220 Summary report of the meeting of experts
on the African slave trade
hardly involved in any large-scale production of exportable wealth. From
this standpoint, there is a great contrast between the Spanish part of
Hispaniola and the part which became French in the eighteenth century
and is now called Haiti.
The United Provinces benefited only from the transportation of slaves and from
the import of African raw materials. Their colonies in the Caribbean
demonstrated no great need for imported manpower nor any particular
productive vitality.
France, particularly in the eighteenth century, obviously made considerable
real profits from the slave trade, but perhaps even more profits from the
intensive exploitation of the Caribbean islands which it owned and which
enabled it to take part in the production of sugar and fresh food products
for the British North American colonies as well as the French colonies.
The basis for an economic and military alliance of converging interests
emerged between France and the British colonies.
The extent to which this manpower was exploited and driven, in Haiti for
example, created violent tensions in the relations between masters and slaves,
relations which constantly worsened with the arrival of more slaves. The rapid
reaction to the very success of the French farming economy was what led to
the revolt of Santo Domingo and Haitian independence.
Great Britain, which benefited during the eighteenth century from increasing
mastery of the seas, would seem to have made greater profits from the
slave trade itself than from the plantation colonies.
It is not clear whether it was the northern or the southern colonies in North
America which really benefited economically from the contributions of
black labour.
In any event, the slave-trade economy brought wealth to the population of
the ports and those who worked for them in France, Great Britain and
Holland, in which countries it made some contribution to capital accu-
mulation. It certainly increased the wealth and political influence of the
West European middle class, but it must be remembered that the riches
of Asia and the Indian Ocean also played a part in that prosperity.
In the American islands, in Brazil, and in the sugar-producing islands of the
Indian Ocean, the rapid growth of the plantations created conditions for basic
development. This development was brought about mainly by black labour,
with the co-operation of the few Amerindian groups that survived the massacres
of the first colonial period. The receiving countries, looked at from this stand-
point, received the Africans not just as objects of trade but as creators of
wealth—even though in the eighteenth century that wealth accrued solely to
their European masters.The plantation societies were violently split and racial prejudice created
an even stronger barrier there than elsewhere between white masters and black