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, 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.

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.

- (English voiceover)
Wealth came from slavery.

There were negotiators, ship owners,
and all those who produced foodstuffs.

Vintners, flour producers,
fabric producers, hardware producers.

- (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.

- (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.

- (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.

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.

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.

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,

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 on board 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