How Slavery Made the Modern World

Slavery was the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned—not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas.

By Greg Grandin
February 24, 2014


A nineteenth-century bilboes for an adult, typically found on slave ships. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—as many as 300,000 died—when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property—their slaves (that is, themselves)—or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80 percent of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

In the on-again, off-again debate that has taken place in the United States over the years about paying reparations for slavery, opponents of the idea insist that there is no precedent for such a proposal. But there is. It’s just that what was being paid was reparations-in-reverse, which has a venerable pedigree. After the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the US, London reimbursed Southern planters more than a million dollars for having encouraged their slaves to run away in wartime. Within the United Kingdom, the British government also paid a small fortune to British slave owners, including the ancestors of Britain’s current Prime Minister, David Cameron, to compensate for abolition (which Adam Hochschild calculated in his 2005 book Bury the Chains to be “an amount equal to roughly 40 percent of the national budget then, and to about $2.2 billion today”).

BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC

Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to theorize that the black Atlantic has always been a queer Atlantic? What new geography—or better, oceanography—of sexual, gendered, transnational, and racial identities might emerge through a queer reading of transoceanic dislocations between Africa and the Caribbean? This article examines canonical African diaspora and queer theoretical texts in dialogue with recently published creative texts that imagine queer relationships between African kidnapees in slave ships' holds. These creative texts, I argue, more expansively theorize conceptual space both to rethink submerged sexual, racial histories and to comment on the intersections between African diaspora and queer experiences in a contemporary era of Haitian refugees, transnational Dominican laborers, and international West Indian “gay” activists. Texts examined include Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993), Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), Ana-Maurine Lara's Erzulie's Skirt (2006), and Dionne Brand's Map to the Door of No Return (2001).

Suriname Slaves Origin, Ghana, Benin, Loango

January 22, 2015 FositengTori historysuriname benin, suriname dahomey, suriname ghana, suriname loango, suriname slavery ancestors

Many Surinamese descendants of slaves often wonder where their ancestors came from. The short answer is mostly from Ghana, Benin and Loango, but also from many other parts of West Africa such as Gambia, Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast etc.
To delve deeper into this subject we have to briefly examine the history starting from the 17th century of the slave trade by both the English and the Dutch.
The first slaves which came to Suriname came to an English colony. English was the language of that day and as a matter of fact the same language which the slaves spoke then is still spoken today, Sranang Tongo. It is mostly an English derived language and not Dutch.
The Dutch got Suriname from the English by the treaty of Breda in 1667. At that time there were already 3000 slaves in Suriname, which was still very sparsely populated surrounded by a huge jungle. Many of the slaves took advantage of this and escaped to the jungle.
From the beginning of the 17th century until after the end of emancipation in 1863, the Dutch were in control of the Gold Coast trade in West Africa and had two main fortresses there from where they shipped Africans.
Fort Amsterdam – In Kromanti Ghana and Fort Elmina, in Elmina Ghana.
More about Kromanti, Ghana and the Suriname Caribbean connection
Learn about Kromanti language in Suriname and Jamaica 
Ghana & Loango(in present day Congo) was the source of most slave descendants in Suriname with a significant number from Dahomey(in present day Benin) but also from other parts of West Africa howbeit in smaller numbers.
Culturally it appears that the Acan(Ghana) culture was more dominant if we look at language, and religious practices which we call winti.
See also African words in daily use in Suriname
And
African Culture – Religion In Suriname
However there are also cultural influences from Loango, Benin and other parts of West Africa.

Here are some images to give you an idea of what those cities looked like where the slaves came from at the time, 16th & 17th century:

Kumasi – Ghana(center of Ashante, Acan kingdom):

Loango(currently Congo):

Benin(Dahomey):

As you can see, these were well organized cities, with an obvious infrastructure of roads and defenses, contrary to what some Westerners would have you believe.

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