bboc/02_Servile_economy_and_capitalism.tex

\chapter[Servile economy and capitalism]{Servile economy and capitalism: a quantifiable overview}

\chapterauthor{Philippe PARAIRE}

In his 118th Persian Letter, Montesquieu noted in 1721 that Africa's coasts 
\enquote{must have been furiously stripped for two hundred years that little kings or village chiefs sell their subjects to the princes of Europe to carry them to their colonies in America}.
In a later work, \emph{L'Esprit des Lois} (1748), he ironize on the laziness of the peoples of Europe:
\enquote{having exterminated the people of of America, had to enslave those of Africa, to use them to clear so much land}.
In the same place (XV, 5), he draws attention to the economic dimension of the problem: 
\enquote{Sugar would be too expensive, if we did not work the plant that produces it by slaves.}
Eleven years later, Voltaire explains in Candide (chap. XIX), through the mouth of a mutilated slave: 
\enquote{It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe}…

Everything is said, in a few words: the wealth of the conquering Europe, the cradle of capitalism, was built on the exploitation and extermination of the Amerindians and on that of the coastal peoples of West Africa:
The Native American population fell in three centuries from 40 to 20 million people (with in some cases a total extinction, as in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, as well as on the east coast of North America)
The African population had to suffer a loss of 20 million people (ten million dead and ten million deported) in three centuries of trafficking, that is to say from 1510 to 1850 approximately.
The revenues of the servile economy, which for the great European powers accounted for more than half of the export profits in 1800, cost the lives of more than thirty million human beings.

The Americas numbered forty million men at the time of the European invasion:
more than five million for North America (Canada and the United States) the rest, in equal parts, in Central America (mainly Mexico) and in South America, in the Andean regions, equatorial forests and southern pampas.

We remain stunned by the most recent censuses:  The United States has less than 2 million Indians! 
If natural demography could have played a role (for example, as in Europe during the last three centuries), the Native Americans of the United States would have to be at least thirty million. 
What happened in Peru and Colombia, Chile or Argentina, where Indians, just like mexico, are only in the majority, whereas they should constitute, if there had been no genocide, 90\% of the general population? 
And this regardless of the miscegenation and other \enquote{assimilations} that some believe can use to blur the figures.

The case of the Amerindians therefore boils down to a sinister count: at least twenty million people were sacrificed to God Profit in a direct way, through massacre, misery, deportations and dispossession. 
Details are missing. The overall picture is, however, terribly edifying: 
Restive, stubborn, diabolically allergic to the forced labor that the colonists imposed on them, the Amerindians, declared foreigners on their own land, were thrown into nothing by the European emigrants. 
For its misfortune, Africa was in turn sacrificed on the altar of the \enquote{civilizing mission} of European capitalism to \enquote{clear so much land}.

\section{The collapse of Africa}

Neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire had the ability to attempt it, but this macabre count, we can now do it.
We can carry it to the liabilities of an economic system based on the transformation into capital of surplus value extorted from forced laborers, the slaves.
Two hundred and fifty years after the humanists of the Enlightenment, we have everything we need to measure the barbarity of nascent capitalism:
shipowners' logbooks, masters' reports, travellers' accounts, amounts of marine insurance policies, plans and number of vessels,
the statements of account of the enriched slave traders, the books of the freedmen, the liquidation of inheritances, the value of the currencies, the quantified balance sheets of the triangular trade,
the statements of the ship's doctors, the bounties paid to fugitive slave hunters, the accounts of lynchings, the minutes of the trials and the count of executions.

No serious historian disputes this figure anymore.
No researcher today seeks to minimize the extent of the catastrophe that was for Africa its encounter with the fledgling capitalism of the metropolises of Europe.
This capitalism could only reach maturity thanks to the extraordinary profits generated by the invasion of one continent (America) developed by populations torn from another, Africa.

Altogether, ten million African deportees reached the New World between 1510 and 1860. More than two million perished during the crossing.
Eight million disappeared between the place of their capture in Africa and the coastal trading posts where the survivors of the raids were embarked.
This brings us to a minimum of twenty million people taken from African demography.

At the great time of the slave trade, from 1650 to 1850, deportation reached 100,000 Africans per year. Previously, from 1500 to 1650, the rate was lower: from 15,000 to 40,000 people embarked per year
But the most terrible period for Africa coincided with the rise of cotton cultivation in the United States, between 1800 and 1850: up to 120,000 people displaced annually.

It is obvious that we cannot drain a continent without dramatic consequences in this way:
First of all, on the statistical level of the strict demographic \enquote{shortfall}, it is worth noting the steady decline of Africa's weight in the world population:
in 1600, it represented 30\% of all human beings. The figure fell to 2\% in 1800.
The fall continued until 1900, when only 10\% of humanity lived in Africa. The west coast, from Senegal to Angola, is obviously the most affected.
The coastal forests and savannahs are literally raked by African kinglets who with their armies capture and then transport the prisoners to the exchange zones.
In these sectors, the male population is declining: between Mauritania and Senegal, 20\% of the total population has been deported in three centuries.
The demographic deficit on the coasts of Guinea, the Gulf of Benin, Cameroon and Angola is such that, in most regions of the Sahel and even in the forests of Congo, fearsome imbalances are reached:
barely 50 men per 100 women in Benin, 70 men per 100 women in Biafra, less than 50 men per 100 women in Congo, Shaba, Angola.
Further north, between Central Africa and Mali, in Côte d'Ivoire and as far as Gambia, there are barely six men for every ten women.
The continuous decline of the population of West Africa during this period is explained by an annual drain (over three centuries) of three inhabitants out of a thousand on average.
This may seem inconsequential, but it must be said that it is 3\% over ten years, and 30\% over a hundred years!
Given regional variations and fluctuations over time, specialists agree on a minimum of 15\% of the population deported between 1700 and 1850.

As a result, during the same period, it is not possible to record any increase in the general population of Africa (while at the same time European demography exports its surplus to the New World and is ready to populate the whole world).

The economic impact is incredibly violent: kingdoms beating money are rejected at the tribal stage. Federations of tribes break up into wandering communities.
Constituted empires are crumbling, cities are abandoned, fields left fallow for lack of farmers.
General insecurity is blocking trade, intracontinental trade is shrinking at the regional level.
A long economic stagnation accompanies the demographic fall. 

An economy of brigandage and raiding regresses the taste for work.
It becomes easier to get rich, or simply survive, by kidnapping your neighbor's son than by cultivating his field.
At the same time, the ideological and political consequences aggravate the continent's stagnation:
slave kings violently impose personal dictatorships contrary to traditional village democracy.
Palaver gives way to allegiance, the payment of tribute in captives replaces diplomacy.
In the midst of this collective decadence, the situation of women (made supernumerary by the deportation of men) deteriorated significantly:
gigantic harems are being formed, made up of bought women, widows and girls sold, unmarriable and useless.
With the captives too scrawny to be bought by the Europeans and the old men in surplus, an abundant herd intended for human sacrifices is fueled,
whose practice is skyrocketing in Africa from the seventeenth century.

Slowly the continent is sinking into a barbarity that it had never really known:
the slave trade during the African Middle Ages had never been anything but exceptional, even marginal.
Islam in the Sahel had not been able to impose polygamy. Human sacrifices were rare and limited to strictly defined occasions.

At the same time, the \enquote{African market} is experiencing a real structural reversal:
before the arrival of Europeans, black Africa lived around what was called the \enquote{Saharan Sea}:
the central desert, traversed by caravans like so many ships going from port to port, served as an economic hub:
exchange between the west coast and eastern Sudan, trade with the Islamic civilizations of the Maghreb.
On the other hand, the ocean, bordered by thick forests, served as a limit, offering no real economic interest.

However, suddenly, the construction of the counters by the European powers turned the African economy inside out like a simple sock.
In less than a century the prosperous peoples of the wooded savannahs became a granary of slaves and the warlike kingdoms of the coastal forests took over,
creating real empires of \enquote{slave economy}, whose only activity was the penetration of peaceful areas, raids, captures, transport and sale of prisoners.

The relative prosperity, due to the economic take-off of West Africa (sensitive from the twelfth century), could not survive such shocks.
By 1800, the entire continent had regressed by a millennium.

\section[Servile economy and \enquote{primitive accumulation}]{The share of the servile economy in the \enquote{primitive accumulation}}

It seems inconceivable that twenty million men, women and children have been uprooted from their homes and land to address a productivity problem:
given the risks of transatlantic trade, the wage bill had to be reduced to zero in order to obtain a satisfactory profit.
Thus, the calculation of the cost of production of coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton could only be favorable by cancelling wages, in order to extort maximum surplus value;
the slave worker, whose total cost was limited to his purchase price and the strict food necessary, thus constituted a kind of living jackpot:
Producing between five and ten times the surplus value of a European employee, the slave contributed to the enrichment of the white settlers, slave traders and merchants of the mainland.

In the late seventeenth century, when the servile population in the United States was numerically equal to that of white immigrants, it produced 80\% of the gross national product of the American colony.
We can thus see that it contributed to the collective wealth (since it did not receive any benefit from it) in such an overwhelming way that when it reached, around 1800,
Two-thirds of the general population, white Americans had practically abandoned all productive roles to limit themselves to the highly remunerative tasks of trade to Europe.
It was not until the end of the century that white European immigrants flooded the population of African descent in successive waves and for the first time secured a significant and then majority share of gross domestic production 
(without, however, participating mainly in the sharing of gross domestic income, because of the wage exploitation suffered by the German, Polish, Russian, Italian and Irish newcomers).

Slave traders, simple hidalgos and unscrupulous adventurers at the beginning of the sixteenth century, were only able to transport about ten thousand captives a year, to the British Colony of the North, the French and Spanish West Indies, and Portuguese-occupied Brazil.
Remaining marginal until 1650, this rapine trade, although lucrative, was not yet a significant source of income.
Easy to buy, with a rather low selling price (between 5 and 10 pounds from 1650 for a healthy man from 15 to 30 years old), 
slaves died quickly and were just as quickly replaced; one year of life expectancy in Brazil and the West Indies, barely two years in French Louisiana.
Five pounds in 1650 accounted for a quarter of the monthly income of an American craftsman on the East Coast.
For example, a century later, the same slave traded for a used rifle and four barrels of powder. Not enough to really make a fortune…

For slavery to become the main pillar of nascent European capitalism, and not only the opportunity for subsidiary income for the feudal economies of the Middle Ages, it was necessary the conjunction of several elements:

\begin{enumerate}
\item The construction \emph{ex nihilo} of a market based on a demand for products deemed rare, and sold expensive despite a low cost of production.
\item The establishment of a real monetary circulation around the transatlantic slave trade, and for this the rationalization of transport.
\item The joint regulation of the price of slaves and the cost of their maintenance.
\item The establishment of agreed prices for bonded labour products, the organisation of the return to Europe of most of the investment profits without hindering the reinjection,
at the local level of colonial economies, of the minimum necessary, in order to avoid unproductive hoarding.
\end{enumerate}

These elements necessary for maximum extortion of the surplus value produced by the slave workers of the New World were all gathered only around 1800.
The ensuing economic boom was such that it can be said without hesitation that European capitalism would not have experienced its extraordinary growth in the nineteenth century without the decisive contribution of the labor of the slave labor of the New World.

Appearing under Louis XIV, the fashion of \enquote{French breakfast} (coffee with milk, or cocoa with cane sugar) became a universal phenomenon throughout Europe from 1750.
Sweet honey teas were suddenly abandoned for the new breakfast, even in the deepest layers of the people, even in the countryside.

The demand was such that the New World increased its import of slaves tenfold and converted to new cultures intended to supply Europe with exotic drinks in fashion:
the French Antilles, for example, abandoned the cultivation of spices and embarked on sugar production around 1700,
while Brazil converted to coffee and everywhere there was an attempt to acclimatize cocoa, and even tobacco, also made fashionable by the court of France.
This first market created, another succeeded it when shortly after 1800 an American engineer found a way to card, spin and weave cotton.
Suddenly, the entire southern United States began to cultivate this culture. The demand for slaves skyrocketed in all areas of production:
Cuba imported between 1800 and 1850 more than 700,000 additional slaves, attached to the cultivation of cane.
The southern United States brought more than 150,000 slaves a year between 1810 and 1830 into the cotton belt.
Far from the tinkering of the beginnings, a real \enquote{servile capitalist economy} was born.

The resale of coffee and sugar production from America accounted for 50\% of France's export earnings in 1750.

With regard to the circulation of money and the transformation into capital of the capital gains produced by the rationalization of the transport of slaves,
there are many indications of the extraordinary nature of the profits generated by bonded labour:
the boom of port cities engaged in this traffic, the parallel flowering of banking companies living off the trade,
the specialization of some shipowners is a tangible sign of the capitalization in Europe of the profits of the exploitation of Africans deported to the New World.
It has become common to say that Bordeaux, Nantes or even Lisbon owe their most beautiful areas, their most beautiful monuments to repatriated capital.
But what about Liverpool or Amsterdam, not to mention Copenhagen and Stockholm?

For if it is true that England alone transported half of the deportees (it ceased the trade in 1812) and the Portuguese a quarter,
small countries like Holland and Sweden owe their economic take-off to the slave windfall (per capita income from the benefits of the slave trade was ten times higher in the Nordic countries than in France, for example).
The Dutch had made the transport of captives, like the Danes and Swedes, a profitable specialty:
the adaptation of aeration awnings, the cleaning of holds, the systematic showering of prisoners, better food rations and faster vessels had reduced mortality to less than 10\% of the captives transported. 
At the same time, in squalid ships of French, Portuguese and English adventurers, mortality could reach 50\%, generally settling around 30\% of deaths.

The nascent capitalism's liability when it comes to the ten million deaths of the transatlantic slave trade makes little doubt since this trade had from the beginning the appearance of a fairly organized market,
structured by regional and even international agreements, trying to best meet the fluctuating demands of European planters and importers of exotic commodities.

There was never a \enquote{Slave Stock Exchange}, but a set of completely standardized business practices, which can be known today from many accounting documents.
Bought in Africa by a pre-capitalist barter system (one slave for twenty liters of brandy in 1770, or two pieces of cloth, or two hats and a necklace of shells),
therefore not very rational and quite dicey, the captives had a fixed price as soon as they arrived in America, according to their age, gender, health and local needs.
The transformation of profits into investments, the transfer of capital gains to Europe or the big colonial cities, the state subsidy to slave shipowners (Richelieu in 1635),
English taxes (from 1661), the regulation of punishments inflicted on slaves in order to avoid mortality rates contradictory to profitability (Colbert in 1685),
all this indicates that from the seventeenth century the servile economy of the New World was as important a pillar for primitive capitalist accumulation as the enclosure movement or the founding of the Lombard banks a few centuries earlier.

The King of Spain gave the green light to slave ships by a decree of 12 January 1510. The first African captives were landed in Hispaniola a year later, in 1511.
After a century of \enquote{tinkering}, during which the elements of servile capitalism were put in place, official stock market ratings of exotic commodities imported into Europe began to reflect the state of the \enquote{markets};
more than a hundred shopping counters on African shores having agreed on a floor price for \enquote{ebony wood}, the item \enquote{acquisition} was limited to that of transport costs.
The fifteen or so ports between the Rio de la Plata and New York Bay provided most of the reception of the captives having also agreed,
the average selling price of a healthy adult slave fluctuated (in constant pounds) from five to twenty units of account from 1800,
or between one and twice the price of a draught animal, ox or horse. The only thing left was to regulate the price of commodities

Given the services rendered by the slave, it was for three centuries an excellent deal for the profitability of investments in both Americas.
On the one hand, the importance of the profits of bonded labour can be measured by the particular productivity ratio that characterizes it:
the wage bill tending towards zero, the ratio between production (whatever it may be) and this mass gives an infinite value, a mathematical image of the maximum possible extortion of the surplus value produced.
On the other hand, the monopoly situation associated with a captive market ensured profits that enabled Europe to establish a solid pre-industrial capitalism.
Which enabled Europe to move to a higher stage during the nineteenth century, that of the conquest of the world.
After imposing \enquote{parisian breakfast}, the servile economy (constituted by the system banks / shipowners of Europe / slave kings of Africa / transporters / planters and exporters of America / importers of Europe) put cotton in fashion.
Having constituted the need (after having managed to put out of fashion honey, herbal teas, linen and silk) it first responded to it in a simply mercantile way with taxes and protectionist barriers,
then in a more capitalist way in the modern sense, through franchises, cartels, joint-stock companies and competition.
After a century, the equilibrium of prices, achieved by supply/demand regulation, literally caused European capitalism to take off.

Just a reminder of the extravagant human cost of this fulfillment:
7 to 8 million Africans killed during the raids or died during the journey to the slave trading posts of Africa. Two million dead during the crossing. Another two million, died of exhaustion in the first year on the plantations.
An impossible to specify number of deaths due to ill-treatment, suicides, revolts, repressions, lynchings and outright massacres.

For Africa, all this has led to a historical and cultural regression without example, a demographic collapse sufficient to stagnate the African population, 
definitive hatreds, economic destructuring, the cancellation of growth and a backwardness that the colonial invasion will only aggravate.

Despite tendentious historians who attribute to African feudalities the initiative of the slave trade or accuse the Arab kings of having perpetuated it,
despite the thurifers of liberalism who refuse to quantify the profits of the servile economy and to associate them with the rescue and then the take-off of the European economies,
it must be said and not afraid to repeat oneself: a set of indisputable facts shows that the nascent capitalism did not only bled the peoples of Europe (this calculation can be made elsewhere).
It took off on a mass grave as history, which was already bloody, had never seen before: twenty million Amerindians exterminated in three centuries, and twelve million Africans killed on the job at the same time.
Two entire continents sacrificed to establish a criminal system without morals and without any law other than that of profit. More than thirty million human beings murdered by capitalism, in a direct and unquestionable way.

\rauthor{Philippe Paraire}

Author of \emph{Les Noirs Américains, généalogie d'une exclusion}, coll. \enquote{Pluriel intervention}, Hachette, 1993.

\section{Bibliography}

~~~\, Franz Tardo-Dino, \emph{Le collier de servitude} (The necklace of servitude), Éditions Caribéennes, 1985.

Ibrahim Baba Kaké, \emph{La traite négrière} (The slave trade), Présence Africaine, Larousse Nathan international, 1988.

Jean Meyer, \emph{Esclaves et négriers} (Slaves and Slaves traders), coll. \enquote{Découvertes}, Gallimard, 1986.

Hubert Deschamps, \emph{Histoire de la traite des Noirs} (History of the slave trade), Fayard, 1972.

Kenneth M. Stamp, \emph{The peculiar institution}, Random House, New York, 1956.

Benjamin Quarles, \emph{The Negro in the making of America}, Collier Books, New York, 1987.

Partick Manning, \emph{Slavery and African Life}, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1990.