European overseas expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries initially took two directions. The first was towards the African west coast where the Portuguese were involved in raiding and trading expeditions for products like slaves, ivory, pepper and gold. The second initial direction of expansion was towards the Atlantic Islands. Here, Europeans found exploitable but not necessarily inhabited land where they collected wild products like honey and timber. Because of the lack of arable land in Iberia, colonists eventually returned to settle the land and cultivate products like wheat and ultimately sugar. Sugar was immensely profitable to produce but required large tracts of land and a large labour force for production. For these two reasons, the sugar and slave trade became intimately entwined in the European exploitation of the Atlantic Islands. This exploitation would eventually spread onwards to the Americas.

The Sugar Plantation

The capitalist plantation system was an economic system oriented to producing a highly commercialised crop using an archaic social form - slavery - to provide its labour. The profits from sugar production provided the impetus for the development of the plantation system that matured in the Mediterranean and eventually spread across the Atlantic to the Americas. Other commercial crops would be adapted to this system such as cotton, indigo, and tobacco, but sugar was the first.

Sugar cane cultivation had its origins in Southwest Asia. From there it was carried to Persia and then to the eastern Mediterranean by Arab conquerors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Shortly after sugar cane's introduction to the Mediterranean, it was being grown on estates similar to the later plantations of the Americas. By the fourteenth century Cyprus became a major producer using the labour of Syrian and Arab slaves. Eventually sugar made its way to Sicily where a familiar pattern of enslaved or coerced labour, relatively large land units, and well-developed long-range commerce was established. The Portuguese and the Spanish both looked to Sicily as a model to be followed in their own colonies in the Atlantic, and in 1420 Prince Henry sent to Sicily for cane plantings and experienced sugar technicians.

An innovation in sugar production, the roller mill, was introduced to the Mediterranean (perhaps by the Sicilians) and the Atlantic Islands in the fifteenth century. The roller mill reduced the time and labour needed to prepare the sugar cane, thereby increasing the mill's capacity. It was this technology, combined with the system of production developed in the Mediterranean, which was transplanted and expanded to the Atlantic Islands. The final component necessary for the industry's growth was satisfying its requirement of a large labour force. The solution was the incorporation of African slaves.

Slavery in Iberia had been an aspect of daily life since the Roman Empire. The continual warfare between the Muslims and the Christians in Iberia had created a constant source of bondsmen, but only on a very small scale. There was no dramatic change in Iberian slavery until the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in 1415 made the trafficking of North African slaves possible. By the 1440's slavery had a profound resurgence and this was due to the Portuguese "raid and trade" expansion down the West African coast. In 1448 more than one thousand Africans had been imported to Portugal, and this figure increased by 800 to 900 Africans a year. By the end of the century this increase in the slave trade coincided with the burgeoning cane fields in the Algarve and Madeira. This need for canefield labour altered permanently the nature of Portuguese slavery from one of domestic servitude to plantation slavery. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries almost all of the Atlantic Islands: the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Madeira experienced sugar booms. In 1425 Madeira was colonised under the auspices of Prince Henry and by 1460's it had become the largest single producer of sugar in the Western world.

As a young man Christopher Columbus was trained in the Madeira sugar trade. He brought this experience to the New World on his second voyage of 1493 when he introduced sugar cane plantings to the Caribbean. But it wasn't until the early sixteenth century that the sugar industry began to thrive first in Santo Domingo, then Cuba, and soon after in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately the growth of this industry in the Caribbean was hindered by the constant drain of people and resources to the mainland, drawn by the lure of gold and silver.

The Portuguese discovered Brazil in 1500. Very early in the settlement process the colonial office requested a sugar technician. By 1518 the first plantation was in operation but it was not until the 1530's that sugar agriculture was firmly established in Brazil. In 1591 the sugar industry was expanding rapidly to meet the growing demand in European markets. By the end of the sixteenth century the Atlantic slave trade had been regularised, making it a dependable source for labour. Until this point in time the European colonists had been using indigenous people, who the Europeans had incorrectly named "Indians", as slaves. The need for skilled slaves was critical if the sugar industry was to expand. The best slave investment became the West Africans who had experience from the Atlantic or Caribbean plantations as sugar masters, purgers, blacksmiths, kettle men, and sugar craters. By the early seventeenth century the shift from indigenous slaves to African slaves was well under way.

African Slavery

Slavery is the holding of human beings as property and it has been a practice that has flourished from the earliest recorded history until the early twentieth century. In the Western context slavery has had a lengthy history with its roots firmly planted within the Greek and Roman traditions. Aristotle, for example, was a slave owner who made it his policy to own slaves who did not share a language, thus preventing any possible collusion among them. Slavery also has had a long history on the continent of Africa. Critical to an analysis of why slavery was such an important institution in Africa is an understanding of the differences between the African and European legal systems. In European legal systems, land was the primary form of private, revenue-producing property; thus, ownership of land was the fundamental legal feature of this system. The African system evolved in such a way that landed private property, or the corporate ownership of land, was absent. Thus African law recognised slaves as the only form of private, revenue-producing property. The issue of wealth production was the same in both systems, but they diverged in their emphasis on where the wealth was produced; products from the land or products from labour. Both were important because each was a reproducing form of personal property that could be inherited by the next generation and could continue to generate wealth. In Africa people, rather than land, were taxed and as a result slavery and slave trading were widespread and pivotal in producing secure wealth for the African political and economic elites. Thus a complex, indigenous institution of slavery was already in place long before the Europeans arrived. In the early fifteenth century, European traders carried out sporadic slave raids along the coast, but the majority of traders eventually realised that there was already in place a well-developed system of slavery that they could peacefully tap into just as easily as any African trader could.

The Kingdom of Kongo's nobility was not wealthy in ready cash, but they were wealthy in slaves. As the major form of wealth in central Africa, slaves played a much more complex role in African society than they ever could in European society. Slaves were seen as a dependent and loyal group that the African elites could use not only for the production of revenue, but also for the performance of administrative and military service. African rulers recognised the value of slaves who were their private property and absolutely loyal as workers, soldiers, and retainers. In this system, Africa created many wealthy and powerful slaves. Empires like the powerful Sudanese relied heavily on slave armies and administrators to keep the local nobility in check. This internal dynamic of African political and institutional structures was far more responsible for the African slave trade then any pressure that the Europeans could have exerted. The majority of Africans outside of Africa were slaves, and in the Atlantic world, they made a profound economic and cultural impact through their labour and through the cultural heritage that they brought with them from Africa.

The Middle Passage

Because so much of the slave trade was done illegally it is difficult to estimate the actual numbers of Africans who were shipped as slaves on European vessels. By the end of the sixteenth century the estimated annual exports of slaves from Africa was 9,500 per year. The result was that literally millions of Africans crossed to the Atlantic and Caribbean Islands, and to the Americas, between 1450 and 1600. For most Africans the starting point for this crossing was the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage was at best a voyage that was very unpleasant and dehumanising. At its worst it was an ordeal that led to a slow and painful death.

European ships were loaded with groups of six people chained together with neck and foot shackles. On board, they were put below the decks, placed head to foot, still chained in long rows. Some historians estimate that for every ton of cargo there were four slaves transported. Conditions below deck were horrendous: crowded cargo holds where the air circulation was very bad, unbearable heat, and a chronic lack of adequate supplies of food and water. Most Africans suffered from seasickness and vomited often. The poor food led to widespread diarrhea and these conditions led to the outbreak of diseases like typhoid fever, measles, yellow fever, and smallpox.

The unhealthy conditions were made worse by the common practice of overcrowding a ship in order to maximise profit. The longer the ship was at sea the higher the slave mortality rate. There was never any question that Africans would die during a voyage, only how many. Short voyages, like the run to São Tomé from Benin, could expect a 5 to 10 per cent mortality rate. Longer voyages, like the run to Lisbon from São Tomé might be 30 per cent or higher. Those that survived the voyage were usually reduced to skeletons and many would die from neglect while awaiting customs clearance and sale.

The extreme human degradation that characterised the Middle Passage left many Africans to suffer severe psychological shock. This was compounded by a common fear among the Africans that they had been taken by the Europeans to be eaten, to be made into oil or gunpowder, or that their blood was to be used to dye the red flags of Spanish ships. In fact it was their skill as agricultural labourers and their adaptability to tropical climates that were sorely needed in the agricultural economy of the European colonies, an economy based upon the plantation system.

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