Impacts
and Legacies of Chattel Enslavement
The human misery, economic exploitation and social
disorder caused by Chattel Enslavement are impossible
to quantify. By way of justification, some have
argued that enslavement was in the interests of
African societies, that it offered profits and
goods to African elites or that Africans who survived
the Middle Passage benefited from being moved
to societies in the Americas. In reality, the
trade in African peoples was about plunder and
brutality and a complete lack of respect for the
human rights of Africans who were enslaved. It
was a ‘reign of terror’ that was imposed
first on West and Central Africa, and then on
the continent’s south-eastern coasts at
the end of the 18th century. It removed Africa’s
young and healthy workforce, as well as destroyed
agriculture and industry and increased political
and military conflict among African states, which
was largely encouraged by European traders as
a way of acquiring slaves. It forced people to
move away from their homes, their communities,
their farmlands and from any kind of economic
stability they had. It impacted massively upon
agricultural production and severely disrupted
the social and psychological well being of inhabitants.
Across the Atlantic, in 1492,
the first Europeans made their so-called ‘discovery’
of the Americas. There were approximately 100
million indigenous peoples living in the Americas
(more or less one fifth of all humans world-wide
at the time), who had made the same discovery
long before. By contrast at this time, the British
Isles had only 5 million inhabitants. The populations
of the Americas by the late fifteenth century,
had developed every kind of society; nomadic hunting
groups, settled farming communities and sprawling
civilisations with cities as large as any then
in the world. Within decades, most of these people
were dead, massacred by Europeans or killed by
their diseases and Europe looked to Africa to
replace its labour force.
Reactions to Chattel Enslavement
across Africa and the Diaspora were different,
but it is clear that enslavement altered the way
these societies ‘developed’, and that
it paved the way for the abject impoverishment
suffered by much of the African continent today.
The experience of 500 years of chattel and colonial
enslavement cannot in any way be separated from
the continent’s current crisis of debt bondage,
crippling ‘free’ trade policies imposed
by the West, severe lack of financial resources
and often dubious ‘Aid’ being channelled
into the continent, all of which perpetuates global
injustices today.
Economic prosperity and profitability
fuelled and increased European demand for African
slaves and also gave rise to the justifications
of ‘betterment’, ‘civilisation’,
‘education’ and reform. Profits from
slave-produced goods enriched companies, corporations
and individuals who invested their money in all
levels of British society (such as schools, farms,
homes, businesses etc). It also propelled the
country into its Industrial Revolution, which
took Britain into a new era of technological advancement.
Whether you were rich or poor at the time, a slave
owning planter or a passionate abolitionist, it
was impossible to escape benefiting from Britain’s
slave trade because the entire infrastructure
of this nation was being built on the ill-gotten
gains of African enslavement. Today many companies
still exist which were originally built on profits
made from the slave trade, as do descendants of
families who invested their whole lives in the
trade, and who became rich and highly regarded
because of it.
But it is not only the economic
effects of slavery and Chattel Enslavement which
are far from gone. Chattel Enslavement set in
place attitudes and ideas which underpinned the
whole period of enslavement and which continue
to this day. Racism as we know it today began
as a justification and rationalisation by some
sections of European society, of man’s inhumanity
to man. The difference in complexion and appearance
between Africans and their European oppressors
made it possible for advocates of slavery to popularise
the idea that Africans were a lower form of human
life, or not even human at all.
Carefully crafted propaganda
was used to prop up and exacerbate Chattel Enslavement,
and became a ‘normal’ way of thinking,
teaching and believing for white people in Britain
at the time. For Chattel Enslavement to have continued
for so long, crossing generations and continents,
this kind of racist thought had to be internalised.
Europeans came to believe that they governed,
even owned, their slaves because they were white,
and therefore superior. One of the most persistent,
insidious and complex consequences of Chattel
Enslavement is the way we still carry these racist
attitudes born out of enslavement and use them
sometimes without even being aware of it. It was
indeed these attitudes that put white humankind
above all others and helped to secure and justify
Chattel Enslavement for centuries. |
