Slavery Trade Routes – Part 3 Slavery’s New Frontiers
Al Jazeera (2018)
Film Review
The final episode in the series begins with the revolution in Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti) that would signal the beginning of the end for the slave trade. Led by Tousaint L’Ouverture, in 1791 the entire slave population of Saint Domingue (90% of residents) revolted again their plantation owners. It would be Napoleon’s first military defeat.
Although the British Navy succeeded in shutting down much of the slave trade in 1815, they couldn’t stem the flow of slaves to feed the prison-style industrial coffee plantations in Brazil. An additional 2 million Africans were deported to Brazil between 1815 and 1850. At present, Brazil has the second largest population of Africans in the world (with Nigeria at number one).
Although the trafficking of slaves to the US stopped in 1815, the American slave population continued to grow – in part due to the routine rape of female slaves by their white masters.
US Last Country to Abolish Slavery
In 1825, after achieving independence, all former Spanish colonies abolished slavery. French, English and Dutch colonies would gradually follow suit. The US formally abolished slavery in 1865 during the Civil War. In reality slavery continued in southern states with Jim Crow laws that denied Blacks the right to vote, freedom of movement and the right to self-defense. In addition, laws providing for the arrest of unemployed blacks for vagrancy resulted in a de facto involuntary servitude.
European Colonization of Africa
For me, the most interesting part of the film concerns the direct link between the abolition of slavery and the intensive European colonization of Africa. The military adventurers who conquered Africa were all “abolitionists.” Officially the purpose of their missions to Africa were to end the slave trade. In reality, they were deeply committed white supremacists who cut deals with Arab slave traders and local chieftains to put poor African peasants to work (involuntarily) on their African coffee, palm oil, rubber and cotton plantations.
The video can’t be embedded but can be seen free at the following link:
The Most Revolutionary Act 
It is striking to me that the open similarity of the concept to return the “former slaves back to Africa” primarily inspired by White Abolitionists and then misuse them as a colonial bridgehead is never compared to the Zionist concept!
Sunday regards
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Interesting point, Schluter. I was really impressed by the strong element of “involuntary servitude” (ie slavery) in that the early European colonists forced poor Africans to work on their coffee, palm oil, cotton and rubber plantations against their will.
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“US Last Country to Abolish Slavery”
The U.S. never abolished slavery hence the reason the 13th Amendment continues slavery by stating that ” Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” So, with that having been stated, I don’t see how it can be said that the U.S. abolished slavery and those who were enslaved during the European colonization of this land are the same complexion as those who are enslaved today. What has changed? Not a damn thing. In fact, it has been stated that there are more descendants of slaves enslaved today than there were original slaves in this land. So, we are going backwards in time, not forward.
“The military adventurers who conquered Africa were all “abolitionists.”
I don’t even know how “military adventurers” can be in the same sentence with “abolitionists” because one should, by military intervention, be attempting to continue the status quo while the other should be the opposing force, but now we are to learn that both were one and the same? This is all just too ludicrous for words, but not surprising seeing as how a slave trader allegedly got religion after having managed to make it through a frightful storm at sea which enabled him to gain empathy and compassion enough to become a member of the clergy and an abolitionist who wrote hymns, one of which that flaming warmonger, Barack Obama, sang over the dead body of Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney who got himself murdered by Dylann Roof in his church in South Carolina. “Amazing Grace” was howled over Rev. Pinckney’s body by Obama. How disgustingly, hypocritical, vile and demeaning! I am outraged, still!
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You are absolutely right, Shelby. Thanks to the 13th amendment, slavery never really ended in the US. Thanks for pointing this out. As for the European abolitionists who colonized Africa (and according to this film ran around looking for other Europeans to invest in their coffee, rubber, cotton and palm oil plantation – staffed by free labor), it sounds to me like they might have had some financial incentive to end the North Atlantic slave trade to improve their African investments.
The overall sense I get is that Europeans have always excelled at military conquest and enterprises based on kidnapping and violence but not much else.
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Perhaps the most extensive practice of slavery in history has been and is being conducted hy Muslims today as they follow the teachings in the Qur’an. Even African Muslims hold other Africans in slavery if they are not Muslims.
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I don’t know if you watched the video or not, marblenecltr, but I get the sense that the North Atlantic slave trade was slavery on an industrial scale – with millions (billions in today’s dollars) of financing from European banks and insurance companies. I have never seen any evidence of an industrially-financed slave trade in the Muslim world.
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Dr. Bramhall, I notice a sort of pattern in people when anyone speaks of the system of slavery in America. It is almost as if they want to continue to downplay the Europeans role in slavery by declaring that Africans had slaves, Muslims had slaves and so forth and so on.
What they fail to state is the fact that even if any of that were true, how many Africans or Middle Eastern Muslims are roaming all around the world depositing slaves for other countries to make use of? If whites don’t like the history of what they have done, then they always like to point the finger and say, “Look at those people, they did it too!” Like that excuses what the Europeans did in Africa and are still over there stealing everything that’s not nailed down to this very day. I noticed this pattern when you posted this series because another person posted a comment similar to the one above yours. Ever the ones in denial, whites are!
And certainly, “the most extensive practice of slavery in history has been and is being conducted by Muslims” is the biggest lie I have ever seen.
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The horrors of slavery are not to be denied, industrial or non-industrial. It was a past way of life that was practiced worldwide, and corrections are being made. It was part of man’s inhumanity to man, and it is ready to erupt with the total dominance by a very few over everyone else through globalism. You wrote about North Atlantic slave trade;. Much greater horrors were carried out through Mid- and South Atlantic slave trade. I did not see the television program you mentioned.
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Reblogged this on Worldtruth.
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The Brits based their Industrial Revolution on 200 years of slave-trading – then, having got a head start on everyone else, self-righteously set about denying others the opportunity to do the same!
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Interesting observation, Alan. I’m not sure that came out the way you meant it but I get the gist.
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😉
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