(Narrator) 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.
- (English voiceover) This was the first black colony,
the first slave society.
- (English voiceover) We witnessed the marriage of the black men
with sugar cane.
- (Narrator) In the 16th century, other European powers
were eager to follow their model.
Their greed would plunge an entire continent
into chaos 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.
(Intense music with strong bass drum beat)
Because the Caribbean has similar climatic features to São Tomé,
it eventually became the principal crossroads
of the slave trader's routes.
For people in 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 Le Gosier, Sainte-Anne,
and Saint François.
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 bathers is a burial site
where countless skeletons were discovered.
Between 500 and 1,000 graves are still buried beneath the sand.
The Raisins Clairs beach is one of 15 slave cemeteries that have been excavated.
15, among the 1,000 that exist in the Caribbean.
89 skeletons have been exhumed 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 experiment,
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 addictive 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 needed 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 a fortune
could be made by shipping Black captives to the New World.
In the mid 16th century, he convinced Queen Elizabeth I
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.
- (Male speaker) "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 Highness' 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."
- (Narrator) 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 Portugal's hegemony.
In the Caribbean, the Dutch took control
of Curaçao, Sint Eustatius, and Saint Martin.
The French: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grenada and Saint-Domingue.
The English occupied The Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados and Dominica.
Only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained 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,
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 colonial spaces
created by design of Europ,ean planters and imperial policy makers
and for their profit, right?
There aren't so many places where you can completely overlay a territory like that.
So, 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.
- (Narrator) 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 Saint Jacques residence and sugar refinery
in Anse-Bertrand:
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 they were harvesting
were 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.
- (English voiceover) The plantation 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.
- (English voiceover) 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.
- (Narrator) 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 their expeditions.
London is one of the oldest centers of global finance.
The city of London was the first to create a 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.
You've got to remember that the State is getting a tremendous amount of revenue from the plantation complex,
so they had a very strong, vested interest in the slave trade.
If you had gone to the king of England in 1680
and said, "Look, I'm gonna give you a choice.
"You can either have these 13 colonies in North America,
"or you can have this one little island called Barbados."
You would have taken Barbados in a split second
because of the sugar revenues.
And this is something that's going to persist as a very important interest
for European states up until the very end of slavery.
To support the sugar war,
the city lent money on a colossal scale.
In the midst of these steel and glass buildings,
the two pillars of the English economy that financed the slave trade
are still prominent on the London skyline.
At the heart of the financial district is the
venerable bank of England,
the world's first central bank.
A couple of blocks away is Britain's most powerful insurance company,
the prestigious Lloyd's of London.
Atlantic slave traders had to take on heavy debts to charter their ships.
Without an insurance company, most would risk ruin on their first expedition.
The slave traders made investments as if playing a game of poker.
The risks were high, but if successful, the return would far outweigh any other type of investment.
Insurers like Lloyd's had everything to gain by participating in this game of chance.
A successful expedition could yield up to three times the initial stake.
In the Lloyd's archives, little evidence remains
of the profits of insuring these high-risk expeditions.
Most accounting records were lost in a fire in 1838,
the same year that slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean.
Ports had to adapt to this initial scramble for Africa and the Caribbean.
In London, Blackwall became the slave trade's principal wharf.
All manner of goods were sold here.
Precious fabrics, jewels, porcelain, weapons,