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