Page 235 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1536 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The Atlantic Plantation for example, they were shaped by the fact that the slave
System, Slavery, and Racism traders concentrated their activities in coastal areas,
It is still not clear exactly when attitudes and responses where, due to environmental conditions and human
that were genuinely racist first emerged. But decades of choice, political power was in fact less centralized than in
careful research on the Atlantic slave trade and slave soci- much of Europe, and building materials and modes of
eties throughout the Americas have thoroughly docu- dress were well suited to hot and humid ecosystems
mented the connection between chattel slavery as it rather than the colder temperate conditions in the lands
developed in the centuries of European expansion into from which the Europeans set forth. The few European
the Atlantic world and the emergence of increasingly explorers who traveled inland throughout the vast
elaborate arguments for the inherent and immutable dif- savanna lands of the Sudanic belt (the desert and semi-
ferences between peoples sold into bondage for the slave arid zone between the North African Maghrib and the
plantations of the New World and the Europeans who rainforest regions of West Africa) before the nineteenth
shipped them across the Atlantic and profited from their century encountered impressive cities—such as Jenne
enforced servitude. Even though we cannot determine and Timbuktu—as well as states and armies often larger
precisely when and why the belief in extreme differences than those in Europe, extensive trading networks,
between Europeans and Africans was first articulated, by monumental architecture, and Islam, a monotheistic reli-
the seventeenth century it was widely held by the Por- gion that had emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tuguese, Dutch, English, and other nationals deeply tion, and thus—despite intense Christian–Muslim rivalry
involved in the slave trade. And there can be little ques- —one Europeans could relate to their own. Because so
tion that the socioeconomic conditions under which the much of what the Europeans found in the interior of
Atlantic slave trade was conducted directly affected the Africa matched their ethnocentric expectations regarding
widespread acceptance of arguments for the Africans’ human achievement and worth, the African peoples of
innate, or racial, inferiority, and in some circles the con- the Sudanic zone were generally given more favorable
viction that they were a separate species from the rest of treatment in Western writings. And until well into the
humankind. nineteenth century they were usually dissociated from the
Early, inchoate racist sentiments were to some degree racist strictures often directed against the peoples of the
elicited by extreme differences in skin color and other societies on the west and southwest coasts of the conti-
obvious (but not genetically significant) variations in nent, where the slave trade was concentrated from the six-
physical appearance between both those who sold slaves teenth through the nineteenth centuries.
and those actually reduced to slave status. But cultural dif- Few of the European travelers, slave traders, mer-
ferences were in most cases far more critical in shaping chants, or missionaries who became involved in ongoing
European attitudes toward different peoples and soci- cross-cultural exchanges with African coastal peoples
eties. These ranged from the Africans’ alleged paganism had any real understanding of their complex, sophisti-
—which was said to revolve around the “worship” of cated social systems and religions or appreciation for
what the Europeans misguidedly lumped together as their splendid art, music, and oral literature. In addition,
“fetishes”—to European disparagement of what they most of the Africans whom Europeans came into contact
judged to be low levels of material development, based with were either merchants engaged to varying degrees in
on everything from the coastal peoples’ lack of impressive the slave trade or groups and individuals who had the
stone structures (including forts), large cities, powerful misfortune to be captured and marched to coastal entre-
rulers, and strong states, to their indifference to semi- or pôts in bondage, where they would be sold to the Euro-
complete nudity. These assessments were, of course, peans and transported to plantation societies across the
problematic in a number of ways.To a significant degree, Atlantic. Not only were the enslaved understandably