In 1660, the newly crowned king of England, Charles II, decided to celebrate by granting his brother, the future King James II, a charter granting him the right to trade with Africa. Rather excited, James lost no time in founding the Royal African Company which began trading with various kingdoms in west Africa right away, by which of course I mean he started buying and shipping African slaves across the Atlantic. You see, at the time, most of the English colonies, both in the Caribbean and North America, were suffering from a bit of a labor shortage. Sugar and tobacco plantations had been historically dependent on indentured servants and enslaved Native Americans, but the former were increasingly becoming a pain in the ass for various reasons and the latter kept dying of Old World diseases all the time, so really something had to be done to ensure people didn’t have to pay out the nose for a bit of the sweet stuff or a nice puff of pipe.
Now prior to this time, the shipment of African slaves across the Atlantic had been a going concern for the better part of 150 years, dominated first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch, but neither was ever really all that interested in selling slaves cheaply to their rivals. However, the future King James solved this by hiring a private navy and army and attacking the Dutch slave traders every chance he got. As a result, by 1675, the Dutch had lost their monopoly, and by 1690 the English were the largest shippers of African slaves, with trading posts, called factories for just plain terrible reasons, spread from present day Gambia to Nigeria. For their part, the Dutch kept control of the slave trade in Central Africa, while the Portuguese maintained dominance in the area of present day Angola.
Anyways, the breaking of the Dutch monopoly caused a complete collapse in the price of slaves, which was pretty sweet for the various plantation owners in the New World, who had lots of available land, just nobody to work it, but pretty terrible for the people of Africa because it greatly increased the demand for slaves. The slave trade soon became a major part of the Atlantic sea trade, and it wasn’t long before the English, being both terrible and enterprising as fuck, setup what became known as the triangular trade. This involved shipping guns, alcohol, indigo, textiles and other manufactured goods to Africa, using the proceeds to buy slaves which were shipped to the New World, and then buying sugar, rum, and tobacco to take back to England. This made the whole venture even more profitable, which of course increased the slave trade even more, because once you get a terrible cycle going it’s really hard to stop.
Now it’s probably worth mentioning at this point, that similar to the earlier Portuguese slave trade, the various leaders of the hundred or so kingdoms which dotted the African west coast were totally down with all of this. After all, slavery had long been a thing in Africa, and trading criminals and people from other kingdoms captured in wars to some random white guys for guns and various manufactured goods seemed like a pretty sweet deal. However, as the slave trade began to accelerate, it began to royally screw up the economic and political systems of these kingdoms. As demand began to outpace supply, some of the mor entrepreneurial kingdoms began starting wars with their neighbors specifically to capture slaves, which in turn forced the neighbors to buy more guns to protect themselves, which meant they needed more slaves to sell, and you can probably already tell where this shit cycle is going. Over time, various kingdoms coalesced into larger and stronger empires with complex infrastructures, all constantly beating the shit out of each other to capture more slaves, which had pretty much become the basis for their entire economies. For their part, the various European traders kept to the coasts, since every time they went into the interior they tended to die of diseases like malaria.
While this might seem all hunky dory for the various elites involved in this royally fucked up part of human history, it most definitely wasn’t in anyway great for the people sold across the ocean, never to see their homes again. Marched from the interior to the port factories, they were crammed tightly on disease ridden unsanitary ships where they were purposefully starved and forced to dance to keep them docile, and chained together to keep them from jumping overboard, a common problem because of the harsh conditions. Others tried to starve themselves to death and were force fed to be kept alive. Between being marched to the ocean and shipped across it, some 20% perished. Ironically the sailors who shipped them died just as often, treated terribly by the ship owners because the fewer who survived the return to England the fewer who would have to be paid.
After a voyage of two to three months, the new slaves would be offloaded on various Caribbean islands, for the English usually Jamaica, for seasoning. This involved packing them together in camps where what was left of their spirits was broken via constant beatings, until they were docile enough to be taught the various skills they would need for their new life of servitude. Some 33% died within their first year of arrival, most of from various shitting oneself to death diseases. The majority of the survivors were sent to sugar plantations, where most would be dead in less than ten years, worked to death by unimaginably harsh conditions. A relatively “lucky” few got to go to Chesapeake Bay and the other English colonies along the North American coast. Of course, lucky is a somewhat relative term. Sure, they didn’t die as horrifyingly fast as their brethren in the Caribbean, but they were still slaves, more livestock then people, not just doomed to a life time of subservience, beatings, torture, and rape themselves, but also knowing that their children, and their children’s children, would have to endure the same. Yeah, history is completely fucked up.
