C

Lecture 5

Plantations, Commodities, and Labour

How did plantations work?

  • Indentured labour: sign a contract, shipped from Europe to the Americas to work, at the end → can have land
    • Does not work well for sugar plantations → cannot force the workers to do more than a day’s work
    • Competitive market doesn’t allow for free labour - solution = slavery
  • Slaves work in all sorts of industries, but plantations are key (because the production is so large)
  • Americas: slave society! The entire economy is based on the plantation system
  • The only way to increase production is to increase land and workers → expansion
  • Sugar: very valuable (rhum)
  • To keep costs low: slaves would do the food production themselves for themselves → can feed themselves
  • Slave mines: slaves can’t grow their own food - harder

Who worked there?

  • A mix of cultures because they are prisoners of war (soldiers, leaders, peasants)
    • Former leaders from Africa → lead these communities
    • Some defeated European colonizers because they were soldiers!
  • Ex: Haiti
    • Slaves were born in Africa, kidnapped from very large areas → very different languages
    • Europeans organize different groups of people so they can’t organize to rebel
    • Only successful slave revolution!
  • Tried to use white European slaves
    • Didn’t work, local white people rebelled because didn’t permit it, were scared that them too could become slaves

What did they produce?

  • Sugar
  • Cotton: inefficient to grow and labour intensive
    • Incorporate industrial machines to help with production
    • Starts making the United States powerful
  • Tobacco
  • Indigo
  • Lumber and timber
  • Rice and wheat

What impact did that production have?

  • Threats: torture, execution, being sold → terror

  • Slaves are commodities

    • They are stripped of their legal rights

  • Plantations: businesslike operation

  • Must disembed slaves from their communities

  • Cheaper to keep importing slaves!

  • Slave labour → cheaper products → profits → more slaves → more production

  • Triangular trade

    • Europe to Africa: manufactured goods
    • Africa to America: slaves
    • America to Europe: raw materials

West Africa and the Slave Trade

State Formation on the Gold Coast

  • 1550-1560 West African Coast: major changes
    • State building: coastal villages, larger towns/cities
    • Large cities rely on trade (European)
    • Administrative core starts the process of state building
    • States incorporate a lot of different groups - needs a lot of organization
    • States build through a series of war → creates a massive number of new slaves
  • States who were equipped (militarily) by Europeans became dominant!
  • Gold coast becomes more unified → Europeans are able to expand slave trade
  • More powerful states = win more wars, so they capture even more slaves

Expansion of the Slave Trade South to Congo

  • Causes:
    • Europeans don’t want to deal with stronger and wealthy states.
    • These states also want to incorporate slaves into their own territory.
    • Wars are getting bigger → slows down gold production, destroying the states’ wealth
    • Flow of gold across the Atlantic reverses (from Brazil to Gold Coast)
    • With the gold, Europeans buy slaves → SLAVE TRADE EXPANDS

Demographic/Developmental impact

  • Slaves would have been way more valuable in their community than the price they were sold at
  • Lack of opportunity
  • Loss in labour
    • Hard to build infrastructure because it takes a lot of labour-power
    • Hard to develop a base of trained workers
  • Loss in markets
    • No internal market
  • Loss in pressure for technological advancement: Europeans wouldn’t sell them/show them new industrial ways that would help them develop
  • Losing population so no developmental progress (intensification/expansion is hard)
  • Loss of wealth due to wars

Capital

Free trade and monopoly

  • Monopoly trade companies start to fall apart
  • Free trade!
  • Voyages are funded on the subscription model

Where did the money go?

  • Abolition movement in Britain was because slavery was becoming not enough profitable
  • Profits made from the slave trade allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen in England
  • Infrastructure, banks, productive capacity

Slavery and the modern economy

  • Money from plantations → produced a very stable fiscal environment because of guaranteed income → foreign investors

  • 20-50% of British capital came from slave trade + plantations

    • Invested in nonfinancial assets

  • People in faraway regions whose employment and work depend on people on other continents → GLOBALIZATION

    • People are completely dependent on other continents
    • Interconnected world