Slavery routes – a short history of human trafficking (3/4) | DW Documentary

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