Animated History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html?hnrepost=9783442

by aidos • 11 years ago

79 46 11 years ago

slate.com

mmanfrin• 11 years ago

It's a shame that it stops at 1860 -- since a major part of the article is about how it was not primarily North America that was the recipient of slaves, but 1860 is the beginning of the Civil War (which concerned just the US).

Also would have been nice to show 'events', such as the banning of importing slaves to the US in 1807 (you can see the boat traffic essentially stop to North America at that point).

Tuna-Fish2• 11 years ago

While there were sporadic slave ships making the crossing after 1860, the trade was already illegal in all destinations. This meant that unlike for the period during which the slave trade was legal, we have no surviving records of them.

mikeash• 11 years ago

From the FAQ for the database which it visualizes:

"For the Voyages Database, the time frame is set by default to the period from 1514, the first year in which a slave voyage can be documented, to 1866, the year of arrival of the last three documented slave voyages."

I don't know what accounts for the 6-year discrepancy there, but I would wager that the choice of ending in 1860 is not due to the US Civil War.

yitchelle• 11 years ago

With such high numbers going to the Caribbean and Brazil, were these just holding ports before the slaves were moved onto their final destinations?

maceo3• 11 years ago

No, that was their final destination. Brazil had by far the largest slave population in the world. Haiti was the crown jewel of the French empire and the envy of all nations. The caribbean slave trade began to decline when Toussaint L'Ouverture rose to power in Haiti (The Haitian and French revolution were very closely intertwined) and slavery was abolished.

The seminal book on this period of Haitian history is "The Black Jacobins" by CLR James.

lexcorvus3• 11 years ago

Haitian revolutionaries murdered virtually all white men, and spared only the women willing to marry black men. [1] "Black Jacobins" is indeed an apt term for such barbarism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

Tuna-Fish2• 11 years ago

Also, so many of the ships landed in the Caribbean because the death rate of the slaves on many of the Caribbean plantations were high enough that the populations could not replace losses through natural growth, requiring constant new shipments.

Sadly, the plantations were profitable enough that constantly bringing in new slaves to die in hellish conditions was just a cost of doing business.

afarrell3• 11 years ago

/adds to reading list

A very short introduction to the Haitian revolution can be found on CrashCourse World History https://youtube.com/watch?v=5A_o-nU5s2U

michaelsbradley• 11 years ago

For those interested in the history of Haiti and learning how, as the parent indicated, slavery and the Haitian and French revolutions were intertwined, I highly recommend:

Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492-1995

by Robert and Nancy Heinl

http://www.amazon.com/Written-Blood-Haitian-People-1492-1995...

It's a chilling read, in many parts, and some of the material may disturb readers who do not care for written depictions of violence – atrocious acts were committed by both slaves and slave owners during the revolutionary period. Having lived in Haiti (Cap-Haïtien) for a year (2007-08), the Heinls' book gave me a much broader perspective on how things got to be the way they are on that beautiful but desperately poor island, so very close to the shores of the wealthiest country on earth.

mixmastamyk• 11 years ago

Not really, they were sent there to work on the sugar cane plantations (and other products).

Unlike Mexico or Peru, there was not enough native population to exploit and lots of work to do in Brazil. Hence the much higher percentage of African descendants that continues today.

DonQuixote1000• 11 years ago

The pope outlawed slavery of the native population.

bjwbell• 11 years ago

No. They used the slaves there for sugar plantations, among other things.

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

In the Caribbean, slaves were used in the sugar trade. Apparently also in Brazil based on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil

Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Brazil, and sugar was the primary export of the colony from 1600–1650.

Sugar was principally used to produce molasses, and from that, rum:

In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves. Sugar (often in the form of molasses) was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was distilled into rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were then used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe.

Another major use of slave labour was in cotton and tobacco production. Also of mining, in Brazil.

In the Caribbean:

Due to overwork and tropical diseases, the death rates for Caribbean slaves were greater than birth rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#British_and...

Another statistic I've seen: life expectancy of British soldiers in West Africa during the 18th and 19th century was about six months.

Government servants fared no better. During one seven-month period Sierra Leone went through 4 acting governors; two died in office and another, mindful of his predecessors fates, left the colony when he fell ill. On another occasion, a governor returning from a trip found his administration had no lawyer, no chief justice, no secretary, no chaplain, and only one schoolmaster....

The story was similar elsewhere in Britain’s West African outposts. In 1824 half the 600 soldiers garrisoned in the Gold Coast died within a few months, and the House of Commons was told in 1826, that of 1,567 troops sent out in the previous two years, 905 had died.

Europeans died mainly from malaria and yellow fever - or from the “cures” which were nearly as dangerous as the ailments.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kenanderson/histemp/whitemansgrav...

Yellow fever also reached the US:

Yellow fever has been a source of several devastating epidemics.[107] Cities as far north as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were hit with epidemics. In 1793, one of the largest yellow fever epidemics in U.S. history killed as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia—roughly 10% of the population. About half of the residents had fled the city, including President George Washington.[108] In colonial times, West Africa became known as "the white man's grave" because of malaria and yellow fever.[109]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Yellow_fever

Scientific paper, paywalled:

The End of the "White Man's Grave"? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa Philip D. Curtin The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer, 1990), pp. 63-88 http://www.jstor.org/stable/204918?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

(Compiled for comment elsewhere.)

Falcon9• 11 years ago

Seriously impressive interactive map, especially when you realize you can pause and click any "ship" for more information.

If this kind of thing had been available when I was in school, I may have had a whole different perspective on history.

beebs93• 11 years ago

Ha - I was impressed before realizing you could do that. Now I'm even more amazed!

protomyth2• 11 years ago

One of the back projects that I will never get to is "how much of this kind of moving graphic could be built with basic animation tools and data from tables in a spreadsheet style interface". I think a HyperCard for showing simulations would be an amazing tool. For something like this put the map as a graphic for the background, define the animation routes, the shape of the ship, and then read the data off a table to know what to animate when. There are tools for this type of stuff, but, last time I looked, they are fairly complicated. It would be amazing to have Harry Potter-style living documents.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Ha sheet, part of my ancestry was on one of these ships. My mother met an mixed Indian at the head of an associations, he told us records (for what they're worth) were kept in an archive somewhere. I didn't know (maybe him too) there were digitalization efforts to make them ...clickable. Weird loop.

psedit: Erf, sheet again, "only" African trade. Too bad, can't click on my (grand^n)pa.

pierrec• 11 years ago

The level of detail is impressive. What would be even more impressive would be to combine this with something like Geacron [1] to show the correct country borders for each year (instead of showing modern borders), as well as a timeline of major historical events on the side.

If you liked this and you're not aware of Geacron, you're in for a treat. Go ahead and spend countless hours on it, knowledge of history is something that's sorely lacking these days, and yet we have such amazing tools to learn it. There's also Centennia [2] for a more detailed moving map of Europe (but that's commercial).

[1] http://geacron.com

[2] http://www.clockwk.com/

And here's a video for the lethargic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDyJ_6N-6A

arjn2• 11 years ago

Thank you for posting those resources.

Yes,it would be very interesting to see changing countries and borders during the Atlantic slave-trade era. we may learn or understand something new from that.

corford• 11 years ago

I found 12 years a slave difficult viewing but watching this animation makes my skin crawl. The sheer scale of it is horrifying.

Clicking randomly on one of the ships revealed its name: Liberty. How pathetically ironic.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

History is full of horrors. Failure to appreciate that makes it all the easier for such horrors to happen again because we didn't do enough to keep them at bay.

cmyr• 11 years ago

This is just heartbreaking. If you're inclined to take a dim view of human progress, think about where we started. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and all that.

thrwy00001• 11 years ago

It's worth mentioning that the Transatlantic Slave Trade wasn't even the largest:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slaver...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_s...

Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism.

s_baby2• 11 years ago

Taking millions of Africans and even one million Europeans as slaves doesn't quite mesh with the popular perception of Arabs as poor, helpless victims of Western imperialism.

Even in the bbc article you posted they're being apologetic and trying to convince the reader that Islamic slavery was somehow exceptional. Great example of why Western narratives are essentially tone-deaf to Eastern Europeans. Can you imagine a respectable publication taking such a tone towards Southern slave owners and not getting into hot water for it?

dang2• 11 years ago

That's actually interesting, but immediately invoking some racial/political agenda spoils your comment. HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars.

thetruthteller• 11 years ago

HN is for intellectual curiosity, not ideological wars.

/s?

s_baby2• 11 years ago

Do you find it intellectually curious that Eastern European and Balkan women are still being trafficked by the thousands into the Middle East using many of the same traditions and rationalizations?

Animated History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

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