade
are truly staggering.

From 1500 to 1880 CE,

somewhere between 10 and 12 million African
slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to

the Americas.

And about 15% of those people
died during the journey.

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.

And those who didn’t die became property,
bought and sold like any commodity.

Where Africans came from, and went to, changed
over time, but in all, 48% of slaves went

to the Caribbean and 41% to Brazil—although
few Americans recognize this, relatively few

slaves were imported to the U.S.—only about
5% of the total.

It’s also worth noting that by the time
Europeans started importing Africans into

the Americas, Europe had a long history of
trading slaves.

The first real “European” slave trade
began after the fourth Crusade in 1204.

The Crusade that you will remember

as the crazy one.
[relatively speaking]

Italian merchants imported thousands of

Armenian, Circassian, and Georgian
slaves to Italy.

Most of them were women who
worked as household servants,

but many worked processing sugar.

And sugar is, of course,

a crop that African slaves later
cultivated in the Caribbean.

Camera 2 side note:

None of primary crops grown by slaves, sugar,
tobacco, coffee, is necessary to sustain human

life. So in a way, slavery was a very early
byproduct of a consumer culture that revolves

around the purchase of goods that bring us
pleasure but not sustenance.

You are welcome to draw your own metaphorically
resonant conclusions from this fact.

One of the big misconceptions about slavery,
at least when I was growing up, was that Europeans

somehow captured Africans, put them in chains,
stuck them on boats, and then took them to

the Americas.

The chains and ships bit is true, as is the
America part if you define America as America

and not as ‘Merica.

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.

And, in fact, Europeans obtained African slaves
by trading for them.

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, usually like metal tools, or fine

textiles, or guns.

And for those Africans, slaves were a form
of property and a very valuable one.

In many places, slaves were one of the only
sources of private wealth because land was

usually owned by the state.

And this gets to a really important point:

If we’re going to understand the tragedy
of slavery, we need to understand the economics

of it. We need to get inside what Mark Twain
famously called a deformed conscience.

We have to see slaves both as they were—as
human beings—and as they were viewed—as

an economic commodity.

Right, so you probably know about the horrendous
conditions aboard slave ships, which, at their

largest could hold 400 people.

But it’s worth underscoring that each slave
had an average four square feet of space.

That is four square feet.

As one eyewitness testified before Parliament
in 1791, “They had not so much room as a

man in his coffin.” #

[and I’m the jerk that gets
claustrophobic in elevators]

Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves
were sold in a market very similar to the

way cattle would be sold.

After purchase, slave owners would often brand
their new possession on the cheeks, again

just as they would do with cattle.

The lives of slaves were dominated
by work and terror,

but mostly work.

Slaves did all types of work,

from housework to skilled crafts work, and
some even worked as sailors, but the majority

of them worked as agricultural laborers.

In the Caribbean and Brazil,

most of them planted, harvested and processed
sugar, working ten months out of the year,

dawn until dusk.

The worst part of this job, which was saying
something because there were many bad parts,

was fertilizing the sugar cane.

This required slaves to carry 80 pound baskets
of manure on their heads up and down hilly

Mr. Green, Mr. Green.

terrain.

I think it’s time for a poop joke.

No,

I’m not, Me From the Past,

because slavery isn’t funny.

[like, at all]

When it came time to harvest and process the
cane, speed was incredibly important because

once cut, sugar sap can go sour within a day.

This meant that slaves would often work 48
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. Slaves often
caught their hands in the rollers, and their

overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations.

I told you this wasn’t going to be funny.

[anyone else reevaluating the hyperbolic
vocab of modern oppression?]

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 23 years.

Things were slightly better in British sugar
colonies like Barbados, and in the U.S. living

and working conditions were better still.

So relatively good that in fact,

slave populations began
increasing naturally,

meaning that more slaves
were born than died.

This may sound like a good thing,

but it is of course it’s 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.

Or use them to work their land.

Either way,

Anyway, this explains why even though the
percentage of slaves imported from Africa

blech.

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.

The brutality of working conditions in Brazil,
on the other hand, meant that slaves were

never able to increase their population naturally,
hence the continued need to import slaves

into Brazil until slavery ended in the 1880s.

So, I noted earlier that slavery isn’t new.
It’s also a hard word to define. Like, Stalin

forced million to work in Gulags, but we don’t
usually consider those people slaves.

On the other hand,

many slaves in history had lives of
great power, wealth, and influence.

Like remeber Zheng He,
the world’s greatest admiral?

He was technically a slave.

So were many of the most important advisers
to Sueleiman the Magnificent.

So was Darth Vader.
[still not over amputee hatchet]

But, Atlantic World slavery was different,
and more horrifying, because it was chattel

slavery, a term historians use to indicate
that the slaves were movable property.

Oh, it’s time for the Open Letter? Ow.

An Open Letter to the Word “Slave.”

But first,

let’s see what’s in the
secret compartment today.

Oh, it’s Boba Fett,

noted owner of a ship
called “Slave One.”

And apparently a ballet dancer. Do do do do
do do.

[THE Stan, off camera]
That’s a fine approximation of ballet music.

Thank you, Stan.

Alright,

dear “slave,”

as a word, you are overused.

Like Britney Spears,

I’m a slave number four letter U,

no you’re not!

Boba Fett’s ship, Slave One.

A ship can’t be a slave.

But more importantly, slave,

you are constantly used
in political rhetoric.

And never correctly.

There’s nothing new about this.

Witness, for instance, all the early Americans
claiming that paying the stamp tax would make

them slaves.

And that was in a time when they knew exactly
what slavery looked like.

Taxes,

as I have mentioned before,

can be very useful.

I, for instance, like paved roads.

But even if you don’t like a tax,

it’s not slavery.
[IT’S NOT SLAVERY.]

I have written for you a list of
all the times it is okay

Here,

to use the word “slave.”

Oh, it is a one item long list.

Best wishes,
John Green.

So what exactly makes
slavery so horrendous?

Well,

definitions are slippery but
I’m going to start with

the definition of slavery proposed by

sociologist Orlando Patterson:

It is

“the permanent, violent, and personal
domination of natally alienated

and generally dishonored persons.”

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.”

Ultimately then,

what makes slavery slavery is that
slaves are de-humanized.

The Latin word that gave us
chattel also gave us cattle.

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.
[technical term]

on this show?

Stan,

am I allowed to say

“suck”

Nice.

Okay, to understand what I’m talking about,
we need to look at some previous models of

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble...

slavery.

The Greeks were among the first
to consider “otherness”

a characteristic of slaves.

Most Greek slaves were “barbarians,”
[bar bar bar barians?]

and their inability to speak Greek
kept them from talking back

to their masters and also
indicated their slave status.

Aristotle, who despite being spectacularly
wrong about almost everything was incredibly

influential, believed some people were just
naturally slaves,

saying:

“it is clear that there are certain people
who are free and certain people who are slaves

by nature, and it is both to their advantage,
and just, for them to be slaves.”

This idea, despite being totally insane,

remained popular for millennia.

The Greeks popularized the idea that slaves
should be traded from far away, but the Romans

took it to another level.

Slaves probably made up 30% of the total Roman
population, similar to the percentage of slaves

in America at slavery’s height.

The Romans also invented the plantation, using
mass numbers of slaves to work the land on

giant farms called latifundia.

So called because they were not fun...dia.
[too soon!!!!]

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 comments section from the Christianity
episode,

the Bible was widely used to justify slavery
and in particular the enslavement of Africans,

because of the moment in Genesis when Noah
curses Ham,

“Cursed be Canaan; / The lowest of slaves
shall he be to his brothers.”

saying:

This encapsulates two ideas
vital to Atlantic slavery:

1.
That slavery can be a hereditary status passed

down through generations, and

2.
That slavery is the result of human sin.

Both ideas serve as powerful justifications
for holding an entire race in bondage.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

But there were even more contributors to the
idea that led to Atlantic slavery.

For instance,

Muslim Arabs were the first to import large
numbers of Bantu-speaking Africans into their

territory as slaves.

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.

The zanj in territory held by the Abbasids
staged one of the first big slave revolts

in 869 CE.

And 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.

But by then, they’d connected the Aristotilian
idea that some people are just naturally slaves

with the appearance of sub-Saharan Africans.

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 in the Iberian Peninsula until

1492.

So it makes sense that Iberians would be the
first to absorb these racist attitude toward

blacks.

And 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,

beliefs they’d inherited from a complicated
nexus of all the slaveholders who came before

them.

In short,

Atlantic Slavery was a
monstrous tragedy—

but it was a tragedy in which the
whole world participated.

And it was the culmination of
millennia of imagining

the “Other” as inherently Lesser.

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.

The truth that we must grapple with

is that a vast array of our ancestors—

including those we think of as ours,
whoever they may be—

believed that it was possible for
their fellow human beings

to be mere property.

Thanks for watching.

I’ll see you next week.

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller,

our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.

The show is written by

my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer

and myself.

Our graphics team is ThoughtBubble,

Last week’s Phrase of the Week was:
"Cinnamon Challenge"

I hate you for that, by the way.
[seriously, grody to the max]

If you want to suggest future phrases of the
week

you can do so in comments

where you can also guess at this
week's Phrase of the Week

or ask questions of our team of historians.

Thanks for watching.

and as we say in my hometown,

Don’t forget…ah, forget it. I got nothing.
[this one's a heaping helping of heavy]