This is the story of a world whose borders
and territories were drawn
by the slave trade,
where violence, subjugation
and profit imposed their own routes.
This criminal system shaped our history
and our world.
On São Tomé, the Portuguese
invented an economic model
with unprecedented profitability:
the sugar plantation.
This was the first black colony,
the first slave society.
We witnessed the marriage of the black men
with sugar cane.
In the 16th century, other European powers
were eager to follow their model.
Their greed would plunge
an entire continent into caos and violence
Nearly 13 million Africans were cast onto
new slavery routes to the new world
where the English, the French
and the Dutch hoped to become wealthy,
immeasurably wealthy.
Because the Caribbean
has similar climatic features to São Tomé,
it eventually became
the principal crossroad of the slave trader's route
For people on the western world,
these islands are today
associated with vacation.
Guadeloupe offers tourists
a dream destination.
Sunshine and pristine nature
Rekindling myths of a lost paradise
Holidaymakers tend to confine themselves to
the beaches of (foreign names)
But as this sign indicates they are all too close
to another side of the islands heritage
That was anything but a paradise
Just a few meters away from the bay there is
a burial site where countless skeletons were discovered
Between 501,000 graves are still buried beneath the sand
The (foreign name) beach is 1 of 15 cemetaries that
have been excavated
15 among the 1,000 that exist in the Caribbean
89 skeletons have been exumed by French archaeological
research experts
Judging by the state of the bones, they concluded that
these men and women had not reached the age of 30
By the time of their death the toll from working on
the plantations had so deformed their bodies
that they seemed more like 75 year olds
These people were human guinea pigs for the
sugar expirament
The collateral damage of an unprecedented
trade war, The Sugar War
74% of all slaves carried off, were carried
off because of sugar
If you want to understand the slave trade you
just need to know about sugar
Sugar proved more addicitve than pepper or cinnamon
From the 17th century onward Europeans craved
this rare and expensive commodity
In London, Amsterdam and Paris sugar fever was rampant
Prompting a new generation of adventurers to go
to any extremes to get it
Shipowners and fitters, merchants and pirates all knew
that to produce sugar you need a lot of slaves
John Hawkins was one of these new entrepreneurs
for whom profit reigned supreme
The English privateer was a pioneer in understanding
that fortune could be made by shipping black captives to the new world
In the mid 16th century he convinced Queen Elizabeth the 1st
to lend him a ship, The Jesus of Lubec
For the expedition Hawkins conspicuously set the tone
by choosing a trussed up black man on his emblem
"I do confirm to your highness that I will bring home 40,000 marks
without any offense of the least to any of your highnesses, allies or friends
I will conduct this enterprise and turn it to the benefit
of your whole realm with your highnesses consent
the voyage I propose is to load negroes in Guinea
and sell them in the West Indies
in truck of pearls, gold and emeralds that I will bring back in abundance"
1620, a century after sugar plantations were introduced
in Brazil
The Atlantic became the battleground for the sugar war
England, The Netherlands and France wanted
to break Spain and Portugals hegemony
In the Caribbean the Dutch took control Coracao, Sint Eustatius and Samata
The French, Guadelupe, Martinique, Granada and Santo Mal
The English occupied The Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados and Dominica
Only Cuba and Puerto Rico remainded under Spanish rule
After the extermination of the native Arawak people
the first sugar canes flourished on this fertile land
The Caribbean became a space of conquest
for the Europeans very early on really
It was the first place that Columbus landed in the new world
Um, the first place that the Spanish began to search for gold
and the first place they began to enslave the Indians
So they were thoroughgoing
Konya spaces created by design
of European planters and Imprial policy makers
and for their profit right
There arent so many places where you can
completely overlay a territory like that
So there, in some ways, the Caribbean is the space
where you find the purest of Colonial territories
Where the masters of the space actually get to
create the space to suit their own needs
In Guadalupe every plot of land, every single square inch of ground,
is connected to this violent and deeply rooted history
Today all that is left of sugar war is a field of ruins
Of the 250 sugar refineries active in the late
19th century only two remain in operation
In 2017, experts from France's national institute of
preventive archeological research
exhumed the remains of the (foreign name)
residents and sugar refinery in (foreign place)
A mill, stock rooms and three rows of so-called negro huts,
where hundreds of slaves were penned up together
In this brutal work camp human beings were but one tool among others
Each became a mechanized emaciated body
consumed by work until their final breath
Both the time in which the slaves were digging the
cane holes and the times in which their harvesting
are really the peak of the labor on a plantation
You could almost see the slaves wasting away
when they were digging these cane holes
because the work was so strenuous and
they were getting fed so poorly
You found women in all of the gangs often times
doing the hardest, dirtiest labor on the plantation
Alongside the men or even before the men
and one of the things that means when
you find young women doing this quite debilitating labor
is that the birth rates are very low
and the mortality rates, the infant mortality
rate is shockingly high
In the mid 18th century people talked about
9 out of 10 infants born
to enslaved Jamaican women dying, right,
within the first year
So, there's no way in which the plantation can
reproduce itself under those kinds of conditions
The plantations were managed by overseers who
saw the slaves in purely functional terms
This was an absolute exploitation of the workforce
It was a very particular society
Because the average rate of life expectancy
on a plantation was extremely low
About 8 to 10 years after arriving
The logic of the slave system was one where the
availability of the workforce had to be absolute
and for this man was conceived as an accessory of the land
He appeared as such in house inventories
Slaves are listed next to records for livestock
or manufacturing implements
That's the archaic aspect which was put
to use by a capitalist system and which largely
met market supply and demand with
its fluctuations needs and competition, free competition
The sugar plantations saw slavery enter a new era
The stronger the demand for sugar
the more the slave trade expanded
and the more the slave traders sought support from banks
to finance there expeditions
London is one of the oldest centers
of global finance
The city of London was the first to create commodities exchange
to develop credit markets and to issue banknotes on a massive scale
Without the invention of a centralized banking system
the explosion of the slave trade in the 17th century
Would not have been possible
Preparing for a slave expedition was expensive and
having a financial arsenal
gave England a decisive advantage over its competitors