Going to ask a very strange question

[dhol82]

Don’t go crazy about this. Purely historical question.
The Americas had been explored and exploited for over a hundred years prior to the first black Africans who were brought here as slaves.
1619.
Who or why did someone get the idea to do the triangle trade? Just curious about the thinking of what they did.
The indigenous people were destroyed in central and South America. Were there not enough here in the north?

[applegrove]

1. Two weeks after the first europeans arrived in the america's the flu and common cold and measles,

smallpox and every other communicable diesease from the old world started to kill off indigenous people in the americans. Like tens of millions died that way within the first hundred years. Keep in mind europeans had over millenia fought said diseases so they had partial immunity. Indigenous north and south americans had no immunity. Many of those diseases came from warmer climates with more life and kinds of life. What europeans didn't have immunity to were interior jungle african and asian diseases like malaria and all. My university african history teacher said that is why the Atlantic slave trade started. That you could view the early history of europeans in the americas through the lens of disease. The Conquistadors didn't have to fight much. Wherever they went indigenous societies were weaked by disease and disorganized. Did that enter the heads of the people who started the slave trade? My professor thought so. We now know that in parts of north america british authorities gave small pox laced blankets to indigenous peoples. Not everywhere. It is one of the reasons it is called a genocide. So probably it entered the heads of some slave traders that people from africa would have greater immunity and it proved to be true. That's all i can stand to write right now.

[jaysunb]

3. Good post. Nt

[GulfCoast66]

5. Good post. But that blanket giving thing might be spurious. Or at least overblown.

The one somewhat credible instance was in 1763. Buy then most native Americans, well over 90% had already been decimated by European diseases , including smallpox. There is no way that exchange resulted in a Virgin Soil epidemic. At that time native Americans were not living isolated lives and the French had been their allies and living among them for decades. Frenchmen who also had smallpox as well as an endemic resistance to smallpox. As did the surviving natives.

DeSoto landed in Florida in 1539 and over the next 3 years led his men, and pigs, through Georgia, South Carolina, maybe Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas(where he died) and a few of his men made it back to Mexico. They recorded the southeast as highly populated with big cities and lots of cleared land. Even though almost all the Spanish died, they unwittingly struck a fatal blow to the native population. Buy the time Europeans returned in numbers, over 100 years later it was wilderness with scattered native settlements. This explains how the Virginians and Pilgrims were able to make it. The entered a land almost empty of people, those the grandchildren of people who saw 90-95% of their population dead due to unknown diseases.

Everyone should read Ecological Imperialism by Crosby. It explains how without European’s introduced diseases they would have never taken the new world. After all, the remnant population of natives quickly adapted to the new technology from Europe and even with a remnant population still put up a hell of a fight. Had the had their population of 1400 they would have never been beat. Of course, germ theory was unknown to anyone at the time. They saw the death of the natives as a sign from god.

Nice post. I love DU and await correction to my post.

[applegrove]

6. I read the small pox thing 20 years ago. Shocked me. Told my bosses

Last edited Sat Aug 17, 2019, 02:30 AM - Edit history (1)

who were Tibetan Canadians and they were shocked too. They didn't think of canada like that. They asked one regular who was from Tyendinaga a township (named after Joseph Brant's Mohawk name). He told them it was true. He appreciated me telling them. The professor i took the course from was in 1986. I have not read up conquistadors since. I think i read something about De Soto but i can remember much. So i will let your version stand. But i think indigenous canadians know better they were genocided in ways too numerous to mention and nobody was talking about it at the time. Now people do admit it. Bet you white people were never given small pox blankets. The account i read of the small box blankets were not french colonial authorities but british ones. Anyhow you have more recent info i think.

[Hortensis]

16. Very interesting topic. One of our little

snowbird places in Florida is on De Soto’s route north. I can only be glad that he died in south Georgia and wish it’d happened much sooner.

He and others were unspeakably cruel, but it should be noted that Europeans didn’t know anything about communicable disease in those days. The best explanation they could come up for the holocaust among the native peoples, but strikingly mostly sparing them, was that it was all-powerful God’s doing, presumably clearing this new land for them because that’s how it worked out.

[raccoon]

22. Ecological Imperialism--Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look for that. ENT

[Drahthaardogs]

8. Small pox cannot really be transmitted via fomites

That whole blanket story is bullshit. They might have tried it, but it wouldn't have worked.

[Joe941]

23. I believe it.

[Drahthaardogs]

24. Oh, it's true they tried it

But it didn't work.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

20. Germ theory wasn't really a thing until the mid-1800s. The blanket story is vivid but likely did

not happen the way your narrative describes it.

[rzemanfl]

2. I recommend the book

1491.

[dhol82]

14. Looks interesting

Next on my reading list.

[rzemanfl]

18. Enjoy. n/t

[Igel]

4. This is the 400th anniversary of continuous US settlement.

In 1619 a British colony in Virginia was founded.

In August, the colony had the first slaves in a North American British colony (that I'm aware of, at least).

The colony was founded without slaves.

In fact, the slaves came on a Dutch ship. There was no connivance, no arrangement: "Please, Messrs Dutchmen, bring us slaves, we'll be arriving in early 1619 and should be ready for the first delivery in late summer."

The Dutch didn't buy the slaves from Africa. The Portuguese had. The Dutch raided a Portuguese ship, stole its cargo, and then disposed of the valuable cargo in a safe place, far from Portuguese territories. Why did they go up north? Because that's the direction the current took them. Couldn't go east from the Caribbean, easier to go the long way 'round. (And there's part of the reason for the triangle: from Africa west was easy, to the Americas; once there, only north was a good option, up south of Greenland on the Gulf stream to Europe; then south, back to Africa. Africa-Americas-Europe. Triangle.)

Now think, "When did the trade triangle really start?" The Portuguese had been importing slaves for a long time--after all, it wasn't like the Dutch knocked off the first-ever Portuguese slave ship. Spanish had been importing fewer, but they'd been active in the slave trade. The African slave trade has Portuguese roots; the Moors whetted the Portuguese appetite for such trade and more. And for decades, the Portuguese had been buying up forced labor and transplanting it.

The impression I had in school back in the '70s was of European marauders going to Africa, sweeping through villages, rounding up people, and forcing them into slavery. Since then I've revised that understanding: Most slaves were traded. If you want to trade, you find what the client wants to sell for. Some European luxuries were hard to come by--rum, tobacco, etc.--and was the currency that Africans wanted for selling off either captured prisoners of war, prisoners from slaver raids, or just poor, unwanted people. (This is a hard thing: It means that for most acts of slavery committed by an British/American slaver, there was a black African leader on the other end to receive payment for the "goods"--but if the supply was low, increased demand would cause increased offers of payment and that would create a desire on the part of leaders to find more slaves to sell to the whites.) The British didn't do much enslaving of Native American peoples--the Spanish did, not calling it that, quite, and that's one reason they imported less forced labor. American slavery was also less common in some areas because of geography, but also because immigration provided the cheap, unskilled, expendable labor. Early on, often Irish labor. (One often unmentioned cause of the Great Migration was a reduction in European immigration because of WWI followed by both northern industrialization and changed attitudes towards immigration after 1918.)

[dhol82]

7. Interesting

Did the Portuguese take any of their slaves to Europe? I have never heard of a population of slaves there.
I do know that they took many to Brazil.

[Recursion]

10. Yes, a few.

Here's a depressing-as-hell animation of every European slave ship from Africa

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html

As you can see a few of them went to Portugal and Spain.

Now, here's what's really depressing: think of all the horrific suffering we learn about as Americans in the American slavery system, and think about what a bit player we were on this international market.

[Recursion]

9. The idea of a "triangle trade" is a later analysis of the situation

And you would almost never see a single ship do all three legs; they specialized. But it's just a particularly depraved case of normal economics: Africa had people it was socially and legally permissible to enslave; the Caribbean and Brazil had sugar plantations; Europe had a sweet tooth and finished goods.

[dhol82]

11. Found this about European slavery

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/europe/black_people.aspx

[Recursion]

12. Cool, thanks. A change in the idea of slavery happened between about 1600 and 1700

(This is a paraphrase of an installation in the basement of the African American History museum in DC, but it really made me think.)

Before 1600, slavery was practiced everywhere, but relatively rare. It was in general not lifelong and not passed on to a slave's children. Selling of slaves was rare. Slavery was not predicated on the race of the slave or master.

By 1700, slavery was very localized, but incredibly intense where it was practiced. Slavery was lifelong and was passed on to children. Selling of slaves was common, and was even financialized: there were banks that specialized in tranched mortgages to buy slaves. Slavery and mastery were entirely race-based.

Two other thoughts strike me about this:

1. It was precisely during that period between 1600 and 1700 that Europe developed our modern concept of the nation-state; it was during this time that civil rule went from dynastic to corporate, and religious belief went from corporate to individual.

2. This one is just odd, but a lawyer friend of mine pointed it out and I can't stop thinking about it. The Mason-Dixon line separated the states where slavery withered from the states where it took root. It also marks the southern end of where there were witch trials in colonial times. But the generation that in Virginia decided that all black people were slaves, and no-one with any non-white ancestry was white, was the same generation in New England that went on a frenzy of trying to stamp out the witches they imagined hiding behind every tree. I am convinced that is not a coincidence and, as my lawyer friend says, "in the African the southerners found a profitable witch."

[Hortensis]

17. Very interesting thoughts.

[Mariana]

19. 2 is indeed just odd.

Virginia had witch trials in colonial times, the last being in 1730, so your friend's idea that the Mason-Dixon line "also marks the southern end of where there were witch trials in colonial times" is false.

There were actually very few witch trials in colonial America. There was no "frenzy of trying to stamp out the witches they imagined hiding behind every tree" in New England. Salem's witch trials became so infamous because they were unique - nothing like that went on anywhere else in the colonies at any time.

[applegrove]

21. Yes. I should not have used the term triangle trade as i heard it used

to describe the atlantic slave trade way after i first studied it. So i used the wrong term.

[Generic Brad]

13. It's not a crazy question

My daughter is currently getting her PhD in American History. When I last spoke to her about her dissertation she touched on this very subject. She is interested in all the human exploitation that was going on and how it contributed to the construct of racial divisions. I don't think that is what she writing about, but it is a topic she has a lot of interest in.

[Hortensis]

15. Plus Europe's tradition was of enslaving its own people.

Same with China. Local labor was sufficient that importing large numbers simply wasn’t necessary and these areas didn’t develop the trade.

So initially the answer to the need of a new continent for labor was to deport poor Europeans, including emptying out the jails, Willingly or involuntarily indentured in what amounted to temporary slavery. Conditions and treatment were so bad that some 40% of them died before becoming free, plus the promises of farmland once free frequently turned out to be cheats. Serious rebellions caused planters and colonial governments to look elsewhere for labor.

As for native peoples, who practiced slavery themselves, they were enslaved by people who had the advantage of guns, but for one thing were too often able to escape and return to their own peoples, unlike those from Africa, who risked trading one slavery for another, or of course death, when they tried.

So the answer was Africa. Before then the Arab-African slave trade was almost entirely off the east side and north coast of the continent. Colonization of the Americas created the west Africa external slave trade.

President Obama was right when he said that given the choice of any time to live in we’d all choose this time in this place.