Empires, plantations and resistance

An old black-and-white plan shows a ship seen from above and in cross-section, its decks entirely covered with human figures lying packed tightly against one another. — Plan of the British slave ship Brookes, printed in London in 1787 by James Phillips: campaigners against the slave trade circulated it to show how 609 African captives were packed into the hold. Printed by James Phillips, George Yard, Lombard Street, London, Public domain, source

Over three hundred and sixty-six years, about 12.5 million people were forcibly embarked from Africa to the Americas.¹

About 10.7 million were landed.

More than 1.8 million people did not arrive.²

This figure was not established separately: it is the gap between two counts, that of the people who went on board and that of the people who came off. A figure always counts something specific; here, the difference between two pieces of data is the historical fact itself.

The system these figures come from

These deportations were no accident of history: they fed an economic system built for this purpose, which lasted nearly four centuries.

A colonial empire is a set of territories conquered and administered by a distant state, for its own profit. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Portugal, Spain, England, France and the Netherlands thus divided up the Americas, then parts of Africa and Asia. A colony is not governed for its own sake: it supplies the metropole with what the metropole does not produce.

A plantation is the tool of this supply. It is a large agricultural estate devoted to a single crop intended for export — sugar first, then tobacco, rice, indigo, coffee. What it produces is not meant to feed those who work there, but to be sold far away.³

This model was not invented in America. It had first been set up on islands off the coast of Africa, where the Portuguese were already having sugar cane grown by enslaved Africans. The Americas did not give birth to the system: they gave it scale.⁴

This model requires a large workforce, available all year round and unable to leave. The colonists first exploited the indigenous populations, decimated by epidemics, then indentured European workers. It was in particular the inadequacy of these two solutions that led to the mass deportation of enslaved Africans — a hereditary status, defined by law as property.⁵

The resulting circuit is often called the triangular trade: goods from Europe to Africa, people from Africa to the Americas, colonial produce from the Americas to Europe. The phrase is convenient but simplifying: the real trade was more complex, and part of the slave trade took place within the Americas themselves.⁶

Sugar is at the heart of the system. A luxury commodity that became an everyday consumer product in Europe, it requires exhausting cultivation and immediate processing on the spot. It was the crop that required the most labour, and it was to the sugar colonies — Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, Barbados, Brazil — that the majority of the deportees were sent.⁷

Against this system, resistance never ceased: it took the forms examined below, from everyday slowdowns to marronage and armed revolt.

Why these numbers are known

How are these figures known so precisely, when estimates of the population of the Americas before 1492 still vary by several tens of millions?⁸

Because it was a trade.

A trade keeps accounts: logbooks, insurance papers, port registers, shipowners’ ledgers. They record what is bought, what is carried, what is sold, and what is lost along the way.

Researchers brought together decades of archival work in two major databases:

36,000 transatlantic crossings recorded;
10,000 journeys within the Americas — for the trade continued after landing.⁹

For each voyage, the team sought to establish the dates, the owners, the ship, the captain, the African ports of call, the American destination, the number of people embarked and the number landed.¹⁰

The team found most of this information for about 80% of the transatlantic slave trade. The rest was estimated by calculation.¹¹

The key point: these data are known because those responsible kept precise accounts of them.

Breakdown by flag

Breakdown of the people embarked by the flag of the ships (estimates):

Flag	People embarked
Portugal	about 5,850,000
Great Britain	about 3,260,000
France	about 1,380,000
Spain	about 1,060,000
Netherlands	about 550,000
United States	about 305,000
Denmark	about 111,000

Sources for the table¹²

The scientific approach and margins of error

The historians of this project write “about”, state their coverage — four voyages in five — and say how they reconstructed the rest. Their work builds on the first overall census, published by the historian Philip Curtin.¹³

Far from weakening the argument, this approach strengthens it. A team that specifies its margin of error distinguishes what it knows from what it infers. It is the approach of the scientists who date a fossil to 315,000 years “give or take 34,000 years”, as reported on our page on the origins of Homo sapiens.

More than ninety thousand names

A third database records the names of more than ninety thousand people, with the place of embarkation, sex and origin.¹⁴

But the reason why these particular names were preserved is significant. These people appear in the archives only because their ship was intercepted by patrols, after the trade had been legally banned, and they were then registered one by one.¹⁵

So it was not their story that caused their name to be preserved: it was the boarding of the ship. And these names represent only a tiny fraction of the twelve and a half million people embarked.

Forms of resistance

The history of the slave trade cannot be reduced to what was endured. It was opposed at every stage, individually and collectively.

Shipboard insurrections: Mutinies broke out during the crossings; historians have recorded these uprisings and study their causes.
Marronage and autonomous communities: Fleeing the plantation gave rise to lasting communities — quilombos in Brazil, palenques in the Hispanic world, marronage in the Caribbean. They developed their own cultures, their own agriculture and their own systems of defence.
Plantation revolts: Strikes, sabotage and armed insurrections regularly disrupted the system, such as the Jamaican revolt of 1760 or the La Escalera conspiracy in Cuba.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804): In Saint-Domingue, the insurrection launched by the captives defeated the colonial armies. It led to the abolition of slavery and to the independence of Haiti.
Other slave-trade circuits: Alongside the transatlantic slave trade, the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades also deported millions of captives over several centuries. Although less documented by centralised accounting archives, they too gave rise to resistance, from go-slows to flight and sabotage.¹⁶

Note 1

in 366 years, slaving vessels embarked about 12.5 million captives in Africa, and landed 10.7 million in the New World

Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases, Rice University et consortium d’universités