Lecture 5

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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

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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

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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

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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

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• Triangular trade

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

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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

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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

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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

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Capital

Free trade and monopoly

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

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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

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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

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

  • People are completely dependent on other continents
  • Interconnected world

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