Ideological, doctrinal, religious and political
aspects of the African slave trade23economies of the south of the United States of America, Great Britain and in
part France would be undermined; that incomes from mines in Brazil, Cuba
and other countries would fall, losses would be suffered by the shipbuilding
and textile industries, the makers of firearms and other craftsmen, leaving
many people without work.
Its protagonists admitted that the slave trade was a brutal affair but
that this brutality was not something peculiar to that trade alone. In conclu-
sion, facts would be adduced showing the brutal treatment of sailors in the
British Navy, or the cruellest European laws.
The advocates of the slave trade, like the abolitionists, said much about
the Africans' awful life in their homeland, claiming that the slave trade had
nothing to do with that side of the question : Africa had always been rent by
internecine warfare, slave raids, etc. Idyllic pictures would be given of life
in the New World plantations with the following conclusion: in the New
World Africans were much better off than at home, as for the state of slavery,
they were used to that in Africa. The defenders of the slave trade categorically
refuted the abolitionists' arguments on the freedom-loving nature of Africans
and explained frequent uprisings on the slave ships only because of brutal
treatment.
The advocates categorically claimed that enslavement of Africans and
the slave trade were sanctioned by the Bible. They alluded to Noah's damnation
of Ham and his progeny as evidence of the fact that Africans were predestined
to be slaves. Nevertheless, there was no single opinion on the slave trade among
the clergy, and especially so in Great Britain. The Bishop of London, for
instance, reminded people that the Bible wrote of slavery in general and not
with regard to Africans, and that it did not mention the slave trade or the
export of Africans to the New World.^21 At that time these doubts did not become
widespread. But in the nineteenth century, when the question of abolishing
slavery in the British West Indies was put up for discussion in Great Britain,
even the most rabid protagonists of slavery refrained from quoting the Bible.
At that time many books were published explaining that the Bible did not
sanction the enslavement of Africans.
The Quakers were among those who came out against the slave trade.
In the late seventeenth century the American Quakers voiced slogans to abolish
it. In Great Britain, the Quakers submitted a petition for the abolition of the
slave trade in 1783, and in the nineteenth century they were the first to demand
the abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies.
Beginning of racismIn those years it was widely claimed that Africans in general were intellectually
inferior to Europeans, that Negroes, using the expression of those days, stood