-
- (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]