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Slavery
Breaking the chains
<DIV>Feb 22nd 2007 | CAPE COAST, GHANA
From The Economist print edition</DIV>
Britain abolished the slave trade 200 years ago this week. Its landmarks are an abiding legacy of cruelty
<BR clear=all><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width=404 align=center border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top><TABLE cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top align=right>Mary Evans</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=bottom>
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THE dungeons can still shock, two centuries after their last inmates were freed. Damp and fetid in the tropical air, immersed in virtual darkness, this is where slaves were kept, often for months at a time—before being led down a tunnel through the “door of no return” to ships riding in the surf, ready to begin their appalling voyage over the ocean.
Just one of the countless inmates left a written record. Having been sold to white traders for a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano recalled waiting in the dungeon till his time arrived: “To conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and groans and cries of our fellow men. Some would not stir from the ground, when they were lashed and beaten in the most horrible manner.”<CF_FLOATINGCONTENT></CF_FLOATINGCONTENT>
When the dungeons were excavated in the late 19th century, a mass of caked excrement was removed, together with the bones of birds and animals on which the slaves presumably fed. On such misery was founded a global trading system that in its heyday, in the mid-18th century, was taking about 85,000 Africans a year across the Atlantic to work on sugar and tobacco plantations that made Europe rich.
Cape Coast Castle was the grandest of the slave emporiums, at the centre of the trade. But in present-day Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, there were over 30 more slave forts, built and maintained by almost all of the European trading powers of the day: the Swedes, Danes, French, British, Dutch and Portuguese.
The “triangular trade” as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisation. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.
At one point the plantations of St Domingue provided two-thirds of France's overseas wealth. By the mid-18th century, though, Britain was the biggest slaving nation, and ports like Bristol, Liverpool and London thrived as a result.
So integral to the British economy was the slave business that there were few men and institutions of wealth who did not want to invest in it, from the royal family and
Breaking the chains
<DIV>Feb 22nd 2007 | CAPE COAST, GHANA
From The Economist print edition</DIV>
Britain abolished the slave trade 200 years ago this week. Its landmarks are an abiding legacy of cruelty
<BR clear=all><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width=404 align=center border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top><TABLE cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top align=right>Mary Evans</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=bottom>
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
THE dungeons can still shock, two centuries after their last inmates were freed. Damp and fetid in the tropical air, immersed in virtual darkness, this is where slaves were kept, often for months at a time—before being led down a tunnel through the “door of no return” to ships riding in the surf, ready to begin their appalling voyage over the ocean.
Just one of the countless inmates left a written record. Having been sold to white traders for a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano recalled waiting in the dungeon till his time arrived: “To conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and groans and cries of our fellow men. Some would not stir from the ground, when they were lashed and beaten in the most horrible manner.”<CF_FLOATINGCONTENT></CF_FLOATINGCONTENT>
When the dungeons were excavated in the late 19th century, a mass of caked excrement was removed, together with the bones of birds and animals on which the slaves presumably fed. On such misery was founded a global trading system that in its heyday, in the mid-18th century, was taking about 85,000 Africans a year across the Atlantic to work on sugar and tobacco plantations that made Europe rich.
Cape Coast Castle was the grandest of the slave emporiums, at the centre of the trade. But in present-day Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, there were over 30 more slave forts, built and maintained by almost all of the European trading powers of the day: the Swedes, Danes, French, British, Dutch and Portuguese.
The “triangular trade” as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisation. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.
At one point the plantations of St Domingue provided two-thirds of France's overseas wealth. By the mid-18th century, though, Britain was the biggest slaving nation, and ports like Bristol, Liverpool and London thrived as a result.
So integral to the British economy was the slave business that there were few men and institutions of wealth who did not want to invest in it, from the royal family and