- (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 man
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 island's 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.
Fifteen, 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 Highness' 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 European 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 the 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're 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.
- [speaking French]
- (English voiceover) The plantations were managed by overseers
who saw the slaves in purely functional terms.
This was 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.
- [speaking French]
- (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."
He 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.
- (Narrator) 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 amassed by 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, and brandy.
All bought on credit with the bank's money.
A giant port complex gradually evolved;
a city within a city, entirely devoted to this new business.
Following London in 1663,
other seaports rushed to take advantage of this lucrative trade.
Lorient, Copenhagen, La Rochelle,
Bristol, Nantes, Liverpool,
Bordeaux, Antwerp.
From all over Europe, slave ships set sail for Africa.
- When I began to see slave ships leaving
from not just Liverpool and Nantes,
but from every port in the Atlantic.
As soon as a port becomes big enough to contemplate a transoceanic voyage,
there's a good chance that voyage is going to be a slave trade voyage.
And we've got like 170 separate ports, tiny places.
Today, they've got no idea that once upon a time,
they sent out slave voyages.
Saint Peter's Port in the Channel Islands, charming place.
And yet, it's a slave trade port.
[drum cadence]
Over a period of two centuries, more than 3,500 expeditions
set sail from French ports.
More than half of them left from the port of Nantes,
the main French hub of triangular trade.
The sculpted figures along the Quai de la Fosse, or Feydeau Island,
are reminders of an era
when the great slave trading families displayed their pride
in being the main architects of the city's wealth.
It was they who made Nantes France's leading commercial port.
- [speaking French]
- (English voiceover) Wealth came from slavery.
There were negotiators, ship owners, and all those who produced foodstuffs.
Vintners, flour producers, fabric producers, hardware producers.
[speaking French]
- [speaking French]
- (English voiceover) The Atlantic ports also generated wealth
for areas that stretched very far inland,
as far as Orléans, in the case of Nantes.
Goods were also transported along rivers.
So the wealth that slavery produced was essential for France.
[speaking French]
- (Narrator) 1669. From Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre,
slavery money flowed back up rivers
to Rouen, Orléans and Angoulême.
It had such repercussions on inland areas that it became a national objective.
Louis XIV knew that to win the Sugar War,
he would need a powerful fleet.
The king ordered the construction of 500 galleons.
The Atlantic became the theater of a naval war
between France, England and the Netherlands.
A bitter fight, in which each sunken ship was a total loss
for the respective country's economy.
- [speaking French]
- (English voiceover) It was very expensive to build and equip
a 74-gun ship and pay its crew.
Ultimately, who bore the cost?
The bill for financing these wars, the financing of ships and arsenals,
was mainly footed by French peasants.
- (Narrator) The slave trade fleets were protected.
16,000 galleons were already protecting Dutch commercial ships,
while the 3,000 light and fast Royal Navy cruisers
terrified their adversaries.
France paled in comparison to these armadas.
Each nation needed a fortress in Africa
if it were to compete in the Atlantic race.
Just like on the Caribbean islands,
these forts were the bastions of triangular trade.
As military bases,
they offered a secure store for bartered goods and captives
before departure by sea.
In less than 80 years,
43 such forts were built from Senegal to the Niger Delta.
Every stone, every beam, every element of masonry
was transported by boat from Europe.
- Most of these fortresses are built by states.
Individual capitalists or even groups of trading capitalists
did not have that kind of money
in order to build those sorts of fortresses.
- (Narrator) The English already had thirteen,
the Dutch ten, the Danish five.
Even the Prussians, with their three forts,
surpassed the French.
On the Gold Coast, in today’s Ghana,
the Fante and Ashanti rented Europeans plots of land to build their forts.
The Europeans established trading posts and fortresses
all along the Atlantic coast,
from the Ewé territory to the Kongo Kingdom.
Equatorial Africa became the world’s principal source of slaves.
In this accounting document written in 1688,
we learn that over an 8-year period, it shipped 60,783 slaves.
Each cost the Royal African Company 8 to 12 pounds sterling,
the equivalent of between €950 and €1500 today.
They were all bought with trade goods.
The demand for slaves was so high
that the Europeans pressured their African partners to help them
plan, rationalize, and industrialize their system of mass deportation.
- Slaves were often bought on credit.
And so that meant that European ships would come,
they would have a whole cargo full of textiles, different metal ware,
rum, tobacco, whatever.
And these would be given to the local merchants,
extended to them on credit.
And then the merchants would go inland with those goods
and buy slaves and come back.
- The biggest impact was the level of violence,
the rising level of violence,
the level of uncertainty that permeated society everywhere,
and also the opportunity for new "big men" to emerge,
new powerful leaders.
Somebody gets a hold of more firearms, somebody gets more aggressive,
they build their own personal chieftain and, suddenly, they’re powerful.
- (Narrator) Among these leaders was Antera Duke,
a major African trader from Calabar in what is now Nigeria.
In his diary, he spoke of the methods he used to terrorize captives:
kidnapping, detention, and murder.
[fire roars and crackles]
- (Man) "About 4am, I got up.
"Awful rain.
"I walked up to the city trading house,
"where I met all the gentlemen.
"We got ready to cut off heads.
"5am, we began decapitating slaves.
"50 heads fell that day."
- Very clearly, these sacrifices were intended as a form of terrorism
that were meant to make it very clear to the population
who was the boss and who was not,
in very much the way the Mafioso type organizations behave
in terms of making sure that the members of the association
respect whoever the Godfather is,
and if anybody steps out of line they can be assassinated or killed.
And so they don't step out of line, obviously.
- (Narrator) For the benefit of a handful of enterprising & unscrupulous profiteers,
the entire continental economy was transformed.
On the coast, African brokers knew all of the inner workings
of the sugar plantation.
A slave ship from Saint-Malo, “Le Marie Séraphique”,
docked at Loango in the Kingdom of Kongo.
Its captain’s drawings provide exceptional details
of the negotiations between Europeans and Africans.
The merchants from the coast knew
that the Marie Séraphique’s captain was in a hurry:
he had to arrive in the West Indies before harvest time.
This was the time of year when slaves sold best,
and when the best sugar was available.
So they deliberately prolonged negotiations
to drive prices up.
312 captives were rounded up in 116 days.
The Marie Séraphique arrived in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti,
one year after leaving France.
Only nine captives had perished:
a good ratio for the crew, who celebrated their success.
In the drawings of the Marie Séraphique,
no allusion to the slaves’ suffering appears.
They were dehumanized shadows,
tallied and lined up like barrels at the bottom of the hold,
the transportation of human beings turned into a nightmare.
- It’s very important to understand that violence onboard slave ships
would be used selectively.
In other words, no captain
wanted to kill the entire allotment of people on board
because that voyage would then have no profit.
So when there was resistance, what the captains would do,
is organize a spectacle
in which a small number of people would be executed
in extremely vicious, horrific ways
as a means of terrorizing everybody else.
All of the enslaved would be forced to come up on deck
in order to view these executions.
One slave ship surgeon said that frequently the decks,
the main deck of the ship would just be completely awash in blood
in the aftermath of one of these failed revolts.
Revolts were common, and they were almost always suppressed.
But the captains would use that situation to kill a small number,
in order to intimidate everybody else,
sending the message that if you resist us, this will be your fate.
[flute and bass drum playing slowly]
I’ve also suggested that the slave ship created categories of race.
For example, the multi-ethnic Africans
who are loaded on board a slave ship
go aboard as Ebo or Fante or Mende,
but when they come off the ship,
they are unloaded as members of a “negro race”.
And the same parallel process goes on among the sailors.
These motley crews, they are English, Irish, also in some cases African.
They leave their European port,
but when they arrive on the West coast of Africa,
they become the White people.
- (Narrator) On Caribbean beaches,
captives disembarked as “Blacks” in a world dominated by “Whites”.
[singing in unison and cracking whips]
Providing an outlet for a society founded on violence and race,
the Carnival maintains the memory of the days
when the sugar industry imposed its rhythms, rites, and seasons,
and set the pace for island life.
[singing in unison]
It was an era when drummers announced the end of winter
and the resumption of cutting;
when fleeing slaves covered themselves in molasses
to help prevent their re-capture.
- [speaking French]
- (English voiceover) What progressively distinguished Atlantic slavery,
what made it different from other systems of slavery,
was the construction of race.
It was precisely this superimposition that developed
between physical appearance, with its own term, and status.
At the extremities of this continuum of both status and color,
there was the white master and the black slave.
The term "White” did not exist prior to slave societies.
The term "White" developed specifically in the Antilles.
So you can see how vital this Atlantic slave area was
to the construction of the racial categories
that we still use now.
We use them as though they hadn't changed throughout time,
when, in fact, they have.
- (Narrator) Race was a weapon of submission,
meant to carve into flesh the supposed inferiority of some people,
and the infinite superiority of others.
Cut off from their roots and their families,
the Black slaves were reduced to a servile mass,
without names and without orientation.
The plantation was a machine that devoured its workforce.
It needed a constant supply of new arrivals.
Landowners wanted to transform the slaves’ bodies into tools.
On plantations, whipping and torture
were used to deprive them of their humanity.
In this garden of torture, the master’s authority was absolute.
- So you take, for example, a character like Thomas Thistlewood.
And you can almost see in his diaries the escalation in the violence
that he has to mete out,
or that he thinks he has to mete out to the enslaved
to keep them working on the plantation.
- (Male voice) "I arrived as a foreman on the new plantation
"barely two weeks ago.
"We had to carry out justice on a negro who had escaped.
"We severely whipped him
"and rubbed pepper, salt, and lime juice into his wounds.
"Three days later, the body of another slave who had escaped
"was brought to us.
"I cut off his head and we burned the body in public.
"That was the only way to exert our control over the negroes.
"In this affair, my reasoning was adopted by all the colonies.
"The unfortunate condition of the Negro naturally led to us being hated.
"Only strength and violence can hold them back."
- These kinds of tortures and these kinds of punishments,
this kind of brutality,
actually became common-place on these plantations
where you had white people working out among armies of slaves
who they feared they could not control.
The sound of the screaming and the stench of the burning bodies,
that also became a fundamental feature of the Jamaican landscape, right?
That is what plantation society is.
It’s that smell, it’s that sound, it’s that fear and terror
that’s compelling people to work and to obey their masters.
There is no way to separate that kind of terror
from the labor on the plantation,
from the profits that labor produced.
- (Narrator) But the plantation owners could not squander
the slaves they had bought on credit.
The state had financed the shipment of slaves,
and wanted its return on investment.
The plantation society relied solely on market forces.
Violence was a necessary cost, and thus included in balance sheets.
It took 4 years to amortize the price of a slave.
After that, they were valuable only insofar as that they could hold a machete.
This was the price to pay so that Europe could eat sugar.
- I don’t think that it’s possible
to reduce another human being to a mere cypher,
to a mere extension of your will.
And that’s where a lot of the tension
and the possibilities for slave revolt and resistance come in,
because if my purpose is to subject you absolutely,
but you can never be subjected absolutely,
we're always gonna have conflict.
At the extremes of human domination, even in slavery,
we find there is always resistance,
there is always tension, and there is always struggle.
- (Narrator) Throughout the Caribbean,
escaped slaves took refuge in the heart of the most remote forests.
They were called “maroon slaves”,
in reference to the Spanish word “cimarrón”,
which originally designated cattle that had escaped into the wild.
In these isolated places, they began to organize resistance.
In Jamaica they included
Captain Leonard Parkinson, the leader of the maroons,
and Grandy Nanny, an Ashanti, known as the “maroon priestess”;
in Barbados, Boussa, an Igbo war chief.
Through rebellion, the insurgents found a name and an identity.
- All throughout the mountainous areas of Jamaica,
you have these communities of formerly enslaved people
who have escaped,
and they learn the territory, they learn to cultivate crops there,
and they learn to fight, as well: harassing plantations,
taking gun powder, getting new recruits,
and maintaining and building communities in the mountains, right?
This becomes increasingly a problem for the British,
and by the second/third decade of the 18th century,
it breaks out into major war.
And the British aren’t even sure they're going to be able
to maintain the Island.
- (Narrator) The uprisings spread to other islands,
and then to the coast of Africa.
Wars raged in the slave capturers' hunting grounds,
notably in Senegambia, where Muslim religious leaders
blamed slave-trade goods for corrupting society.
These outbursts of violence plunged the sugar industry into a crisis,
which also had an impact in Europe.
A growing number of voices expressed outrage
at the horrors of the slave trade.
- In all of the major slave trading ports,
everybody knew the truth of the slave trade.
And I’ll tell you one way in which they knew it.
Slave-trading vessels had a very specific smell,
and you could never get the smell out of the wood.
In fact, it was said in Charleston, South Carolina,
which was the major port
for the importation of slaves into North America,
that when the wind was blowing off the water a certain way,
you could smell a slave ship before you could see it.
What that meant was that in every port, these ships,
these ships of horror that stank of human misery,
that this was all very well known.
- Certainly information about the slave trade and its characteristics,
the experiences of enslaved Africans in the course of the Middle Passage
came increasingly to public attention in the late 1780s.
Abolitionist campaigners placed particular emphasis on the Middle Passage.
- That’s when the polemical arguments begin,
and many pamphlets being published, and the case being argued,
slave owners realizing for the first time,
that they’re going to have to make an argument
about the legitimacy of colonial slavery.
- (Narrator) Within this context, in 1783,
a court case involving Lloyd's and a slave trade company
enjoyed significant publicity in Britain.
Abolitionists used it as a platform
to reveal the slave traders’ barbaric practices.
- The so-called Zong Massacre, which took place in the early 1780s,
was a very important event.
It basically consisted of a slave ship captain
throwing a group of living Africans overboard
in an effort to collect insurance money.
Now this was...this voyage went on,
and it only came to court a couple of years later
because the insurance company refused to pay.
And when this event came to court,
an abolitionist named Granville Sharp shows up at this court case,
and the question being: “Were they actually property or not?”
and Sharp’s answer is: “This is mass murder.
"This is just plain mass murder.
"This is not about property rights.
"These are human beings.”
- The judge actually upheld the insurance companies,
which refused to pay insurance on the murdered Africans.
And it was Vassa who brought this to attention of Granville Sharp,
and it was Granville Sharp who then turned it into a big issue
that helped to mobilize public opinion in Britain.
- (Narrator) Gustavo Vassa was one of England's
most fervent abolitionists.
Born in Nigeria, he was deported to the Caribbean at the age of 11.
At the age of 21, he managed to buy his freedom
while passing through England.
In his autobiography published in 1789,
he recounted his experience of the Middle Passage down in the hold,
and delivered an impassioned plea against slavery.
Vassa held up a mirror to the nations
that had reduced him to the rank of a marketable object.
- (Male voice) "Gentlemen, such a tendency
"has the slave-trade to debauch men's minds,
"and harden them to every feeling of humanity!
"It is the fatality of this mistaken avarice,
"that it corrupts the milk of human kindness
"and turns it into gall.
"Which violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency,
"and gives one man a dominion over his fellows
"which God could never intend!
"Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters?
"Are slaves more useful
"by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes,
"than they would be if suffered to enjoy the privileges of men?"
- (Narrator) By the time Gustavo Vassa spoke out in 1789,
7.7 million Africans had been deported:
1 million from Senegambia,
3.4 million from Benin and Biafra,
3.2 million from Central Africa,
and close to 73,000 from eastern Africa.
While David Eltis and the Emory University research team
have established precise deportation figures,
the income amassed by the slave trade is still being estimated.
Historians are trying to assess today how much profit the slave trade yielded
for banks and insurance companies.
- The slave trade is not only a foundation of American capitalism;
it is a foundation of all of European and Atlantic capitalism
because it created this massively profitable economic system
that linked the countries of Northwestern Europe
to the Americas through the plantation system.
The great scholar-activist C. L. R. James pointed out that the slave system
created the greatest planned accumulation of wealth
the world had ever seen up to that moment in time.
And this, of course, is a very important part of Western prosperity.
- (Narrator) Between 1633
and Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807,
English and then British companies
deported 2,755,830 African captives.
Most of them died on the plantations,
worn out from working in the sugar cane fields.
All of this, for the sake of profit.
In 2007, London's Westminster Abbey hosted a bicentennial commemoration
of the abolition of the slave trade
in the presence of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair
and Queen Elizabeth II.
One guest, human rights activist Toyin Agbetu,
disrupted the ceremony.
- (Toyin Agbetu, angrily)...
The plantation owners and slave traders
could not accept losing the hard-won Caribbean,
the immensely lucrative driving force behind the rise of global capitalism.
At the beginning of the 19th century,
they sought to thwart the wave of protest in civil society.
By that time, slavery,
a practice that dated back to the dawn of humanity,
seemed immoral, and to belong to the past.
Britain had understood this before the others,
and was thus one step ahead of its rivals.
It was preparing itself for world domination.
[slow string music with heavy bass drum]