Ideological, doctrinal, religious and political
aspects of the African slave trade19has survived to our day.^7 It has, however, been refuted by the history of the
European colonies in America.
After exterminating the American Indians, the British and the French
began to employ white slaves to work their plantations. At that time political
prisoners and criminals were exiled to the West Indies. The system of inden-
tured servants was also widespread. In Europe, particularly in London and
Bristol, people were kidnapped and sold into slavery to the New World.^8
In the 1640s, when sugar-cane was introduced on a wide scale in the
West Indies, and crop areas were extended, the number of white slaves fell
short of the demand for manpower. Beginning with the late seventeenth cen-
tury the import of African slaves into the colonies of the New World rose
sharply.
Thus the reason for replacing white slaves by Africans had nothing to
do with the hot climate. At that time Europe simply could not supply the
colonies with a sufficient amount of cheap manpower. As admitted by all
contemporaries, without the enslavement of Africans the colonies of the New
World could not have continued to exist. One of the documents of the Royal
African Company, founded in 1672, reads: "The slaves are sent to all His
Majesty's American Plantations which cannot subsist without them.'^9
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the slave trade became
notorious as one of the most profitable branches of trade, and each European
country, provided it had the opportunity, sought to snatch a profitable share
of the slave trade for itself. Great Britain, Holland and France were the leading
slave-trading powers of the time. From the late seventeenth century, the British
North American colonies, the future United States of America, also sent slave
ships to the American coast. Even Denmark and Sweden built several forts
on the western coast of Africa with the aim of taking part in the slave
trade.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slave trade was considered
as respectable as any other branch of trade. Tradesmen from different countries
boasted of their successes in trading in 'live merchandise'. Pages upon pages of
old books are filled with inventories showing the number of slaves exported
from Africa and the number of those who managed to reach the New World
alive.^10 These data are only approximate—there were no precise statistics—yet
they are sufficient evidence of the importance of the slave trade and its scope
in the eighteenth century.
Robert Bisset's The History of the Negro Slave Trade in its Connection
with the Commerce and Prosperity of the West Indies and the Wealth of the
British Empire}^1 one of the most serious works on the subject written by an
advocate of the slave trade in the years of struggle for its abolition, when both
abolitionists and their opponents spared neither words nor emotions in publi-
cizing their economic, political and religious views on the subject, gives the