Module 1

“The Black Atlantic” was an event that occurred during the eighteenth century. Many historians, including Lovejoy, Inikori, and Eltis, cannot seem to agree on just how many Africans were stolen from their land and shipped across the seas. What they do seem to agree on, however, is the magnitude of such an event. Joseph Inikori, for example, describes the slave trade as an event that “shames the world” (Inikori, 37).

According to Walvin and his essay, “Questioning Slavery”, Africa provided European settlers with a much needed work force. They had an abundance of land, natural resources, and access of European capital. “What they also needed, however, was labour to unlock the potential of the region” (Walvin, 3). Because Africans had for some time been shipped and enslaved for the benefit of white settlers, Europeans continued to use them for labor. “By, say. The mid-eighteenth century, when the European appetite for African slaves seemed insatiable, Africa seemed the natural place to recruit labour for the Americas” (Walvin, 1). According to Walvin, Indians and other indigenous people were not able to contribute with their economic plans. Whole communities of Indians fell to the diseases that white men introduced, and indentured Europeans were too few in numbers for the back-breaking work for frontier life. African slaves became highly valued, and a more profitable investment than Indians. It would seem that the European settlers did not feel what they were doing was wrong by any means. “English settlers’ categorized the Negroes and Indians who worked for them as heathen brutes and very quickly treated them as chattels” (Walvin, 9). Africans were easily replaced by the next shipment if they were worked to death or became ill. People of color were viewed as animals, dirty and inferior, while whites viewed themselves as pure and superior.

“Movement in the early black Atlantic took multiple forms: it was intra- as well as international, transoceanic and coastal as well as inland, female as well as male” (Gezina, 42). Gezina describes the Black Atlantic as “acts of forced migration” in her essay, “Mobility in Chains: Freedom of Movement in the Early Black Atlantic”. During the eighteenth century alone, over six million slaves were taken from Africa, and hundreds of them were crossing the seas at any given time throughout the century. According to Gezina, “The concept of ‘home’ is a crucial one to the travel narrative, for what colonial discourse called ‘home’ or ‘England’ was seem as the domestic space of the English nation” (Gezina, 44). Many black writers that were slaves in this era considered the journey on the ocean a “safer domestic space” (ibid), giving them a sense of temporary freedom. African American mobility is connected with their desire of opportunity and aspiration to find a home. The Black Atlantic was both racial and religious. “Race was itself often the reason for the travel, even as that travel may have been motivated by the nearly impossible search for a deracinated space” (Gezina, 42). In many of the writings of Africans, the ocean was also a symbol of religious conversion. Equiano, for example, had his epiphany at sea, “Where it pleased God to pour out on me the spirit of prayer and the grace of supplication, so that in loud acclamations I was enabled to praise and glorify his most holy name” (Guzina, 43).

Although there seems to be some argument over just how many slaves were brought over from Africa, the end result is still the same. Slave trading changed not only the lives of the Africans stolen from their land and sealed their fate of back breaking labor or disease, it changed the course of history from that point on. Our world is what it is today because of the events that took place back then.