Would it not have been an option to use Africans as an indentured workforce, rather than resorting to slavery? The racism at the heart of this system imposes a huge price on the way in which it operates and that isn’t often highlighted, although it’s highlighted in a couple of the books that I’ve chosen.

It would be much cheaper to have used indentured servants. But, actually, there are all sorts of alternatives that could have worked and actually would have been a lot cheaper. There’s a tendency to think of this as a predetermined outcome. What happened was that the supply of indentured servants from Europe dried up, and so they had no other option but to resort to the purchasing of enslaved African peoples. It’s not that people in, for example, colonial Virginia decided that they didn’t want to use indentured servants anymore and they’d rather use Africans. What I’m emphasizing here is that it wasn’t automatic that those people would be Africans. You were transported across the Atlantic and received no payment for seven years but-once you got through that process, if you get through that process (many people didn’t they succumbed to disease)-you would be given a piece of land and some tools afterwards. In fact, most European countries try to solve that problem by importing their own populations first and, in the Netherlands and in England, that takes place-we’re into the early 17th century now-via indentured servitude. The other really important thing to stress here is that the solution to the problem of labour supply in America isn’t automatically African. But the crucial thing to say here is that the idea of this slavery doesn’t originate in Africa, it originates in the Middle East. If you like, the people who were pushing out into the Atlantic Ocean already had this idea of using Africans as slaves. The possibility of using slave labour was there in the 15th century. And they started to do that pretty much immediately. That undermines them physically, but also undermines them culturally, so the solution to the acute problem of labour supply, which exists all over North America and the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, in South America, is to import people. What you’re much better off doing is getting people from outside. It’s always been really difficult to enslave people on their own territory. What happens in Mesoamerica is interesting because the Spanish make a conscious decision not to enslave the indigenous population there. So, you have this really interesting coincidence that, when the Europeans start to push out into the Atlantic in earnest and start to establish centres of population in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, the slavery technology, that is the combination of commodities and slave labour, is resting there on the west coast of Africa.

It goes through Cyprus, Sicily and, ultimately, ends up in the Canary Islands on the west coast of Africa just before Columbus sails. What happens as the Middle Ages proceed, from the 13th to the 15th century, is that the combination of sugar production and the use of slave labour gradually moves west through the Mediterranean. So, you have to choose an ethnicity that’s understood to be foreign to you and they often used Slavic peoples. Crusaders who controlled territory in Palestine were, like colonial slavers in the 17th and 18th century, keen to use people not like them to do the work of slaves. You have, in the Levant, the cultivation of-what we would call by the 18th century-plantation crops, using enslaved people.

You can trace that story back to the Crusades without too much interruption. How did it actually kick off – did it start a week after Columbus arrived in America, or did it develop as a result of particular constraints in developing colonialism in the Spanish experience? Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get on to the books I want to start by asking about the origins of the Atlantic slave trade.

Empire of sin black book