Chapter 18 - The Atlantic System - 1550 - 1800

     The Atlantic System was a trading network that moved people and goods around the Atlantic Basin after 1500. Many of those who moved goods were charter companies, which consisted of investors who paid for shares of the company in order to control the monopoly on trade of a particular commodity in the West Indies colonies. The overall population of the colonies in the West Indies grew because new people came in on ships and slaves were brought from Africa.  The Dutch West India Company, formed in 1621, was one of the primary trading companies that conducted business in Africa and the Americas. It came to control much of Brazil's sugar and seized ports in the country. The Dutch revived sugar's status as an important crop and made it one of the largest products of the West Indies.

The Atlantic Basin (the Atlantic Ocean)

     Large plantations were built to grow sugarcane. They required lots of slaves to work and messed up the environment pretty badly through deforestation and soil exhaustion (no nutrients are left in soil if you just keep growing the same thing over and over again). These plantations were run by men who formed the plantocracy - the group of people who owned most of the slaves and the land in the colonies.
     Slaves were forced to work in terrible conditions, some working up to eighteen hours a day at the height of the sugar-producing season. Everyone had a job, even if it wasn't working in the fields. Poor nutrition and accidents caused many deaths, requiring additional slaves to be brought in from Africa to replace those that plantation owners had lost. Slaves rebelled because of the bad conditions, most notably during the Tacky Slave Rebellion of 1760 in Jamaica. The slaves attacked plantations after they had broken into a fort and seized weapons, wanting manumissions (grants of freedom). Maroons, runaway slave colonies, began to form, and soon there were many all black communities in the West Indies.

Triangle Trade

     Large financial institutions allowed merchants to act even if they were far from home - the beginnings of capitalism. Mercantilism, on the other hand, promoted overseas trade only between the mother country and the colony, keeping the rest of the world out of the loop. The Middle Passage, however, was open to anyone. It shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas. Triangle Trade was established between continents: the 13 colonies sent rum to Africa, where slaves then went to the West Indies and rum and molasses was shipped to New England (Europe was also involved - they wouldn't miss out on their colonies' trading!).
     Back in Africa, the Songhai of western Sudan became important in trans-Saharan trade but were destroyed by Morocco. Their trading position was taken over by the Hausa and Bornu. Rulers controlled the slave trade, sparing their own people and sending prisoners of war away to the colonial slave markets before sending their own people. The African-Muslim slave trade was 1/4 the size of the African-New World slave trade, but it lasted longer, with most slaves that went to Muslim countries becoming servants or soldiers.