Episode 152: Rethinking the Slave Trade

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David Eltis
Turns out that the majority of slave voyages didn’t begin in Europe. They began in the Americas, and the Americas was in fact the heart of the business, not Europe.

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Ben Wright
This is 15 Minute History, a podcast for educators, students and anyone interested in history. Featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas at Austin.

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Ben Wright
Beginning in the 15th century, European history took a dark turn with the rapid expansion of the slave trade. We’re joined today by Emory professor David Eltis, the coeditor of Slavery Just Talk. Slave Voyages draws upon thousands of archival sources, ship logs, registers, letters, and government records to understand the mechanics behind the slave trade. His new book, Atlantic Capitalism, utilizes these records to offer a new interpretation of transatlantic slavery.

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Ben Wright
Centered on the Iberian rather than French or British Americas. Doctor Eltis, welcome to 15 minute history.

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David Eltis
Glad to be here.

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Ben Wright
There are two words in your book title, one in the title, one in the subtitle I wanted to begin with. The word cataclysm and the word rethink. Let’s start with cataclysm. Why have you called your book Atlantic Cataclysm?

00;01;28;17 – 00;02;04;11
David Eltis
There is nothing quite like what happened in the Atlantic Ocean between the 15th and the 19th centuries. And, I think that that in itself justifies the use of the word. The movement of people, which meant mortality rates were horrific. And I don’t think there’s anything in the historic record, certainly not in the 20th century, that, can match it in terms of those characteristics.

00;02;04;13 – 00;02;14;04
Ben Wright
But the subtitle of your book is Rethinking Sea. Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trade. What is it that we need to rethink about the slave trade?

00;02;14;06 – 00;02;51;04
David Eltis
I’m actually trying to get a rethinking, not just of the slave trade, but of Atlantic history. Because I think the focus of research on this topic, Renaissance 19th century, has been on the North Atlantic and the connections disconcertingly between European status and the Americas. What my book does is suggest that the focus of the business was actually in the South Atlantic.

00;02;51;07 – 00;03;17;02
David Eltis
And the, concept of the Middle Passage is long. It’s built on the idea that there was a triangular trade. Whereas what I’m arguing for is, in fact an out and back trade, because it turns out that the majority of slave voyages didn’t begin in Europe. They began in the Americas, and the Americas was in fact the heart of the business, not Europe.

00;03;17;04 – 00;03;55;17
David Eltis
The South Atlantic has not received anything like the attention it should I say Atlantic history, because it also turns out there’s an interesting second major conclusion that the vast majority of Africans that were hauled off from the continent, the subcontinent, did not end up in the U.S. or in the French and British Caribbean, but rather in South America and the reason for arguing this is based on a reevaluation of a second slave trade, which is the intra American slave trade.

00;03;55;20 – 00;04;44;00
David Eltis
The movement of captives from the British Caribbean in particular, to what we can call the Iberian Americas. What this suggests, in turn, to pretty damning, revisions, in my view, is that two thirds, almost two thirds of all Africans carried off ended up actually in the Iberian Americas. And what that in turn suggests is that, in fact, the most prosperous part of the Americas was not what became the U.S. or the British Caribbean or the French Caribbean, but rather Brazil and Spanish America.

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David Eltis
Well, the whole project’s really based on a website called w w w slash voyages.org.

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Ben Wright
What was your motivation for the Slave Voyages project, and did you expect the data to show you what it showed to you?

00;05;02;29 – 00;05;35;12
David Eltis
Well, to answer the second question first, no, I didn’t. It’s, this is something that’s really just merged in the last few years. You see, slave voyages only began to accumulate data on the Inter-American traffic around 2018. And it’s that which, I think has caused me to suggest a reinterpretation of black history as necessary. The original goal was simply to collect data on that on the transatlantic.

00;05;35;14 – 00;05;41;21
Ben Wright
What data sets are you relying on, which is the primary sources that you’re finding coming?

00;05;43;13 – 00;06;14;13
David Eltis
There’s an amazing variety of sources. Many of them documentary, far more than any single individual could actually, examine and exploit. So we’ve been, I mean, I’m an author of this project, but it couldn’t have happened without the I can only describe it as mass involvement of scholars over the period of the last half century.

00;06;14;29 – 00;06;20;11
Ben Wright
Do you expect more primary sources to be added and discovered?

00;06;20;13 – 00;06;51;21
David Eltis
Yes. A major feature of the site is, in fact, to encourage people to contribute. I don’t mean contribute funds, but I mean contribute data and, a lot of time is taken up with editing those contributions. Obviously, we can’t just accept them at face value. We have to check them, make sure that correct. Of course. And some cases go back to the original source, and that’s happening on a literally a daily basis.

00;06;51;23 – 00;07;11;10
David Eltis
But my current activity is just editing the contributions. So yes, I expect additional they didn’t become available and it might well result in, us increasing the overall total from, say, 12.5 million to possibly 13 million.

00;07;11;13 – 00;07;15;05
Ben Wright
What is the significance of that number?

00;07;15;08 – 00;07;54;20
David Eltis
The real significance is not so much the number itself, but the distribution of that number. Because one of the results of the analysis that we’ve made is that it seems very likely that the basic drawing card, if you like, was further south. And we thought, now, this has implications for developments in Europe because there’s a strong argument being made these days accepted by, I would say, the majority in the media, which is that the slave trade was the foundation of British industrialization.

00;07;54;23 – 00;08;19;10
David Eltis
What we found is that essentially that’s just not plausible, because in fact, the country that that was mostly responsible was not Britain, but actually Portugal. And it did not show any signs of industrialization during the period when the slave trade was at its peak in the 18th and 19th centuries.

00;08;19;13 – 00;08;30;28
Ben Wright
Would there be an analogy with, in, America, North America there? And it’s the South where slavery is prominent and the North where industrialization is taking us.

00;08;31;01 – 00;09;16;17
David Eltis
It’s, it’s a different issue in the sense that the slave trade to North America ended, effectively in 1807. Industrialization, of course, happened beyond that. And the rapid growth of the black population in the US occurred in the 19th century. So there were only perhaps 380,010 Africans, disembarking in those on the North American mainland. But by the time of emancipation in the eight and consequent as a consequence of the Civil War, the population had grown to 4 million.

00;09;16;19 – 00;09;36;29
David Eltis
So the, black population of the US is essentially, the result of natural population growth, not the slave trade. The slave trade actually contributed very little to the North American continent. Black population.

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Ben Wright
Why do you think this debate around British prosperity and the slave trade, is contentious?

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David Eltis
That’s, I guess, going beyond my remit. But it’s, the literature on the British slave trade is the most complete. People know it in a way that they don’t know it. The literature from, say, Portugal, certainly not from Africa. So there’s a natural tendency to see Britain as the core, of the system. The reality is likely to be different from that.

00;10;13;07 – 00;10;51;05
David Eltis
I mean, in terms people search for simple courses, essentially. And the starting with Eric Williams, his book in 1944, British participation in the slave trade has come to be seen as central to industrialization. I mean, I’m not saying that slavery didn’t contribute. Of course it did. But when you look at the distribution that we’ve found with the Slave Voyages site, the distribution of arrivals in the US, it’s just not a plausible hypothesis.

00;10;51;08 – 00;11;01;28
Ben Wright
What impact does the forced migration of Africans to South America? What are some of the impacts we see?

00;11;02;23 – 00;11;33;27
David Eltis
Well, the black population in Brazil is probably, the greatest of any country in the world except Nigeria. It’s also the case that the system that the Portuguese developed was was it was unique, a large ratio of their crews were actually black and some of them were enslaved and some of the enslaved were actually paid wages, as part of the voyage.

00;11;33;29 – 00;11;46;13
David Eltis
It’s it’s almost a different world compared to the North Atlantic. And it’s an under-appreciated world. The South Atlantic system is really not had anything like the attention it should have.

00;11;46;15 – 00;11;52;25
Ben Wright
What do you think the benefit to the historiography will be with that? South would shift.

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David Eltis
A better understanding of the state of the system. The British had a highly capital intensive structure to their slave trading. What? You don’t quite what you don’t find in the Portuguese case that reflects that the slave trade didn’t necessarily need a great capital markets and the capital intensity that you find in the North Atlantic.

00;12;17;29 – 00;12;29;17
Ben Wright
One of the questions you seek to answer with your scholarship is, why were the slaves who was African? And you’ve talked from there about the emergence and persistence of anti-Black prejudice.

00;12;29;19 – 00;13;13;08
David Eltis
Oh, I think, anti-Black prejudice was there at the beginning, but it’s, was reinforced, of course, by what happened in the Atlantic. But it’s very striking that when you consider the options open to Western European powers, like it’s very striking that they did not choose to use their own citizens. They had convicts, they had the large numbers of poor people, but they and they certainly tried to ship some of these individuals to the plantation colonies, but they never put them into slavery.

00;13;13;10 – 00;13;27;01
David Eltis
Slavery itself was something restricted to black people, which suggests that the prejudice, that we’re still experiencing, was there at the very beginning.

00;13;27;04 – 00;13;36;26
Ben Wright
I do suppose I have one last question, which is for the future slave voyages. Do you do you anticipate a role for artificial intelligence in processing data?

00;13;36;29 – 00;14;10;28
David Eltis
Yes, I would. You can argue maybe in a few years that slave boy just thought it would be redundant. At least, it’ll be possible to get, you know, a question answered quite differently the way I didn’t, in a way which you didn’t anticipate. Slave voyages site does offer options which, perhaps will be harder to reproduce, but, I think in the long run, people will address their questions about the slave trade.

00;14;10;28 – 00;14;23;14
David Eltis
Do I just cheaply rather than to slave I just side. Of course I will draw on what we’ve done. So it’s not certainly not lost.

00;14;23;16 – 00;14;52;06
Ben Wright
I would think something definitely personally that you’ve crafted a data set that can be used by scholars utilizing artificial intelligence to process that data quickly and spend more time thinking about what it means than collating it. If you’d have had more time in your, career to spend analyzing rather than collating the data, other directions, you would have liked to have taken this research.

00;14;52;08 – 00;15;28;15
David Eltis
But I think the science is so complex and covers so many regions that that’s pretty impossible for one person to get on top of what’s what’s going on. So if anything, it’s a website. It’s kind of restricted my own work. This is only my first book. Although I’ve got several, many, many edited volumes. And in a sense, the creation of the site has, hobbled my output.

00;15;29;20 – 00;15;37;25
David Eltis
On the other hand, it’s provided the basis for a great deal more output from others. So from that perspective, of course, it’s a plus.

00;15;37;27 – 00;15;40;20
Ben Wright
Thank you for joining us today, Doctor Eltis.

00;15;40;22 – 00;15;45;23
David Eltis
My pleasure.

00;15;45;25 – 00;16;04;20
Ben Wright
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