The Transformation of the World (35 page)

It depends on one's perspective whether one sees a slight decline in the slave trade between the eighteenth century and the period after 1800, or whether one emphasizes the continuity in an age when, at least in Europe, the forcible trade in human beings was beginning to be taken less for granted. In any event, post-1800 slave exports were down 1.6 million on totals for the eighteenth century, yet it has been cautiously estimated that 5.6 million people were still affected by it in the nineteenth century.
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East Africa was the only region on the continent that serviced both American and Afro-Asian markets. In the late eighteenth century, European slave traders scoured the French Indian Ocean islands, Mauritius (known as Île de France until 1810, then a British possession), and Réunion (known as Île Bourbon until 1793). Then came Brazilian traders who could not gain a foothold in Angola, followed by Spanish and North Americans seeking supplies to send to Cuba. The buyers included the Merina kingdom in Madagascar, which curiously also lost inhabitants as slaves. Portugal, the colonial power in both Angola and Mozambique, passed a decree in 1836 under British pressure that “completely abolished” the slave trade. But in reality nothing was abolished. In 1842, flexing its muscles more, Britain forced a treaty on Portugal that declared the slave trade to be piracy and gave the Royal Navy the right to conduct searches; British warships then began to patrol off the East African coast. But market forces, spurred on by Britain's global policy of free trade, proved to be stronger. Rising sugar and coffee prices in the 1840s increased the demand for African labor, and traders found ways to meet it. Human trafficking behinds the backs of British naval officers and missionaries was a mere trifle for experienced trading
networks. In the 1860s the “illegal” trade from Mozambique was no less brisk than the “legal” trade had been before 1842, which had run to a yearly average of more than 10,000 slaves.
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Only after 1860 is it possible to speak of a real end to slave exports across the Atlantic, or anyway to trade movements that were recorded in some way and can be assessed by historians.
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The slave traffic ended at different moments in different areas (again the actual circumstances need to be investigated). It first disappeared from the coasts of West Africa, where it had begun at an early date and notched up the highest turnover, and where it was all but over by the end of the 1840s.
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West Africa—the arc stretching from Sierra Leone to the Bight of Biafra—was the first part of Africa to recover from the population drain, before it was caught up in the 1880s maelstrom of colonial conquest. Western central Africa—the Congo and Angola—enjoyed at best a brief respite of one generation, while throughout the east of the continent, from Somaliland to Mozambique, the European colonial conquerors of the 1880s arrived at a time when the slave trade was still in full swing.

South Africa—this should not be forgotten—was like the rest of the continent in experiencing the institution of slavery (on the eve of its prohibition throughout the British Empire, slaves made up a quarter of the population of the Cape Colony),
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but it was never significantly involved in the slave trade. Only rarely did the new “legal” trade in agrarian exports and the old slave trade change places with each other as neatly they did in certain regions of West Africa (where palm oil products, for example, came to the fore). And if one looks more closely at particular localities, the juxtaposition of different systems becomes apparent. There might have been a local slave economy with its own institutionalized interests, but alongside it free African traders flowed into the cities and pressed on the markets.
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The old slave-hunting routes were by no means everywhere a thing of the past when the European colonial presence created its new topography of migration.

The most important legacy of the slave trade was slavery itself. It had existed before the appearance of European slave traders in the sixteenth century, but the trade then generalized the institution and gave rise to societies based entirely on enslavement in military campaigns. Between 1750 and 1850, as much as a tenth of the population of Africa may have had the status of slaves—whatever that actually meant in practice.
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And it was an upward trend. New internal slave markets came into being. The city of Banamba in today's Mali, soon after its foundation in the 1840s, was functioning as the center for a far-reaching slave trade network; it was surrounded by a band of slave plantations fifty kilometers wide.
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Early colonial censuses often recorded a high percentage of the population with slave status, and the colonial authorities partly justified their rule by the claim to be “civilizing” the region in which they had intervened.

There is much to be said for the view that, far from being an archaic remnant of the premodern age, a slave mode of production fit well with the new possibilities
that opened up in the nineteenth century. Whereas the colonial authorities, especially at first, used African labor in a corvée system, many African regimes continued to deploy slaves in production as the foundation of their economy. These might be prisoners-of-war, purchased slaves, tribute objects, debtors, victims of kidnapping, human beings captured specially for oracles, and so on. In West Africa, states such as the Sokoto Caliphate, Asante, and Dahomey often imported slaves from far away to work on plantations or in handicrafts. It is said that in the 1850s, just before it became a British protectorate (1861), nine-tenths of the population of Lagos consisted of slaves.
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In some parts of Africa slavery gained a fresh vitality in the nineteenth century, fueled by new economic opportunities and by Muslim revivalist movements whose state-building jihads depopulated whole areas as they swept through the sub-Saharan savannah belt from today's Mali to Lake Chad.
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So, in addition to what was left of the maritime slave trade, impulses developed in the African interior toward that high mobility that is always related to slavery. It had inevitably to cover wide areas, because societies are disinclined to enslave their own lower classes en masse. The “weapons revolution” that began in the 1850s—that is, the availability of discarded rifles from European arsenals and their appropriation by of Africans—reinforced this process by making it possible to construct new kinds of armed forces.

Although Africa, after the dismantling of the slave trade, no longer served as the basis for a transcontinental system of migration—that is, unlike fin-de-siècle Europe, South Asia, and China, it no longer provided a long-term regular flow of labor in distinct geographical patterns—colonial
immigration
to the continent should not be overlooked. On the eve of the First World War, it was not Asia, with its ancient and populous colonies, but Africa that hosted the largest number of overseas Europeans in the Old World.
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Algeria's 760,000 Europeans (two-thirds of them French) made it the largest settler colony outside the British Empire, well ahead of India's maximum of 175,000 (all categories included). At the same time South Africa had approximately 1.3 million white inhabitants, a large influx having begun after the mining revolution of the 1880s. More than 140,000 Europeans lived in British-ruled Egypt, almost exclusively in the cities, with Greeks as the largest single group. Most of the 150,000 Europeans in the French protectorate of Tunisia were Italians. As to the colonies south of the Sahara, there were a total of approximately 120,000 long-term-resident Europeans in 1913. All in all, roughly 2.4 million “whites” or people of European extraction then lived in Africa, most of whom had arrived there after 1880. The equivalent figure in Asia was no higher than 379,000—plus 11,000 Americans in the Philippines.

A European-organized labor migration from Africa to Asia did not exist in the nineteenth century. When the Dutch took slaves from the Cape to Batavia two centuries earlier, it was not the start of an ongoing large-scale export trade, any more than was the movement of slaves from India or Indonesia to the Cape Colony. The reason for the transfer was that the Dutch East India Company
prohibited the enslavement of local subjects in its possessions. In the nineteenth century, after a long break, Asians began to migrate again to Africa in considerably larger numbers. Between 1860 and 1911, a total of 153,000 contract workers were shipped from India to work on the sugar plantations of Natal; some shopkeepers went of their own free will. In Kenya, 20,000 Indians were employed for the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railroad, and many of them stayed on after the end of their contract.
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In Mauritius, too, there were many Indians. In precolonial times, a small community of Indian tradesmen already lived in the territory of what is now Tanzania. By 1912 German East Africa contained 8,700 Indians—indispensable middlemen, who kept the colonial economy going, but who were suspected by the authorities because the great majority of them remained British subjects.
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All in all, perhaps 200,000 Asians arrived in Africa between 1800 and 1900.
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At the intersection of several major systems, Africa in the nineteenth century was the continent with the greatest variety of migration.

7 Migration and Capitalism

No other epoch in history was an age of long-distance migration on such a massive scale. Between 1815 and 1914 at least 82 million people moved
voluntarily
from one country to another, at a yearly rate of 660 migrants per million of the world population. The comparable rate between 1945 and 1980, for example, was only 215 per million.
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The migration of tens of millions of Europeans to America, an especially striking instance fraught with consequences, has been considered in many different ways:

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 as emigration that partly developed out of migration within Europe

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 as immigration that was part of the centuries-long settlement of America as a hostile invasion of land belonging to Native Americans

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 in the perspective of social history, as the creation of new, and expansion of existing, immigrant (diaspora) societies

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 sociologically, as a collection of phenomena of acculturation economically, as the opening up of new resources and the raising of the possible global level of productivity

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 politically, as flight from a repressive Old World—from a monarchical old order to the realm of egalitarian liberty

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 culturally, as a stage in the long-term Westernization of the world

Here it is enough to sketch the overall demographic picture.

Destination America

A sharp break, not uncommon in the history of population, here permits a fairly exact periodization of the nineteenth century. The break occurred around the year 1820, with the rapid and almost total disappearance of the “redemption system” under which new male and female immigrants had undertaken to pay
back the cost of their passage soon after their arrival in America.
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The system was a legal and humanitarian improvement on the old form of indentured service, customary first in the Caribbean and later in North America, which had always involved a period of bonded labor in a private relationship. Under the redemption system it was possible to cover the debt in other ways—if someone could be found to stand surety, for example—but even then the last resort was for the immigrant, or sometimes his children, to discharge it through their labor. The core of the redemption system therefore still meant voluntarily entering into a relationship of bondage.
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It remained legal until the early twentieth century but soon dwindled in significance after 1820. Immigrants—Germans earlier than Irish, for example—were less and less prepared to accept such forms of service, and the American public, itself often not long in the country, increasingly viewed this “white slavery” as degrading. In 1821 the Indiana Supreme Court passed a landmark judgment against the debt bondage of white immigrants. Conditions in Europe would still force millions to move across the Atlantic, but in the eyes of the law that emigration was now free.

Meanwhile, processes were under way on both sides of the Atlantic that would lead to an “integrated hemispheric system,”
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combining the various older patterns of migration within Europe and overseas. This subsystem of an emerging international labor market filled a vast space from the Jewish Pale of Settlement in western Russia to Chicago, New Orleans, and Buenos Aires, making contact at its margins with the Siberian and the Asian migration system. Mobility within the system was generated by imbalances—between poor and rich regions, between low-wage and high-wage economies, between agrarian societies and early industrial centers, between societies with steep hierarchies and few opportunities for upward mobility and societies of which the opposite was true, and between repressive and liberal political orders. All these dimensions shaped the changing rhythms of movement within the system, so that different parts of Europe channeled their surplus population into it at different times. With few exceptions, the migratory flows were mainly proletarian in character. Ordinary people looking for a better life were more characteristic than adventure seekers of genteel birth.

Net immigration into the United States for the whole period from its founding until 1821 has been estimated at 366,000,
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more than half of whom (54 percent) came from Ireland, and just under a quarter from England, Scotland, and Wales. In 1820 the annual volume of slave exports to Brazil was still more than twice as large as that of free emigrants to the United States! Before 1820 the migration to the United States was a trickle. After 1820 it became a steady flow. The 1840s, 1850s, 1880s, and 1900s were the decades when it turned into a flood.
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