Origin of Everything

[pensive music] (host) Why were most slaves in especially considering West Africa is thousands of miles away from the Americas and Europe?

[reflective music] Slavery has existed in multiple forms throughout history and across a wide variety of cultures.

But slavery in the early Americas, meaning the North American colonies, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, was ultimately powered by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

And there's an important question many people don't stop to ask: Why Africans?

There was nothing inherent to the social or psychological makeup of West Africans and their descendants in the 17th through 19th centuries that made them more prone to enslavement.

So to get to the heart of our question, we should first ask ourselves: Why did Europeans set out to colonize the Americas to begin with?

Okay, so before I dive into the answers to these questions, I think it's important to note that there is no such thing as benevolent slavery, since any system that's predicated on the exploitation and extraction of labor through violence and force cannot be considered fair.

However, the purpose of this rough timeline is to sketch a comparison without creating hierarchical values of assessing harm inflicted on enslaved people.

To set the scene of the early American colonies, European powers such as Spain, followed by Portugal, the Dutch, British, and French, ventured out in search of conquest and capital.

Their early explorations of the Americas, starting in 1492 and continuing up until the 18th century, weren't driven by wanderlust and a desire for adventure, no matter what Disney-fied versions of colonization we learned in the movie "Pocahontas."

Instead, they were looking for one primary thing-- wealth.

And this could mean gold and silver, or it could mean land, farmland, and commercial crops.

The driving incentive for exploration was to increase European power and to fatten the royal coffers.

But initially, slavery was not the source of this wealth.

The early Spanish colonists to Central and South America in the 16th century wrested control of silver and gold mines that had been controlled by Incan and Aztec empires.

By forcing Native groups to extract silver and gold from the mines they had already established, colonists were able to meet their desires for high profits with low labor costs, AKA, no labor costs, because they weren't exactly intent on paying anyone.

And the colonists were brutal.

By working Native people to death, cutting off limbs if they didn't extract enough materials quickly, or threatening them with murder, the Spanish were able to increase their mining efforts in these regions and to meet their specific demand for increased wealth throughout the 16th century.

And despite European expectations in other regions like North America or the Caribbean, there weren't huge repositories of gold and silver to send back to Europe.

But even though there was little precious metal to be found, the monarchies and the early colonists who arrived in these areas were equally intent on yielding high profits.

So they turned to crops that yielded high profits like sugar, tobacco, rice, and later, cotton.

In order to assure the highest profits, they began to look to slavery since European laborers and indentured servants required payment or other forms of protection.

So, next we have to ask: When did colonists in the Americas turn to the African continent as a site for extracting slaves?

The first enslaved Africans arrived in the North American colonies under control by the British.

The areas that would later become part of the U.S. in 1619, when 20 were forcibly transported to Jamestown, Virginia, by the Dutch.

But the first enslaved Africans had arrived in the Caribbean and Latin America prior to that, starting as early as the first decade of the 16th century.

Because remember, folks, the colonies established in the Americas, plural, cover South, North and Central America plus the Caribbean, and not just the present-day U.S., but the transportation of African people into slavery began before the colonization of the Americas.

According to an article by professor Dr. Hakim Adi, the Portuguese began enslaving Africans in the 15th century when they arrived on the African continent for the purposes of trade.

Around that time, there were enslaved Africans among other enslaved and free populations in Portugal.

So even though it wasn't the only or necessarily most widespread form of slavery at the time, this 15th century precedent would set the stage for later decisions surrounding slavery that were to come in during colonization in the Americas.

But at that point in time, captivity wasn't extended exclusively to Black people or people from the African continent, and was often the result of raids, warfare, or slave trading that included Islamic traders, West African groups and Europeans, among others.

Okay, so we've established the precedence leading up to the explosion of the West African slave trade.

So our final question is: Why did European colonists start to look exclusively at West Africans as a source of slave labor?

And how did the emergence of chattel slavery in the Americas differ from pre-existing forms?

Remember that the colonies were established to make money for royal families and wealthy colonists, and a small class of wealthy colonists who own large plantations looked to increase their margins through not paying for the labor that generated their cash crops.

So it wasn't that slavery was needed to develop the colonies, but rather that it was decided that this was the quickest way to enrich the people invested in getting rich.

Black slaves continued to arrive in the Caribbean, North America, and South America through the 16th, 17th, and 18th century.

And it wasn't until the 19th century that slavery began to be eradicated.

However, by this point, there was a large slave population in the Americas, and the condition of slavery was considered legally hereditary, with children taking the status of their mothers in perpetuity.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas, colonists found that the previously established system that relied on enslaving conquered enemies was not functioning for several key reasons.

Namely, first, early attempts in the Americas to enslave Native Americans proved difficult because they had familiarity with the terrain of their own nations and land.

As a result, the potential for escape or revolt was high.

This made using a system of leading raids and then enslaving whoever lost the battle less achievable since colonists had little to no idea how to survive in these new regions and often fell prey to diseases which Europeans had no immunity to, namely malaria.

The subsequent rampant genocide of Native American people and the introduction of new diseases that decimated their population, namely smallpox from Europe, made widespread enslavement less possible.

But, by transporting people from West Africa to the Americas, European colonists wanted greater ability to control enslaved populations by making escape more challenging and reducing the risk of those who did flee blending into neighboring Native nations.

Although the fact that there continued to be slave revolt amongst enslaved Africans and their descendants proves that this calculation was often mistaken.

Second, West Africa was often the source of forced and kidnapped laborers because of its proximity to seaports which made contact between these three locations more possible.

Also, laborers from West African countries were more familiar with the agricultural methods needed for mass cultivation of these kinds of crops in the New World.

So, how does it all add up?

Well, even though the slave trade brought an estimated 9 to 12 million people here from Africa as cargo, colonists eventually resorted to reproduction within the colonies as a method for sustaining slavery.

This meant that slavery could be passed down as an inherited status from mother to child.

And to justify this never-ending enslavement, we started to see the evolution of false race science and racialization used as a justification for why one group of people, specifically people of African descent, were the only ones who could be enslaved.

But the shift erased the reality that prior to turning to West Africa as a labor source, slavery existed across racial lines and was dictated more by battles and military capture than by skin tone.

The resulting idea we had about race evolved out of a desire by people engaging in the slave trade to find an after-the-fact justification for enslaving people from one specific region over others.

This history of racialization is covered in our episode on "The Origins of Race in the USA," so check that out if you want to learn more.

So, what do you think?

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