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 island's 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 European 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're 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 plantations
were managed by overseers

who saw the slaves
in purely functional terms.

[speaking French]

This was 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.

[speaking French]

- (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."

He 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 amassed by 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.

[snare drum cadence]

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.

[speaking French]

- (English voiceover)
Wealth came from slavery.

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

Vintners, flour producers,
fabric producers, hardware producers.

[speaking French]

[speaking French]

- (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.

[speaking French]

- (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.

[speaking French]

- (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.

- (Narrator) 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.

- (Narrator) 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 onboard 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 executions.

One slave ship surgeon
said that frequently the decks,

the main deck of the ship
would just be completely awash in blood

in the aftermath of one of these
failed revolts.

Revolts were common, and they were
almost always suppressed.

But the captains would use that situation
to kill a small number,

in order to intimidate everybody else,

sending the message that if you resist us,
this will be your fate.

I’ve also suggested that the slave ship
created categories of race.

For example, the multi-ethnic Africans

who are loaded on board a slave ship

go aboard as Ebo or Fante or Mende,

but when they come off the ship,

they are unloaded as members
of a “negro race”.

And the same parallel process
goes on among the sailors.

These motley crews, they are English,
Irish, also in some cases African.

They leave their European port,

but when they arrive
on the West coast of Africa,

they become the White people.

- (Narrator) On Caribbean beaches,

captives disembarked as “blacks”
in a world dominated by “whites”.

[singing in unison and cracking whips]

Providing an outlet for a society
founded on violence and race,

the Carnival maintains
the memory of the days

when the sugar industry imposed
its rhythms, rites, and seasons,

and set the pace for island life.

[singing in unison]

It was an era when drummers
announced the end of winter

and the resumption of cutting;

when fleeing slaves
covered themselves in molasses

to help prevent their re-capture.

[speaking French]

- (English voiceover) What progressively
distinguished Atlantic slavery,

what made it different
from other systems of slavery,

was the construction of race.

It was precisely this superimposition
that developed

between physical appearance,
with its own term, and status.

At the extremities of this continuum
of both status and color,

there was the white master
and the black slave.

The term "white” did not exist
prior to slave societies.

The term "white" developed
specifically in the Antilles.

So you can see how vital
this Atlantic slave area was

to the construction
of the racial categories

that we still use now.

We use them as though they hadn't
changed throughout time,

when, in fact, they have.

Race was a weapon of submission,
meant to carve into flesh

the supposed inferiority of some people,
and the infinite superiority of others.

Cut off from their roots
and their families,

the Black slaves were reduced
to a servile mass,

without names and without orientation.

The plantation was a machine
that devoured its workforce.

It needed a constant supply
of new arrivals.

Landowners wanted to transform
the slaves’ bodies into tools.

On plantations, whipping and torture

were used to deprive them
of their humanity.

In this garden of torture,
the master’s authority was absolute.

- So you take, for example,
a character like Thomas Thistlewood.

And you can almost see in his diaries
the escalation in the violence

that he has to mete out,

or that he thinks he has to mete out
to the enslaved

to keep them working on the plantation.

-(Male voice) "I arrived as a foreman
on the new plantation

"barely two weeks ago.

"We had to carry out justice
on a negro who had escaped.

"We severely whipped him

"and rubbed pepper, salt,
and lime juice into his wounds.

"Three days later, the body
of another slave who had escaped

"was brought to us.

"I cut off his head
and we burned the body in public.

"That was the only way
to exert our control over the negroes.

"In this affair, my reasoning
was adopted by all the colonies.

"The unfortunate condition of the Negro
naturally led to us being hated.

"Only strength and violence
can hold them back."

- These kinds of tortures
and these kinds of punishments,

this kind of brutality,

actually became common-place
on these plantations

where you had white people
working out among armies of slaves

who they feared they could not control.

The sound of the screaming
and the stench of the burning bodies,

that also became a fundamental feature
of the Jamaican landscape, right?

That is what plantation society is.

It’s that smell, it’s that sound,
it’s that fear and terror

that’s compelling people to work
and to obey their masters.

There is no way to separate
that kind of terror

from the labor on the plantation,

from the profits that labor produced.

- (Narrator) But the plantation owners
could not squander

the slaves they had bought on credit.

The state had financed
the shipment of slaves,

and wanted
its return on investment.

The plantation society relied
solely on market forces.

Violence was a necessary cost,
and thus included in balance sheets.

It took 4 years to amortize
the price of a slave.

After that, they were valuable only
insofar as that they could hold a machete.

This was the price to pay
so that Europe could eat sugar.

- I don’t think that it’s possible to reduce
another human being to a mere cipher,

to a mere extension of your will.

And that’s where a lot of the tension

and the possibilities for slave revolt
and resistance come in,

because if my purpose
is to subject you absolutely,

but you can never be subjected absolutely,

we're always gonna have conflict.

At the extremes of human domination,
even in slavery,

we find there is always resistance,

there is always tension,
and there is always struggle.

- (Narrator) Throughout the Caribbean,

escaped slaves took refuge
in the heart of the most remote forests.

They were called “maroon slaves”,

in reference to the Spanish word
“cimarrón”,

which originally designated cattle
that had escaped into the wild.

In these isolated places,
they began to organize resistance.

In Jamaica they included

Captain Leonard Parkinson,
the leader of the maroons,

and Grandy Nanny, an Ashanti,
known as the “maroon priestess”;

in Barbados, Boussa, an Igbo war chief.

Through rebellion, the insurgents
found a name and an identity.

- All throughout the mountainous areas
of Jamaica,

you have these communities
of formerly enslaved people

who have escaped,

and they learn the territory,
they learn to cultivate crops there,

and they learn to fight, as well:
harassing plantations,

taking gun powder, getting new recruits,

and maintaining and building communities
in the mountains, right?

This becomes increasingly
a problem for the British,

and by the second/third decade
of the 18th century,

it breaks out into major war.

And the British aren’t even sure
they're going to be able

to maintain the Island.

- (Narrator) The uprisings
spread to other islands,

and then to the coast of Africa.

Wars raged in the slave capturers'
hunting grounds,

notably in Senegambia,
where Muslim religious leaders

blamed slave-trade goods
for corrupting society.

These outbursts of violence
plunged the sugar industry into a crisis,

which also had an impact in Europe.

A growing number of voices
expressed outrage

at the horrors of the slave trade.

- In all of the major slave trading ports,

everybody knew the truth
of the slave trade.

And I’ll tell you one way
in which they knew it.

Slave-trading vessels
had a very specific smell,

and you could never
get the smell out of the wood.

In fact, it was said
in Charleston, South Carolina,

which was the major port

for the importation of slaves
into North America,

that when the wind was blowing
off the water a certain way,

you could smell a slave ship
before you could see it.

What that meant was that
in every port, these ships,

these ships of horror
that stank of human misery,

that this was all very well known.

- Certainly information about
the slave trade and its characteristics,

the experiences of enslaved Africans
in the course of the Middle Passage

came increasingly to public attention
in the late 1780s.

Abolitionist campaigners placed
particular emphasis on the Middle Passage.

- That’s when
the polemical arguments begin,

and many pamphlets being published,
and the case being argued,

slave owners realizing for the first time,

that they’re going to have
to make an argument

about the legitimacy of colonial slavery.

- (Narrator) Within this context,
in 1783,

a court case involving Lloyd's
and a slave trade company

enjoyed significant publicity in Britain.

Abolitionists used it as a platform

to reveal the slave traders’
barbaric practices.

- The so-called Zong Massacre,
which took place in the early 1780s,

was a very important event.

It basically consisted
of a slave ship captain

throwing a group
of living Africans overboard

in an effort to collect insurance money.

Now this was...this voyage went on,

and it only came to court
a couple of years later

because the insurance company
refused to pay.

And when this event came to court,

an abolitionist named Granville Sharp
shows up at this court case,

and the question being:
“Were they actually property or not?”

and Sharp’s answer is:
“This is mass murder.

"This is just plain mass murder.

"This is not about property rights.

"These are human beings.”

- The judge actually upheld
the insurance companies,

which refused to pay insurance
on the murdered Africans.

And it was Vassa who brought this
to attention of Granville Sharp,

and it was Granville Sharp
who then turned it into a big issue

that helped to mobilize
public opinion in Britain.

- (Narrator) Gustavo Vassa
was one of England's

most fervent abolitionists.

Born in Nigeria, he was deported
to the Caribbean at the age of 11.

At the age of 21,
he managed to buy his freedom

while passing through England.

In his autobiography published in 1789,

he recounted his experience
of the Middle Passage down in the hold,

and delivered an impassioned plea
against slavery.

Vassa held up a mirror to the nations

that had reduced him
to the rank of a marketable object.

- (Male voice) "Gentlemen, such a tendency

"has the slave-trade
to debauch men's minds,

"and harden them
to every feeling of humanity!

"It is the fatality
of this mistaken avarice,

"that it corrupts the milk
of human kindness

"and turns it into gall.

"Which violates that first natural right
of mankind, equality and independency,

"and gives one man
a dominion over his fellows

"which God could never intend!

"Yet how mistaken is the avarice
even of the planters?

"Are slaves more useful

"by being thus humbled
to the condition of brutes,

"than they would be if suffered to enjoy
the privileges of men?"

- (Narrator) By the time Gustavo Vassa
spoke out in 1789,

7.7 million Africans had been deported:

1 million from Senegambia,

3.4 million from Benin and Biafra,

3.2 million from Central Africa,

and close to 73,000 from eastern Africa.

While David Eltis
and the Emory University research team

have established
precise deportation figures,

the income amassed by the slave trade
is still being estimated.

Historians are trying to assess today
how much profit the slave trade yielded

for banks and insurance companies.

- The slave trade is not only
a foundation of American capitalism;

it is a foundation of all of European
and Atlantic capitalism

because it created
this massively profitable economic system

that linked the countries
of Northwestern Europe

to the Americas
through the plantation system.

The great scholar-activist C. L. R. James
pointed out that the slave system

created the greatest
planned accumulation of wealth

the world had ever seen
up to that moment in time.

And this, of course, is a very important
part of Western prosperity.

- (Narrator) Between 1633

and Britain's abolition
of the slave trade in 1807,

English and then British companies

deported 2,755,830 African captives.

Most of them died on the plantations,

worn out from working
in the sugar cane fields.

All of this, for the sake of profit.

In 2007, London's Westminster Abbey
hosted a bicentennial commemoration

of the abolition of the slave trade

in the presence of
then-Prime Minister Tony Blair

and Queen Elizabeth II.

One guest,
human rights activist Toyin Agbetu,

disrupted the ceremony.

- (Toyin Agbetu, angrily)...

The plantation owners and slave traders

could not accept losing
the hard-won Caribbean,

the immensely lucrative driving force
behind the rise of global capitalism.

At the beginning of the 19th century,

they sought to thwart
the wave of protest in civil society.

By that time, slavery,

a practice that dated back
to the dawn of humanity,

seemed immoral,
and to belong to the past.

Britain had understood this
before the others,

and was thus one step
ahead of its rivals.

It was preparing itself
for world domination.

[slow string music with heavy bass drum]