326 Chapter 17
lived in slavery). African slaves were then sold to plan-
tation owners, and the revenue was used to buy the
agricultural goods (chiefly tobacco in North America
and sugar in the Caribbean), which slave labor had pro-
duced. On the third leg of the triangle, these goods
were returned to England, where they were sold at
huge profits.
All European states with American colonies (in-
cluding Holland and Denmark), and a few states with-
out colonies (notably Prussia), participated in the slave
trade. The French triangular trade sent textiles, jewelry,
and hardware to west Africa; then shipped slaves to
Saint Domingue (Haiti), Guadeloupe, and Martinique
in the Caribbean; and finally brought sugar and coffee
back to France. The French amplified the British system
by reexporting sugar to the rest of continental Europe.
That sugar was the commodity upon which the
Caribbean slave economy rested (see illustration 17.6).
Sugarcane was not cultivated in Europe, and sugar was
not yet extracted from beets. Slave-produced sugar
from America sustained a growing European love of
sweets. The European addiction to sugar cost humanity
dearly: During the century 1690–1790, one African
died for every ton of sugar shipped to Europe. When
the consumption of Caribbean sugar reached its peak in
1801, the cost had become one dead slave to provide
the sugar for every 250 consumers in Britain.
The scale of the slave trade was immense (see
table 17.5). The British Board of Trade estimated in
1709 that British colonies needed twenty-five thou-
sand additional slaves each year—four thousand for
Barbados, five thousand for North America, and
twelve thousand for Jamaica. When Britain obtained
the Asiento,the contract for supplying slaves to Span-
ish America, in 1713, English slave traders brought an
additional five thousand slaves for Spanish colonies.
The French delivered only four thousand slaves per
year in the early eighteenth century, but that figure
rose to an average of thirty-seven thousand slaves per
year by the 1780s. Britain and France alone sold ap-
proximately 3.5 million African slaves in the Americas
during the eighteenth century. An average of
10 percent to 20 percent of the slaves died during an
Atlantic crossing (50 percent to 75 percent on voy-
ages when scurvy or amoebic dysentery broke out on
the ship), so the number of African slaves initially
taken was closer to four million. Adding the
Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and Prussian slave trade,
the grand total probably surpasses five million
Africans. The demand for slaves was so high because
the average life expectancy of a Caribbean slave was
seven years after arrival.
During the eighteenth century, signs were evident
that this economy would also change. Moral revulsion
with slavery began to create antislavery opinion, both
in Europe and the Americas. An American, Samuel Se-
wall, published an antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph,
as early as 1700. Two Portuguese Jesuits who served in
Brazil, Jorge Benci and Giovanni Andreoni, published
works in Europe attacking slavery. By 1727 the Society
of Friends (widely known as the Quakers) had begun an
abolitionist crusade. The moral arguments against slav-
ery made slow progress because they faced powerful
economic arguments that slavery was essential for both
the colonial and the home economies. The Portuguese
example illustrates both the progress and its slowness.Illustration 17.6
Slave Labor on a Caribbean Sugar
Plantation.The European craving for
sugar created a growing slave economy
in the West Indies. In this engraving, an
armed white overseer (lower right)
watches sugar making from harvesting
sugarcane (center left edge) to milling it
(upper right) and compressing it in
molds.