Max Bruckner History 203 Makimura Book Review #2 The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey by Randy Sparks The largest forced migration in human history, the African Slave Trade, has left little documentation records for historians to work from. Given the long lasting historical repercussions of the estimated eleven million African captives forced to cross the Atlantic from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, we know amazingly little about the individual experiences of the horrific middle passage. Randy Sparks’s book corrects this silence. It tells the remarkable story of two African princes enslaved at Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, taken first to the Caribbean and then shipped to Virginia. They then escaped to England where they sued for their freedom, and finally made their way back to Old Calabar.
The slave trade impacted Africa’s population, turning it into half of what it was expected to be in 1850. Organization of the Trade: 1. Triangle trade is a trade network in which slaves from Africa were carried to the Americas, sugar, tobacco, and other goods were carried from the Americas to Europe, and European products were sent to the coast of Africa to trade for the slaves and start the whole network. African Societies, Slavery, and the Slave Trade 1. Europeans made slave trade acceptable by saying that is was already practiced in the continent and they were not the first.
(McKay, Chap 21, pg 570) In order to get a good perspective on what being a slave was like, we will look into a narrative written by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was a native of Iboland who was captured at the age of eleven. He describes how some villagers would wait until the adults would go out in the plantations to work to abduct their younger children. Once Equiano was sold to the Europeans he says that they were treated horribly beaten and cramped on a very small boat. The reason that the slaves were treated badly could have been due to the fact that the Europeans had to pay a high price for them or just due to a lack of space.
Ch.4 Sec 1: Slavery and Empire -Mercantilism realized: the triangular trade. -West Africa had become a thriving slave industry since the Portuguese had arrived while going to the West coast. Most slaves went to other destinations, like South America( Brazil), Caribbean and then some to the Americas. Very little of them went straight to North America. *The Ordeal of the Slave* -A state of perpetual terror: 1) first caught from her/ his tribe by the Europeans or another tribe.
(Gallay, 2011) Indentured servants were men, women, and sometimes children from England who signed a contract with a master to serve them for four to seven years. They exchanged their service for passage from England to the New World, for food, clothing, and shelter. (Stratford Hall, 2012) After their contract was over, the servant was given food, clothing, tools, and land of their own. Indentured servants were mostly white English people, but in 1619 a group of twenty Africans arrived in Virginia. Those twenty Africans were sold to the settlers of Jamestown from a captain of a Dutch man-of-war.
Name Date CHAPTER 4 Summary CHAPTERS IN BRIEF The Atlantic World, 1492–1800 CHAPTER OVERVIEW Starting in 1492, the Spanish built a large empire in the Americas, but the native peoples suffered. In North America, the Dutch, French, and English fought for control. England finally won. The labor of enslaved persons brought from Africa supported the American colonies. The contact between the Old World and the New produced an exchange of new ideas.
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima speaks of Christopher Columbus’ diary, which spoke of his many voyages and discoveries. After his second voyage, the Portuguese informed Columbus of Africans in large boats with merchandise sailing west of the Cape Verde islands. The Portuguese were aware of African navigation because they had been in Africa since 1415. Not only did the Portuguese tell Columbus of Africans but Natives in the Olmec civilization spoke of Africans as well. The Olmec civilization, was the first civilization established in the Americas.
The Middle Passage The middle passage was when African Americans were forced to go from the West Coast of Africa to the Caribbean’s where they were marketed, and sold for profit to the plantations owners. This journey was listed as the “Middle Passage” because it was considered the middle leg of the trading triangles, and this was constructed in the early stages of the colonial period. The Middle Passage started from even before 1619 an it was the arrival of the very first African slaves in British Northern America. However, as it developed it was initially amongst Portuguese and the West African mariners in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The Africans were taken or for better word use they were kidnapped by the Europeans and, by other Africans mostly for trading spoils of
Columbus made his first landing in the Bahamas, and the Spanish transported many of the Arawak to work in mines in Hispaniola and Cuba, where most of them perished. The first permanent settlement of Europeans was a group of English settlers who organized a community in 1647. The Bahamas became a British Crown Colony in 1717. Bahamians gained self-governing status in 1964 and full independence within the British Commonwealth in 1973. As a member of the commonwealth, the Bahamas recognizes the Queen Elizabeth II (b.
Each partida is divided into articles (182 in total), and these are composed of laws (2802 in all). The French West Indies had, as the basis of their slave laws, the Code Noir (Black Code) which was drawn up in France in 1685 and remained in force until 1804, until it was replaced by the Code Napoleon. The British colonies did not have a set of laws drawn up by the mother country; instead, each colony drew up its own set of laws. Such laws began to be passed by mid seventeenth century which gave the masters total authority over the life and death of their slaves. These slave codes saw the slaves as heathenish and brutish and each slave owner was required to act as a policeman to deal with his slaves by using a whip.