The growth in Atlantic communities was driven by the "mobile, multiethnic, exploitative, and commercial Atlantic trade” so feared by the Trustees of the Georgia colony during their 1732 to 1752 tenure.[1] The reformist efforts of the Trustees would have better addressed to their own class however, as the South Sea bubble which had collapsed in 1720, was only the most recent event in a series of economic aggressions by elites against the poor, which had bgun with the enclosure movement of the 1500s. These aggressions turned English small farmers and small-businessmen first into common laborers, and then into thieves and prostitutes. Although the trustees did initially attempt to exclude slaves from the colony, Trustee control over the labor of the men and women transported to Georgia, meant that the Georgian colonists – who were paupers, whose migration had not been entirely voluntary – were part of the “consolidation of forced labor” of that time.[2] Under the circumstances, it was unsurprising that both the quality and quantity of colonist labor was disappointing, especially since the Georgia colony was expected to eventually do more than just meet the need of the colonists themselves.
The city of Bristol was also dependent on the Atlantic trade, and its dependence intensified after the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1698. Bristol grew rapidly by virtue of outcompeting London by its ability to deliver an average of "24 percent more slaves with the same quantity of inputs as their London rivals." [3] This was probably due to Bristol’s significantly shorter transit time, (which would have decreased slave - and sailor - mortality), and that, in turn was most likely a combination of Bristol’s more favorable geography, and a lack of slave trading competition in the Bight of Biafra, resulting in less time spent haggling with African traders over the price of slaves.[4] (43)
Similarly, the West African ports on the Slave Coast show these communities to have been a part of the wider Atlantic world. More than 10,000 slaves were estimated as having departed for the New World from this region between 1687 and 1811, mostly through Ouidah, its principal 18th century shipping port, which was ruled by strong African states.[5] This long period of intensive slave trade caused population growth both in Ouidah and in Bahia via slaves shipped to Bahia in the 18th century, and freed slaves who returned in the 19th century. The length of this trade also permitted a demand for other African products, such as palm oil, and kola nuts,[6] to spring up, and allowed a religious syncretism of African and Christianity to develop in Brazil.[7]
[1] James O’Neill Spady. “Bubbles, and Beggars and the Bodies of Laborers: The Georgia Trusteeships Colonialism Reconsidered”, Atlantic World, Volume 11: Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750,(Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007), 263, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/lib/asulib/docDetail.action?docID=10271057 (accessed 6/10/2012).
[2] David Richardson, “Involuntary Migration in the Early Modern World," The Cambridge World History of Slavery, online edition, vol. 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2011).
[3] David Richardson, "Slavery and Bristol's 'Golden Age'", Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 26:1(2005): 35-54, 41, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440390500058830 (accessed June 10, 2012).
[4] Richardson, "Slavery and Bristol's 'Golden Age'", 43.
[5] Robin Law and Kristin Mann, "West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast", The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 56, No. 2 African and Atlantic Worlds (April 1999), 312-313, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674121 (accessed June 10, 2012).
[6] Law and Man, 314.
[7] Elizabeth W. Kiddy, "Congados, Calunga, Canadombe: Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais, Brazil", Luso-Brazilian Review, XXXVIII 0024-7413/00/0047(2000), 48.
I felt your blog post focused too heavily on the slave trade and not enough on the broader economic forces of the time. There is no question that the slave trade helped to grow Atlantic communities in a big way. However, these slaves were not captured and shipped just for the fun of it. The European market was growing and its appetite was always eager to be satiated by the newest flavors from the New World. Initially this insatiable desire was sugar. The high demand and potential profits were what initially made the slave trade, and all of the expenditures involved therein, to be an economic feasibility. It made sense to pay trappers to capture slaves and ship them across the ocean in order to sell them to plantation owners. Granted, the slave trade itself is one of the greatest factors that aided in the growth of Atlantic Communities. But without a need to make that business model feasible, Atlantic Communities might have grown very differently.
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