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

(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,