#triangular trade

[beaniebabythenb]

A wonderful video on how and why humans lost most of our body hair and gained the beautiful gradient of skin tones we see today, as well as some brief notes on the history of racism, which is not as old as you might believe. This was a video required in my 100 level anthropology course and I found it quite interesting, so I wanted to share it with all of you.

[paulpingminho]

[tibonanj]

[African Objects : Slavery and French Trade , the silver ceremonial weapon of Cabinda]

This silver ceremonial weapon features a Louis XVI, style handle and an African, shaped blade with engraved decorations.  

Geometric symbols, seemingly added later ,are also visible on the surface.

The piece was crafted in La Rochelle for Andris Poucouta, macaye (first minister) and mafouque (minister of trade relations) in Cabinda. His name appears in the inscription.

As a royal broker, Poucouta acted as an intermediary between slave traders from La Rochelle and the African kings along the coast of what is now Congo. He was known and respected, even described in French sources as "The Just Man of Cabinda.”

This object, at once European and African, diplomatic and commercial, speaks to the layered and often troubling entanglements of the Atlantic trade, where status, violence, and negotiation became materialized in metal, symbolism, and names.

see : Arme d'apparat du MAFOUQUE ANDRIS POUCOUTA MACAYE en argent - Lot 67

[ub-sessed]

If I were going to write a book about the industrial revolution I would call it Caffeine and Coal.

I just need a subtitle.

[historybizarre]

Historians expose early scientists’ debt to the slave trade

Key plant and animal specimens arrived in Europe on slavers’ ships

When British slave ships arrived in Latin America, the crews had strict orders to stay at port and not poke around, mostly because Spain wanted to protect its monopoly on certain lucrative natural resources. But naturalists such as Petiver knew Spain had no way to enforce that rule—the territories had too little oversight. So they cultivated crew members to collect specimens on the sly....

Strikingly, some naturalists also instructed their contacts abroad to train slaves as collectors. Slaves often knew about specimens that Europeans didn't and visited areas that Europeans wouldn't. Those slaves virtually never got credit for their work, though Petiver did offer to pay them a half-crown ($18 today) for every dozen insects or 12 pence ($7) for every dozen plants.

[afishtrap]

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish Manila became a pivot for intercontinental exchange in silver and silk. When studying early modern Manila, its multilayered character has often been overlooked. Urban and economic developments were not only based on Chinese and Japanese private merchants’ contributions but also imbedded in the complex history of Asia’s global integration and the Castilian Overseas Empire’s involvement in various international affairs. The present article revisits these global and local connections by highlighting the impact of triangular encounters between powerful premodern states on the short-lived global significance of the Manila market.

Birgit M. Tremml. "The Global and the Local: Problematic Dynamics of the Triangular Trade in Early Modern Manila." Journal of World History. Volume 23, Number 3, September 2012. pp. 555-586. Print.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Manila developed into a global trading outpost of major economic and only slightly less geopolitical importance for all trading nations involved. Consequently, her urban and economic development became embedded in the complex history of Asia’s integration into the global economy9 and the Castilian overseas empire’s involvement in European and American affairs.10 The archipelago’s relative closeness to China, Japan, and Southeast Asian trading hubs encouraged these countries’ private merchants to call at the favorable natural harbor of Cavite, close to the colonial capital. There they connected to centuries-old trading networks of the wider maritime region spanning far into the Indian Ocean. Coastal Chinese, mostly from southern Fujian, represented the largest group.11 The relatively liberal political environment gave rise to allied Japanese and Chinese privateers, the so-called wakō,12 whose economic activities could—if required—also include coastal raiding. They reached their peak around the middle of the sixteenth century,13 at the same time as the Iberians—mostly the Portuguese from the Estado da India, who were prominent on the scene throughout the sixteenth century as pioneers in building a trading post empire in Asia—appeared as promising business partners for the East Asians.  

Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, probably the most assertive advocates of early modern Manila’s “miracle,” consider the foundation of the Spanish colonial city in 1571 as the point when global trade was born. In their much-quoted article about the impact of intercontinental silver flows on world affairs, they claimed that “Manila was the crucial entrepôt linking substantial, direct, and continuous trade between the Americas and Asia for the first time in history.”18 As such, late sixteenth-century Manila, as the Asian outpost of the Manila galleon trade, became a center for intercontinental exchange of American— and to a certain extent also Japanese—silver and Chinese silks and ceramics.19 Yet, as has been the case in several other works dealing with the Philippines, while highlighting Manila’s remarkable growth at the time, they provide a very bleak view of Spanish performance in Asia. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that the cities’ economic success was simply and solely a result of foreign parties’ exchanging highly priced commodities; in other words, this would mean that the city existed only because of its function as a transit port. Sinocentrists and followers of the California school claim that this sort of exchange was a losing deal for the exporting countries and intermediaries, since the silver eventually all ended up in China.20 Thus, Manila has been considered nothing more than a way station to China and the bullion flows from America were a losing deal for the Spanish.

For the Spaniards, as colonial rulers, restricting East Asian participation in this exchange was not an option, for the latter secured the colony’s military and general supply. Importing military resources from China, Portuguese Macau, and Japan was necessary from the earliest days of the colony but became especially important at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Spanish were exposed to continuous Dutch attacks. The Portuguese role in the Manila trade was ambiguous: despite logistic interdependence, the Spaniards also tried to limit Portuguese interaction as a result of restricting trade at Manila. A law of 1593 prohibited Castilians from trading in Macau, and Spanish sources furthermore hint at royal decrees that forbade Macau traders in Manila. However, these regulations were eased in the 1620s when Portuguese started to travel from Macau to Manila on a regular basis and started to carry huge amounts of silver to China. Since they lacked a permanent base in Manila, they will not be treated in this article.

[...]  

...Accepting the established belief that the Spanish-born population of Manila did not benefit from the obvious riches of the galleon trade, we have to ask: who did? We know that Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese participated—both in legal and illegal trade—despite constantly complaining about insufficient returns.34 Neither Japanese nor Chinese commercial activities showed any signs of serious decline until the beginning of domestic political transformations in the 1620s and 1640s, respectively. Revisiting the early years in the history of the Spanish colonial capital with a special focus on disentangling the various levels of interaction should shed light on their complex relations and the dynamics behind them.

The attitudes and motivations of these three countries toward Manila were on the whole different. My point of departure is that the striking differences in political economies and culture are very important considerations when analyzing the behavior of states.35 In each of these three premodern states we find a single hereditary ruler who reigned over a specific sovereign territory with a largely agrarian economy. Governance was supported by sophisticated bureaucratic structures.36 So we may be tempted to conclude that both economically and politically, differences between late sixteenth-century China, Japan, and Spain were marginal. However, they seem to increase significantly when we take on board the effect of cultural influences and geopolitical considerations on their political economies. Multilayered encounters in Manila reveal major differences both in mode of governance and the institutions that backed their respective political economies. Intrigued by this idea of striking differences between the maritime powers of the South China Sea, I should briefly compare Spain’s, Japan’s, and China’s sixteenth-century presence in Manila before continuing with a comparative analysis of their political economies.

[...]    

After Andrés de Urdaneta and his crew eventually succeeded in finding a return route (tornaviage) via the Pacific to Mexico, cargos with provisions and silver were annually sent from Acapulco to Manila until 1815—that is, just before Mexico gained independence from Spain. With the huge bullion flows that reached Southeast Asia after the discovery of the transpacific route and the establishment of a regular transport network between the two coastal colonial outposts, the Spanish in the Philippines were able to quench China’s thirst for silver but at the same time had difficulties maintaining the colony and were far from achieving what a few individuals dreamt of: neither Spanish rule nor the Catholic faith were noticeably spread beyond the archipelago’s borders.40 The fact that it did not accomplish any initial imperial goals in the East has often led to the conclusion that Spain had ignored Manila’s obvious qualities as an emporium for transcontinental trade. This, however, is a one-dimensional argument. The Spanish may have been short-sighted in economic affairs, but what they missed most in the Philippines was simply the people who could carry out elaborate jobs. For instead of taking advantage of maritime Asia’s economic conditions, the territorial colonial model—which had just been successfully tested in the Americas—was uncritically applied to the Philippines despite the far greater distance between the Philippines and the motherland. As with the Americas, early steps in colonizing the region were achieved by missionary efforts and the administrative and educational contributions of the friars, who were not only the first but also the most committed Spanish settlers of the Philippines.41 Because of frequent natural disasters, such as fires and earthquakes, seasoned Spanish town planners were not able to build a solid town until the seventeenth century. Despite residential restrictions imposed by the ruling Spaniards, the tens of thousands natives, Chinese, and Japanese who settled around the city walls were integrated well into the urban structure. From the very beginning, Manila’s settler continuity relied on migration from East Asia as well as logistical support from outside. After the native population of the archipelago, people from China— including visiting and hibernating merchants and sailors, as well as long-term residents and immigrants—represented by far the hugest ethnic group in Manila.

[colleenrants]

[chewdisco]

The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then sold or traded for raw materials.

Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New World.

Disease and starvation due to the length of the passage were the main contributors to the death toll with amoebic dysentery and scurvy causing the majority of deaths. Additionally, outbreaks of smallpox, syphilis,measles, and other diseases spread rapidly in the close-quarter compartments. The rate of death increased with the length of the voyage, since the incidence of dysentery and of scurvy increased with longer stints at sea as the quality and amount of food and water diminished. In addition to physical sickness, many slaves became too depressed to eat or function efficiently due to loss of freedom, family, security, and their own humanity.

While treatment of slaves on the passage was varied, slaves' treatment was often horrific because the captured African men and women were considered less than human; they were "cargo", or "goods", and treated as such; they were transported for marketing. For example, the Zong, a British slaver, took too many slaves on a voyage to the New World in 1781.

Overcrowding combined with malnutrition and disease killed several crew members and around 60 slaves. Bad weather made the Zong's voyage slow; the captain decided to drown his slaves at sea, so the owners could collect insurance on the slaves. Over 100 slaves were killed and a number of slaves chose to kill themselves. The Zong incident became fuel for the abolitionist movement and a major court case, as the insurance company refused to compensate for the loss.

While slaves were generally kept fed and supplied with drink, as healthy slaves were more valuable, if resources ran low on the long, unpredictable voyages, the crew received preferential treatment. Slave punishment was very common, as on the voyage the crew had to turn independent people into obedient slaves.  

Whipping and use of the cat o' nine tails were a common occurrence; sometimes slaves were beaten for "melancholy".The worst punishments were for rebelling; in one instance a captain punished a failed rebellion by killing one involved slave immediately, and forcing two other slaves to eat his heart and liver.