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Talk:Triangular trade (view source)
Revision as of 22:33, December 6, 2008
, 22:33, December 6, 2008Reply to Ed
::(I now have to get a bit of other history onto site. By the way, it's quarter to five in the morning here, and I am not yet fully functional.) [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 12:48, 1 December 2008 (EST)
::(I now have to get a bit of other history onto site. By the way, it's quarter to five in the morning here, and I am not yet fully functional.) [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 12:48, 1 December 2008 (EST)
:::Random thought...middle passage can mean the second leg of the three voyages making up the "triangular trade"...... Or .... Though I have never seen the term used in an Atlantic context, I have seen references to a "middle passage" in the Indian Ocean...where they stood out from the South African coast, passed well to the east of Madagascar and sailed more or less diagonally north east to India or Ceylon instead of the Portuguese route up the coast of Africa and across the Arabian Sea using the monsoon, or the Dutch way across to just shy of West Aust, using the "Roaring Forties" then up. So a middle passage in the slave trade context could be the middle passage from Africa to the Caribbean; not the north passage to North America, or the southern route to Brazil. I know I could be arguing against my own case but that's me. (I now have to leave for the morning or longer...Christmas shopping with wife...may not be back 'til after 4PM when I am locked out.) [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 16:50, 1 December 2008 (EST)
:::Random thought...middle passage can mean the second leg of the three voyages making up the "triangular trade"...... Or .... Though I have never seen the term used in an Atlantic context, I have seen references to a "middle passage" in the Indian Ocean...where they stood out from the South African coast, passed well to the east of Madagascar and sailed more or less diagonally north east to India or Ceylon instead of the Portuguese route up the coast of Africa and across the Arabian Sea using the monsoon, or the Dutch way across to just shy of West Aust, using the "Roaring Forties" then up. So a middle passage in the slave trade context could be the middle passage from Africa to the Caribbean; not the north passage to North America, or the southern route to Brazil. I know I could be arguing against my own case but that's me. (I now have to leave for the morning or longer...Christmas shopping with wife...may not be back 'til after 4PM when I am locked out.) [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 16:50, 1 December 2008 (EST)
Ed...Sorry to be so long. Health ain’t what it used to be…. Re the two "extremes; think of the context.
(1) If white Americans are “the worst people” then they are in a dead heat for “worst” with most of the peoples of Western Europe. Right into the 19th century the large majority of ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic would have been owned by Europeans (increasingly English until about 1800), and whose home ports were Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, L’Orient, Lisbon, Cadiz, Amsterdam, and other places as far north as the Baltic.
Until the “Enlightenment”, Christianity was never really a major force against the institution of slavery itself, more a moderator of its conditions. That the numbers of slaves fell in the Middle Ages is as much to do with their being replaced by serfs as anything. (A statistic that has stuck in my mind about the 1080s Domesday Book is that it recorded 25,000 slaves (''servii'') in England - about a quarter of the number of those listed as serfs (''villeins'')) - and one modern historian mentions 10% of the population, but he may have been including villeiny.) When Christianity reached the Scandinavians in the years around 1000 A.D. it made not a blind bit of difference to the frequency, and severity of their raids on England, nor to their slave trading up and down the rivers of eastern and central Europe. (The people there are still called “Slavs”.)
We look at things with modern sensibilities – the foundations of the Atlantic slave trade were built at a time when the criminal codes of most of the Christian nations allowed extreme torture as an instrument of both enquiry and punishment. (I’m not talking “waterboarding” here, but fire, and the crushing of bones.) The Inquisition and all that that implies was at its height. A relatively minor infraction in England could land you in Virginia (or later, in New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land) for seven years, or in France, seven years chained to an oar in the galleys. Both were a form of slavery. Man’s inhumanity to man was, in most places, a given.
The Americans were no better or no worse than most western Europeans. It has to be seen in the context of its time.
(2) It is true that nearly all African slaves that were shipped to the Americas were bought from other Africans. The Europeans very very rarely caught their own cargo. It is also true that many slaves were traded by Muslims. The likelihood of that increased the more north the transaction. When the trans-Atlantic slave trade began the southern-most extent of Islam was a wavy line across Africa from present day [[Guinea Bissau]] to above [[Ethiopia]], before hurtling down the east coast. It never got much further except for various periods in various kingdoms in the hinterland of the Guinea coast. It rarely touched the coast. Naturally, Islam had nothing to do with slaves traded in what is now the Congo and Angola regions. When the Europeans arrived on these coasts (see [[Portuguese Exploration of West Africa]] during the second half of the 15th century, slaves were an intrigal and inevitable result of the almost non-stop inter-tribal, inter-ethnic warfare in the area. Slavery was a part of society like it had been in north-west Europe in the middle ages…prisoners of war became slaves (if allowed to live) and a slave raid was as good a venture as any other for a nice profit. (Remember, St Patrick went to Ireland as a slave.)
That’s about as much leaning forward as I can do this morning…I hope it gives you something to think about. Cheers [[User:AlanE|AlanE]] 17:33, 6 December 2008 (EST)