Out of Africa

A prize-winning, informative and irritating book (reference 1) written by a one-time real journalist, now academic journalist. A child of two African-American parents of mixed and diverse heritage, married to a lady from Ghana.

I came to the book via an article in the NYRB (reference 2). An easy-read book, but reading has been slowed down by the irritation. I associated to the book at reference 7, irritating in something of the same way – but without being stodgy in the same way.

Given the amount of ground covered, it seems likely that there are going to be a fair number of errors and failures of balance. But I don’t suppose that they detract that much from the bottom line below.

The book covers the period suggested in the title rather unevenly, with much more space given to the first half than the second. Perhaps fair enough, given that the first part is the part which most of us never knew.

The bottom line

A book which, inter alia, asserts that the pre-eminence of the UK in the 19th century was built on the cheap labour of slaves in the Caribbean and the US, first in growing sugar, then in growing cotton. And that the pre-eminence of the US in the 20th century was built on the cheap labour first of slaves, then of freed slaves. And depended in some large part on the successful rebellion of the slaves of what is now Haiti triggering the Louisiana purchase. Furthermore, the UK while being smug about having stopped the Atlantic slave trade, continued to profit from the cheap labour of slaves and their descendants. And much the same was true of the northern states of the US, with, to give just one example, pre-revolution New England being given a big leg-up by being a big supplier of the sugar islands.

A miscellany

A few odds and ends follow, by way of a taster for the book proper.

There were two great migrations within the US. The first, of slaves into the Mississippi delta to grow cotton in the first part of the nineteenth century. The second, of freed slaves into the industrial cities of the north from the cotton fields of the south, in the first part of the twentieth century. The first triggered by the Louisiana purchase, the second triggered by the invention of the cotton harvester. 

Mali aside, western and central Africa may have been a patchwork of unstable, warring states for most of the period. But states which were, nevertheless, a match for the sort of armies that Europeans were able to put into the field. The relationship was more one of trade, albeit a destructive trade, than one of conquest. We took gold and slaves out, they took a variety of manufactured goods in.

There had always been trade in slaves in Africa, with many of them going to the Middle East. But many of the slaves captured in the endemic warfare of the time were assimilated rather than sold and the brutal, slave based plantation system, invented off the African coast and which then moved across the Atlantic, was new.

We are offered estimates that maybe 12 million slaves were shipped to the Americas. Perhaps half as many again lost their lives on the way from their homes in the interior. Maybe 3 millions to the Middle East. I have not attempted to verify these figures.

Both sugar (originally from far-away New Guinea) and cotton (from both old and new worlds) were brutal crops. And while the trans-Atlantic trade in slave was up and running, it was often cheaper to work slaves into the ground and then replace them – rather than look after the ones you already had.

The rapidly increasing supply of sugar made a significant difference to the diet of the workers in the UK. French argues that it made the industrial revolution possible. And he reminds us that the condition of these workers was pretty grim too – although not the in the same league as slavery. Also that at the beginning of the period, plenty of workers were shipped from the UK to the Caribbean to work as indentured labourers or servants. Otherwise, slavery for a term of years. A pest which used to afflict, and perhaps still afflicts, rural India.

Small islands were good for plantations in the beginning; they contained the slaves. Notwithstanding, Brazil did quite well on slaves and sugar for a while. 

We are told of the curious case of the Kingdom of the Kongo, which converted to Catholicism and had a good relationship with both Portugal and the Vatican for a hundred years or more – and survived in one form or another until the end of the nineteenth century.

Conclusions

A shocking story. Although I have no idea what the descendants of the slave traders, that is to say us, are supposed to offer the descendants of the slaves traded by way of restitution.

Next stop reference 3, a book with more of the flavour of a university. There is also the matter of reference 4 which was brought to my attention while I was reading this book.

PS: no mention of this kind of sugar in the famous book of reference 8.

References

Reference 1: Born in Blackness: Africa, African and the making of the modern world: 1471 to the Second World War – Howard W. French – 2022.

Reference 2: Naipaul’s unreal Africa – Howard W. French, NYRB – 2022.

Reference 3: A New World of Labor. The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic – Simon P Newman – 2013.

Reference 4: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/how-to-reduce-online-racism/. Something of the same story to be found here. 

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-last-shout.html. An earlier spin-off.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/mali.html. Another earlier spin-off.

Reference 7: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/07/elkins-and-out.html. Another irritating book.

Reference 8: Food in England – Dorothy Hartley – 1954.