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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,