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

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    (Narrator) This is the story of a world
    whose borders and territories
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    were drawn by the slave trade,
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    where violence, subjugation
    and profit imposed their own routes.
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    This criminal system shaped our history
    and our world.
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    On São Tomé, the Portuguese
    invented an economic model
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    with unprecedented profitability:
    the sugar plantation.
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    - (English voiceover) This was
    the first black colony,
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    the first slave society.
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    - (English voiceover) We witnessed
    the marriage of the black men
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    with sugar cane.
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    - (Narrator) In the 16th century,
    other European powers
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    were eager to follow their model.
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    Their greed would plunge
    an entire continent
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    into chaos and violence.
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    Nearly 13 million Africans were cast onto
    new slavery routes to the new world,
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    where the English, the French,
    and the Dutch hoped to become wealthy,
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    immeasurably wealthy.
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    (Intense music with strong bass drum beat)
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    Because the Caribbean
    has similar climatic features to São Tomé,
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    it eventually became
    the principal crossroads
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    of the slave trader's routes.
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    For people in the western world,
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    these islands are today
    associated with vacation.
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    Guadeloupe offers tourists
    a dream destination.
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    Sunshine and pristine nature,
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    rekindling myths of a lost paradise.
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    Holidaymakers tend to confine themselves
    to the beaches of Le Gosier, Sainte-Anne,
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    and Saint François.
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    But as this sign indicates,
    they are all too close
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    to another side of the islands heritage
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    that was anything but a paradise.
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    Just a few meters away from the bathers
    is a burial site
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    where countless skeletons were discovered.
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    Between 500 and 1,000 graves
    are still buried beneath the sand.
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    The Raisins Clairs beach is one of 15
    slave cemeteries that have been excavated.
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    15, among the 1,000
    that exist in the Caribbean.
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    89 skeletons have been exhumed
    by French archaeological research experts.
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    Judging by the state of the bones,
    they concluded that these men and women
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    had not reached the age of 30.
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    By the time of their death,
    the toll from working on the plantations
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    had so deformed their bodies
    that they seemed more like 75 year olds.
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    These people were human guinea pigs
    for the sugar experiment,
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    the collateral damage of an unprecedented
    trade war: The Sugar War.
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    74% of all slaves carried off, were carried
    off because of sugar.
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    If you want to understand the slave trade, you
    just need to know about sugar.
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    Sugar proved more addictive
    than pepper or cinnamon.
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    From the 17th century onward, Europeans
    craved this rare and expensive commodity
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    In London, Amsterdam, and Paris,
    sugar fever was rampant,
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    prompting a new generation of adventurers
    to go to any extremes to get it.
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    Shipowners and fitters,
    merchants and pirates,
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    all knew that to produce sugar,
    you needed a lot of slaves.
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    John Hawkins was one of these
    new entrepreneurs
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    for whom profit reigned supreme.
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    The English privateer was a pioneer
    in understanding that a fortune
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    could be made by shipping Black captives
    to the New World.
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    In the mid 16th century,
    he convinced Queen Elizabeth I
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    to lend him a ship, The Jesus of Lubec.
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    For the expedition,
    Hawkins conspicuously set the tone
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    by choosing a trussed up Black man
    on his emblem.
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    - (Male speaker) "I do confirm
    to your highness
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    "that I will bring home 40,000 marks
    without any offense of the least
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    to any of Your Highnesses,
    allies, or friends.
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    "I will conduct this enterprise
    and turn it to the benefit
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    "of your whole realm,
    with Your Highness' consent.
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    "The voyage I propose
    is to load negroes in Guinea
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    "and sell them in the West Indies,
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    "in truck of pearls, gold, and emeralds
    that I will bring back in abundance."
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    - (Narrator) 1620,
    a century after sugar plantations
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    were introduced in Brazil.
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    The Atlantic became the battleground
    for the sugar war.
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    England, The Netherlands and France wanted
    to break Spain and Portugal's hegemony.
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    In the Caribbean,
    the Dutch took control
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    of Curaçao, Sint Eustatius,
    and Saint Martin.
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    The French: Guadeloupe, Martinique,
    Grenada and Saint-Domingue.
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    The English occupied The Bahamas, Jamaica,
    Antigua, Barbados and Dominica.
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    Only Cuba and Puerto Rico
    remained under Spanish rule.
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    After the extermination
    of the native Arawak people,
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    the first sugar canes flourished
    on this fertile land.
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    - The Caribbean became a space of conquest
    for the Europeans very early on.
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    Really, it was the first place
    that Columbus landed in the new world,
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    the first place that the Spanish
    began to search for gold,
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    and the first place they began
    to enslave the Indians.
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    So they were thoroughgoing
    colonial spaces
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    created by design of Europ,ean planters
    and imperial policy makers
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    and for their profit, right?
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    There aren't so many places where you can
    completely overlay a territory like that.
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    So, in some ways, the Caribbean
    is the space where you find
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    the purest of Colonial territories.
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    Where the masters of the space
    actually get to create the space
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    to suit their own needs.
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    - (Narrator) In Guadalupe,
    every plot of land,
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    every single square inch of ground,
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    is connected to this violent
    and deeply rooted history.
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    Today, all that is left of sugar war
    is a field of ruins.
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    Of the 250 sugar refineries active
    in the late 19th century,
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    only two remain in operation.
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    In 2017, experts from France's
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    National Institute of Preventive
    Archeological Research
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    exhumed the remains of the Saint Jacques
    residence and sugar refinery
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    in Anse-Bertrand:
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    A mill, stock rooms,
    and three rows of so-called "negro huts"
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    where hundreds of slaves
    were penned up together.
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    In this brutal work camp, human beings
    were but one tool among others.
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    Each became a mechanized, emaciated body
    consumed by work until their final breath.
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    - Both the time in which the slaves
    were digging the cane holes
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    and the times in which
    they were harvesting
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    were really the peak of the labor
    on a plantation.
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    You could almost see the slaves
    wasting away
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    when they were digging these cane holes
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    because the work was so strenuous and
    they were getting fed so poorly.
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    You found women in all of the gangs,
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    often times doing the hardest,
    dirtiest labor on the plantation
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    alongside the men, or even before the men.
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    And one of the things that means,
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    when you find young women doing
    this quite debilitating labor,
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    is that the birth rates are very low
    and the mortality rates,
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    the infant mortality
    rate is shockingly high.
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    In the mid-18th century,
    people talked about
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    9 out of 10 infants born
    to enslaved Jamaican women dying, right,
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    within the first year.
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    So, there's no way in which the plantation
    can reproduce itself
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    under those kinds of conditions.
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    - (English voiceover) The plantation
    were managed by overseers
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    who saw the slaves
    in purely functional terms.
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    This was an absolute exploitation
    of the workforce.
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    It was a very particular society
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    because the average rate
    of life expectancy on a plantation
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    was extremely low,
    about 8 to 10 years after arriving.
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    - (English voiceover)
    The logic of the slave system
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    was one where the availability
    of the workforce had to be absolute.
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    And for this, man was conceived
    as an accessory of the land.
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    He appeared as such in house inventories.
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    Slaves are listed next to records
    for livestock or manufacturing implements.
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    That's the archaic aspect which was
    put to use by a capitalist system,
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    and which largely met
    market supply and demand,
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    with its fluctuations, needs,
    and competition - free competition.
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    - (Narrator) The sugar plantations
    saw slavery enter a new era.
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    The stronger the demand for sugar,
    the more the slave trade expanded,
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    and the more the slave traders
    sought support from banks
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    to finance their expeditions.
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    London is one of the oldest centers
    of global finance.
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    The city of London was the first
    to create a commodities exchange,
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    to develop credit markets
    and to issue banknotes on a massive scale.
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    Without the invention
    of a centralized banking system,
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    the explosion of the slave trade
    in the 17th century
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    would not have been possible.
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    Preparing for a slave expedition
    was expensive,
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    and having a financial arsenal
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    gave England a decisive advantage
    over its competitors.
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    You've got to remember that the State is getting a tremendous amount of revenue from the plantation complex,
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    so they had a very strong, vested interest in the slave trade.
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    If you had gone to the king of England in 1680
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    and said, "Look, I'm gonna give you a choice.
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    "You can either have these 13 colonies
    in North America,
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    "or you can have this one little island called Barbados."
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    You would have taken Barbados
    in a split second
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    because of the sugar revenues.
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    And this is something that's going to persist as a very important interest
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    for European states up until the very end of slavery.
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    To support the sugar war,
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    the city lent money on a colossal scale.
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    In the midst of these steel and glass buildings,
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    the two pillars of the English economy that financed the slave trade
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    are still prominent on the London skyline.
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    At the heart of the financial district is the
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    venerable bank of England,
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    the world's first central bank.
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    A couple of blocks away is Britain's most powerful
    insurance company,
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    the prestigious Lloyd's of London.
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    Atlantic slave traders had to take on heavy debts
    to charter their ships.
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    Without an insurance company,
    most would risk ruin on their first expedition.
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    The slave traders made investments as if playing a game of poker.
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    The risks were high, but if successful,
    the return would far outweigh any other type of investment.
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    Insurers like Lloyd's had everything to gain by participating in this game of chance.
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    A successful expedition could yield up to three times
    the initial stake.
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    In the Lloyd's archives,
    little evidence remains
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    of the profits of insuring these high-risk expeditions.
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    Most accounting records were lost in a fire in 1838,
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    the same year that slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean.
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    Ports had to adapt to this initial scramble for Africa and the Caribbean.
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    In London, Blackwall became the slave trade's principal wharf.
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    All manner of goods were sold here.
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    Precious fabrics, jewels, porcelain, weapons,
Title:
Slavery routes – a short history of human trafficking (3/4) | DW Documentary
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Video Language:
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Duration:
42:26

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