Africa+and+the+Atlantic+Slave+Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade:

 * **MI: Early Portuguese contacts set the patterns for contact with the African coast. the slave trade expanded to meet the demand for labor in the new American colonies, and millions were exported in an organized commerce that involved both Europeans and Africans.**
 * In 1487, Portuguese ships pushed down the west African coast and reached Cape of Good Hope. Along the coast, they established **factories**: forts and trading posts with resident merchants. These forts enabled Portuguese to exercised control with limited personnel. Most forts were established with consent of local rulers, who benefitted from access to European commodities and military support in local wars from Portuguese soldiers.
 * **El Mina**(1482) was the most important and situated in the heart of the gold-producing region of the forest zone.
 * Africans acquired goods from Portuguese, such as slaves from other stretches of the coast. In exchange, Africans gave ivory, pepper, animal skins, and gold. Initially trading from El Mina and Accra, routes led the Portuguese to the heart of gold kingdoms, such as the Mande and Sonike merchants from Mali and Songhay.
 * Trade was the basis of Portuguese relations with Africans, but commerce led to political, religious, and social relations.
 * were not impressed with small kingdoms on Senegambian coast
 * awed when they reached Gold Coast, finding kingdom of Benin, by the power of the ruler and magnificence of his court.
 * Missionary efforts made to convert Benin, Kongo and other African kingdom rulers.
 * Portuguese contacted the Kongo kingdom south of the Zaire River about 1484
 * achieved major success, through conversion of members of the royal family
 * ruler, **Nzinga Mvemba**(1507-1543) brought the whole kingdom to Christianity, with the help of Portuguese advisors/ missionaries
 * eventual Portuguese attempts to enslave his subjects led to Mvemba's attempt to end slave trade and limit Portuguese activities
 * Africans viewed Portuguese as strange and at first, tried to fit them into their world.
 * Portuguese viewed the Africans as savages and pagans, but also capable of civilized behavior and conversion to Christianity.
 * Portuguese exploration continued southward toward the Cape of Good Hope and beyond in the 16th century.
 * Early contacts were made with the Mbundu peoples south of Kongo in the 1520's, and a more permanent Portuguese settlement was est. there in 1570s with the foundation of Luanda on the coast.
 * became basis of Portuguese colony of Angola
 * Portuguese attempted to dominate existing trading system of the African ports in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. They est. an outpost on Mozambique Island and then secured bases at Kilwa, Mombasa, Sofala, and other ports that gave them access to the gold trade from Monomotapa.
 * In East Africa and the west African coast, number of permanent Portuguese settlers was minimal. The Portuguese effort was mainly commercial and military, although it was accompanied by a strong missionary effort.
 * in 17th century, Dutch, English, French, and others competed with the Portuguese and displaced them to some extent.
 * Portugal's interest in Africa had been gold, pepper, and other products, a central element in this pattern was the slave trade. The Portuguese voyages opened a direct channel to sub-Saharan Africa. The first slaves brought directly to Portugal from Africa arrived in 1441, and after that date, slaves became a common trade item.
 * Portuguese sent about 50 slaves per year to Portugal before 1450, when raiding was prevalent, but by 1460, some 500 slaves per year arrived in Portugal as a trade with African rulers developed
 * slave trade given added impetus when the Portuguese and Spanish began to develop sugar plantations on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, Canaries, and Sao Tome.

Trend Toward Expansion

 * **MI: Although debate and controversy surround many aspects of the history of slavery, it is perhaps best to start with the numbers.**
 * between 1450 and 1850, it is estimated that about 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. With a mortality rate of 10-20% on the ships, about 10 or 11 million Africans actually arrived in the Americas. As many as 1/3 of the total captured died in Africa as a result of slaving wars and forced marches to the coast.
 * In the 16th century, the numbers were small, but they increased to perhaps 16,000 per year in the 17th century.
 * in the 18th century, the great age of the Atlantic slave trade, probably more than 7 million slaves, or more than 80% of all those embarked, were exported between 1700 and 1800. By the latter date, about 3 million slaves lived in the Americas.
 * In the 19th century, when slavery was under attack, the slave trade continued to some places. Cuba received some 700,000 slaves, and Brazil took more than 1 million.
 * Slave trade, in such high volume, was necessary, because in most slave regimes of the Caribbean and Latin America, mortality was high, while fertility was low. There was usually a loss of population, and the only was to maintain/ expand the number of slaves was by importing more from Africa.
 * Southern US was the only exception to this pattern, where slave pop. grew, b/c of temp. + climate and the fact that few worked in most dangerous and unhealthy conditions, ie. sugar growing or mining.
 * by 1860, ~6 million slaves worked in the US, and area that depended on natural pop. growth than Atlantic Slave trade.
 * dimensions of the trade varied over time, reflecting the economic and political situation in the Americas. From 1530 - 1650, Spanish America and Brazil received the majority of African slaves, but after the English and French began to grow sugar in the Caribbean, the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, and St. Domingue became important terminals for slavers.
 * Atlantic slavers drew slaves from across the continent.

Demographic Patterns:

 * **MI: The majority of the trans-Saharan slave trade consisted of women to be used as concubines and domestic servants in north Africa and the Middle East, but the Atlantic slave trade concentrated on men**.
 * To some extent, this was because planters and mine owners in the Americas were seeking workers for heavy labor and not eager to risk buying children because of their high levels of morality.
 * African societies that sold captives into slavery often preferred to sell men and keep women and children as domestic slaves or to extend existing kin groups.
 * Atlantic slave trade seems to have has a demographic impact on at least certain parts of of west and central Africa.
 * one est. is that the pop. of about 25 mil. in 1850 in those regions was about 1/2 what it would have been had there no slave trade
 * it is true that the trans-Atlantic slave trade carried more men than women and more women than children, but captive women and children who remained in Africa swelled in numbers of enslaved people and skewed their proportion of women to men in the African enslaving societies.
 * As Atlantic trade developed, new crops, such as maize and manioc, were introduced to Africa that provided new food resources for the population and helped it recover from the losses of the slave trade.

Organization of the Trade:

 * **MI: The patterns of contact and trade est. by the Portuguese at first were followed by rival Europeans on the African coast. Control of the slave trade or a portion of it generally reflected the political situation in Europe.**
 * for one and a 1/2 centuries, until about 1630, the Portuguese controlled most of the coastal trade and were the major suppliers of their own colony of Brazil and the Spanish settlements in America.
 * Growth of slave-based plantation colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere led other Europeans to compete with the Portuguese.
 * The Dutch became major competitors when they seized El Mina in 1637
 * by the 1660s, the English were eager to have their own source of slaves for their growing colonies in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia
 * **Royal African Company** was chartered for that purpose.
 * French made similar arrangements in 1660s, but it wasn't until 18th century did France become a major carrier.
 * each nation est. merchant towns or trade forts from which a steady source of captives could be obtained. For the Europeans stationed on the coast, Africa was also a graveyard because of the tropical diseases they encountered
 * fewer than 10% of the employees of the Royal Africa Company who went to Africa ever returned to England, and a majority died the first year there.
 * European agents for the companies often had to pay local rulers with taxes or offering gifts. Various forms of currency were used: iron bars, brass rings, cowrie shells.
 * The Spanish developed a complicated system in which a healthy man was called an **Indies piece**, and children and women were priced at fractions of that value.
 * slaves were brought to the coast by a variety of means. Sometimes, as in Angola, European military campaigns produced captives for slaves, or African or mulatto agents purchased captives at interior trade centers.
 * Some historians argue that the profitability of slave trade was so great and constant that they were a major element in the rise of commercial capitalism and later, the origins of the Industrial Revolution.
 * The slave trade was little more profitable in the long run than most business activities of the age, and by itself was not a major source of the capital needed in the Industrial Revolution.
 * It is difficult to calculate the full economic importance of slavery to the economies of Europe, because it was so directly linked to the plantation and mining economies of Americas. During some periods, **a triangular trade** existed in which slaves were carried to the Americas; sugar, tobacco, and other goods were then carried to Europe; and European products were sent to the coast of Africa to begin the triangle again.

002: pg 440-448 outline notes MI + details

 * African Societies, Slavery, and the Slave Trade:**
 * **MI: The slave trade influenced African forms of servitude and the social and political development of African states. Newly powerful states emerged in west Africa; in the Sudan and east Africa, slavery also produced long-term effects**
 * Europeans during the age of slave trade often justified their enslavement of Africans by noting that it was already existent on that continent.
 * Despite the prevalence of bondage practice in Africa, Atlantic trade interacted with and transformed these earlier aspects of slavery.
 * African societies had developed many forms of servitude, which varied from a peasant status to something much more like chattel slavery in which people were considered things: "property with a soul," as described by Aristotle.
 * nonegalitarian, because in many African societies, all land was owned by the state or the ruler, the control of slaves was one of the few ways, in which individuals or lineages could increase their wealth and status
 * slaves were used as servants, concubines, soldiers, administrators, and field workers.
 * despite great variation in African societies and the fact that slaves sometimes attained positions of command and trust, in most cases, slaves were denied choice about their lives and actions
 * placed in dependent/ inferior positions, and were considered aliens
 * enslavement of women was central feature of African slavery
 * domestic slavery and extension of lineages through addition of female members remained a central feature in many places
 * in Sudanic states of the savanna, Islamic concepts of slavery had been introduced
 * viewed as legitimate fate for nonbelievers but illegal for Muslims
 * despite complaints of legal scholars, such as Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu(1556-1627) against the enslavement of Muslims, many of the Sudanic states enslaved their captives, both pagan and Muslim
 * In Niger River valley, slave communities produced agricultural surpluses for the rulers and nobles of Songhay, Gao, and other states. Slaves were used for mining and salt production and as caravan workers in the Sahara

Slaving and African Politics:

 * **MI: In the period between 1500 and 1750, as the gunpowder empires and expanding international commerce of Europe penetrated sub-Saharan Africa, existing states and societies often transformed.**
 * The empire of Songhay controlled a vast region of the western savanna until its defeat by the Moroccan invasion in 1591, but for the most part, the many states of central and western Africa were small and fragmented, leading to a situation of instability caused by competition and warfare as states tried to expand at the expense of its neighbors.
 * warrior/ soldier emerged as an important social type in states such as Kongo kingdom and Dahomey, and along the Zambezi River.
 * endless wars promoted the importance of military and made the sale of captives into the slave trade an extension of the politics of regions of Africa
 * one result of the presence of Europeans on the coast was a shift in the locus of power within Afric
 * states closer to the coast or in contact with the Europeans could serve as intermediaries between the gold of the west African forests and the trans-Saharan trade routes.
 * with access to European goods, such as firearms, iron, horses, cloth, tobacco, etc, western and central African kingdoms began to redirect trade toward the coast and to expand their influence.

Asante and Dahomey:

 * **MI: Several large estates developed in west Africa during the slave trade era. Each represented a response to the realities of the European presence and the process of state formation long under way in Africa. Rulers in these states grew in power and often surrounded themselves with ritual authority and a luxurious court life as a way of reinforcing the position that their armies had won.**
 * In the Gold Coast, the empire of **Asante** rose to prominence in the period of the slave trade. Asante were members of the Akan peope who settled in and around Kumasi, a region of gold and kola nut production that lay between the coast and the Hausa and Mande trading centers to the north.
 * There were at least 20 small states, based on the matrilineal clans that were common to all the Akan peoples, but those of the Oyoko clan predominated.
 * Their cooperation and their access to firearms after 1650 initiated a period of centralization and expansion.
 * Under **Osei Tutu**(1717), the title **asantehene** was created to designate the supreme civil and religious leader.
 * his golden stool became the symbol of an Asante union that was created by linking the many Akan clans under the authority of the asantehene but recognizing the autonomy of subordinate areas.
 * With control of the gold-producing zones and a constant supply of prisoners to be sold as slaves for more firearms, Asante maintained its power until the 1820s as the dominant state of the Gold Coast.
 * In the areas of the Bight of Benin, several large states developed
 * the kingdom of Benin was at the height of its power when the Europeans arrived
 * traced its origins to the city of Ife and to the Yoruba peoples that were its neighbors, but it had become a separate and independent kingdom withs its own well-developed political and artistic traditions, esp. in the casting of bronze.
 * as early as 1516, the ruler, or oba, limited the slave trade from Benin, and for a long time, controlled directly by the king and was in pepper, textiles, and ivory rather than slaves.
 * the kingdom of **Dahomey**, which developed among the Fon peoples, had a different response to the European presence. It began to emerge as a power in the 17th century from its center at Abomey. Its kings ruled with the advice of powerful councils, but by the 1720s, access to firearms allowed the rulers to create an autocratic and sometimes brutal political regime based on slave trade
 * in 1720's under King Agaja(1708-1740), the kingdom of Dahomey moved toward the coast, seizing in 1727 the port town of Whydah.
 * Dahomey became a subject of the powerful neighboring Yoruba state of Oyo, whose cavalry and archers made it strong.
 * Between 1640 and 1890, over 1.8 mil slaves were exported from the Bight of Benin.
 * growing divinity of rulers paralleled the rise of absolutism in Europe. In some states, a balance of offices kept central power in check.
 * creativity of these societies was exemplified through traditional arts.
 * bronze crafting, woodcarving, weaving
 * guilds of artisans developed
 * sculptures of wood and ivory

East Africa and Sudan:

 * **MI: On the east coast of Africa, the Swahili trading cities continued their commerce in the Indian Ocean, adjusting to the military presence of the Portuguese and Ottoman Turks. Trade to the interior continued to bring ivory, gold, and a steady supply of slaves.**
 * slaves were destined for harems and households of Arabia and the Middle East, and some were carried by Europeans to plantation colonies
 * Portuguese and IndoPortuguese settlers along the Zambezi River in Mozambique used slave soldiers to increase their terrritories, and certain groups in the interior east Africa specialized in supplying ivory and slaves to the east African coast.
 * on Zanzibar and other offshore islands, and later on the coast, Swahili, Indian, and Arabian merchants followed the European model and set up clove plantations using African slave laborers
 * by 1860s, Zanzibar had slave pop. of 100,000
 * sultan of Zanzibar owned 4,000 slaves in 1870, and slavery was a prominent feature of the east African coast, and the slave trade from the interior to these plantations and to the traditional slave markets of the Red Sea continued until the end of the 19th century.
 * The interior of East Africa consists of large and small kingdoms supported by well-watered and heavily populated region of the great lakes of the interior.
 * Bantu speakers predominated, but many peoples inhabited the region
 * a groups of languages called Cushitic formed, as a result of the interactions between Bantu speakers with farmers and herders
 * the Nilotic migrations, of people who spoke languages of the Nilotic group, esp. of the **Luo** peoples, resulted in the construction of related dynasties among the states in the area of the large lakes around east central Africa.
 * in the northern savanna, at the end of the 18th central, Islamization took place, which was important in the days of the Mali and Songhay empires, entered a new and violent stage that linked Islamization to external slave trade and growth of slavery in Africa, as well as produce other long-term effects in the region.
 * After the breakup of the Songhay in the 16th century, several successor states developed
 * Bambara kingdom of Segu --> pagan
 * Kausa kingdom in northern Nigeria --> Muslim royal families and urban aristocrats
 * 1770s --> Muslim reform movements began to sweep western Sudan
 * religious brotherhoods advocating a purifying Sufi variant of Islam extended their influence throughout the Muslim trade networks in the Senegambia region and western Sudan. This movement had intense impact on the **Fulani**, a pastoral people who spread across a broad area of western Sudan
 * 1804 --> Usuman Dan Fodio, a studious and charismatic scholar, began to preach the reformist ideology in the Hausa kingdoms.
 * movement became a revolution in 1804, seeing himself as God's instrument, he preached a jihad against the Hausa kings, and a great upheaval followed in which the Fulani took control of most of the Hausa states of northern Nigeria in western Sudan
 * a new kingdom developed under Fodio's son and brothe, based in the city of Sokoto
 * by 1840's the effects of Islamization and Fulani expansion caused:
 * new political units, a reformist Islam that tried to eliminate pagan practices spread, and social and cultural changes took place in the wake of these changes.
 * Literacy became more dispersed, and new centers of trade, such as Kano emerged
 * jihads established other new states

White Settlers and Africans in Southern Africa:

 * **MI: In Southern Africa, a Dutch colony eventually brought Europeans into conflict with Africans, esp. the southern Bantu-speaking peoples. One of these groups, the Zulu, created under the Shaka a powerful chiefdom during the 19th century in a process of expansion that affected the whole region.**
 * the southern end of Africa was occupied by non-Bantu hunting peoples, **the San**; by the **Khoikhoi**, who lived by hunting and sheep herding; and after contact with the Bantu, by cattle-herding peoples. By 3rd century, people were practicing farming and using iron tools, living south of the Limpopo river.
 * by 16th century, Bantu-speaking people occupied most of the eastern regions of southern Africa, practicing agriculture and herding, working on iron and copper tools, weapons, adornments; traded with their neighbors
 * spoke related languages, such as Tswana and Sotho as well as the Nguni languages such as Zulu and Xhosa.
 * Men worked as artisans and herders; women did the farming and housework and sometimes organized their labor communally
 * political cheifdoms of various sizes, many of them small, but a few with as many as 50,000 inhabitants, characterized the southern Bantu peoples
 * Chiefs held power with the support of relatives and acceptance of the people, but there was variation in chief authority.
 * junior lineages to form villages created a process of expansion that led to competition for land and absorption of newly conquered groups
 * 1652 --> Dutch East India Company est. a colony at the Cape of Good Hope to serve as provisioning post for ships sailing to Asia
 * when boers crossed Orange River in search of new lands in the 1760s, competition and warfare resulted
 * by 1800, the Cape Colony had 17,000 settlers, 26,000 slaves, and 14,000 Khoikhoi
 * accelerating arrival of English-speaking immigrants, and the lure of better lands caused groups of Boers to move to the north. These **voortrekkers** moved into lands occupied by the souther Nguni, eventually creating a number of autonomous Boer states.
 * after 1834, when Britain abolished slavery and imposed restrictions on landholding, groups of Boers staged their **Great Trek** far to the north to be free from government interference.

The Mfecane and the Zulu Rise to Power:

 * **MI: Among the Nguni peoples, major changes had taken place. A unification process had begun in some of the northern chiefdoms, and a new military organization had emerged.**
 * in 1818 leadership fell to **Shaka**, a brilliant military tactician, who reformed the loosed forces into regiments organized by lineage and age.
 * Iron discipline and new tactics were introduced, including the use of a short stabbing spear to be used at close range.
 * Shaka's chiefdom became the center of new military and political organization
 * absorb/ destroy neighbors
 * destroyed ruling families of the groups he incorporated into the growing Zulu state
 * ruled with iron hand, destroying enemies, acquiring their cattle, and crushing any opposition.
 * when assassinated in 1828, his reforms continued
 * rise of Zulu and other Nguni chiefdoms was the beginning of the **mfecane**, or wars of crushing and wandering
 * as Zulu control expanded, a series of campaigns and forced migrations led to constant fighting as other peoples sought to survive by fleeing, emulating, or joining the Zulu
 * new African states, such as the **Swazi**, that adapted aspects of the Zulu model emerged among the survivors.
 * One state, **Lesotho**, successfully resisted the Zulu example.

003: Notes: pg. 448- 454:



 * The African Diaspora:**
 * **MI: Despite African resistance to enslavement, the slave trade and the horrifying Middle Passage carried millions of Africans from their original homelands. In the Americas, especially in plantation colonies, they became a large segment of the population, and African cultures were adapted to new environments and conditions.**
 * The slave trade was the means by which the history of the Americas and Africa were linked, and in which African societies were drawn into the world economy. The import into Africa of European firearms, Indian textiles, Indonesian cowrie shells, and American tobacco in return for ivory, gold, and esp. slaves demonstrated Africa's integration into the mercantile structure of the world.
 * Prices of slaves rose steadily in the 18th century, and terms of trade increasing favored African dealers. In many ports, ie. Whydah, Porto Novo, and Luanda, African or Afro-European communities developed that specialized in the slave trade and used this position to advance.
 * Slave Lives:**
 * **MI: To slaves, slavery meant the decimation of their villages or their capture in war, separation from friends/ family, and then forced to march to an interior trading town or to the slave pens at the coast.**
 * Conditions were deadly, and as much as 1/3 of the captives died along the way or in slave pens. Eventually, slaves were loaded on ships, and cargo sizes varied, going as high as 700 slaves crowded into dank, unsanitary conditions.
 * Overcrowding + length of the voyage/ point of origin in Africa = factor in mortality.
 * average mortality rate ~18% and declined a little in 18th century.
 * in 1737, on a Dutch ship, 700/ 716 people died
 * The **Middle Passage**, the slave voyage to America, was traumatic:
 * taken from their homes, branded, confined, and shackled, the Africans faced dangers of poor hygiene, dysentery, disease, bad treatment, and fears of being beaten by Europeans.
 * sometimes led to resistance and mutiny on shops.
 * Middle Passage, despite being traumatic, did not strip Africans of their culture, and they retained their languages, beliefs, artistic traditions, and memories of their past in America
 * Africans in the Americas:**
 * **The slaves carried across the were brought mainly to the plantations and mines of the Americas-landed estate using large amounts of labor, often coerced, became characteristic of American agriculture, at first in sugar production, and later for rice, cotton, and tobaccco.**
 * The plantation system was already used for producing sugar on the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal was transferred to the New World. After attempts to use Native American laborers in places such as Brazil and Hispaniola, Africans were brought in.
 * West Africans, coming from societies in which herding, metallurgy, and intensive agriculture were widely practiced, were sought by Europeans for the specialized tasks of making sugar. In English colonies of Barbados and Virginia, indentured servants from England were replaced by enslaved Africans when new crops, such as sugar, were introduced or when indentured servants became less available.
 * Plantation system of farming with a dependent or enslaved workforce characterized the production of many tropical and semitropical crops in demand in Europe, and thus the plantation became the locus of African and American life.
 * slave tasks: mining to urban occupations as artisans, street vendors, and household servants
 * there were no occupations slaves did not perform; most were agricultural laborers.

American Slave Societies:

 * **MI: Each American slave-based society reflected the variations of its European origin and its component African cultures, but there were certain similarities and common features.**
 * Each recognized distinctions b/t African-born **saltwater slaves**, who were almost invariably black and their American born descendants, the **Creole slaves**, some of whom were mulattos as a result of sexual exploitation of slave women and other forms of miscegenation.
 * In all American slave societies, a hierarchy of status evolved in which free whites were at the top, slaves were at the bottom, and free people of color had an intermediate position. In the sense this sense, color and "race" played a role in American slavery it had no played in Africa.
 * Among the slaves, slaveholders also created a hierarchy based on origin and color. Creole, esp. mulatto slaves were given more opportunities to acquired skilled jobs or to work as house servants rather than in the fields or mines. They were also more likely to win their freedom by **manumission**, the voluntary freeing of slaves.
 * This hierarchy was a creation of the slaveholders and did not necessarily reflect perceptions among the slaves. Important African nobles or religious leaders, who for one reason or another were solve into slavery, continued to exercise authority within the slave community, as did the distinctions b/t different African groups whose members maintained their ties and affiliations in America.
 * Many slave rebellions in the Caribbean and Brazil were organized along African ethnic and political lines.
 * Although economic factors inposed similarities, slave-based societies varied in composition.
 * In early 17th century Lima, Peru, the capital of Spain's colony in South America, blacks outnumbered Europeans.
 * In 18th century, on the Caribbean islands where the indigenous population had died out or exterminated and where few Europeans settled, Africans and their descendants formed the vast majority.
 * In Jamaica and St. Domingue, slaves made up more than 80% of pop.; a large proportion of them were African born.
 * Brazil also had a large proportion of imported Africans, but its more diverse populations and economy, as well as a tradition of manumitting slaves made up only 35% of the pop.
 * free people of color, the descendants of former slaves, made up another 1/3, so slaves and free colored people comprised 2/3 of pop
 * North American cities such as Charleston and New Orleans developed a large slave and free African population, but souther colonies of British America differed significantly from the Caribbean and Brazil, by depending less on imported Africans because of natural population growth among the slaves.
 * In NA, creole slaves predominated, but manumission was less common, and free people of color made up less than 10% of pop.
 * Combination of natural birth and small direct trade from Africa reduced the degree of African cultural reinforcement.

The People and Gods in Exile:

 * **MI: Africans brought as slaves to the Americas faced a peculiar series of problems. Working conditions were exhausting, and life for most slaves often was difficult and short.**
 * Family formation was made difficult because of the general shortage of female slaves; the ratio of men to women was as much as three to one in some places. This was added to the insecurity of slave status: family members might be separated by sale or by master's whim.
 * Religion was an example of continuity and adaptation. Slaves were converted to Catholicism by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and showed fervent devotion as members of Black Catholic brotherhoods. In North America and the British Caribbean, they joined Protestant denominations.
 * In English islands, **obeah** was the given name to the African religious practices, and the men and women knowledgeable of them were held in high regard within the community.
 * In the practices of Brazilian **candomble** (Yoruba) and Haitian **vodun (**Aja), fully developed versions of African religions flourished and continue today, despite attempts to suppress them.
 * Slaves held their new faith in Christianity and their beliefs at the same time, and tried to fuse the two. For Muslim Africas, in 1835, the Bahia, the largest slave rebellion in Brazil was organized by Muslim Yoruba and Hausa slaves and directed against the whites and nonbelievers.
 * Resistance and rebellion were aspects of African American history:
 * 1508 - African runaways disrupted communications of Hispaniola, and in 1527, a plot to rebel was uncovered in Mexico City.
 * In Brazil during the 17th century, **Palmares**, an enormous runaway slave kingdom with many villages and a population of perhaps 8000 - 10000 people, resisted Portuguese and Dutch attempts to destroy it for a century.
 * In Jamaica, the runaway Maroons were able to gain independence and recognition of their freedom.
 * In Suriname, a former Dutch plantation colony, large numbers of slaves ran off in the 18th century and mounted an almost perpetual war in the rain forest against the various expeditions sent to hunt them down.
 * Those captured were brutally executed. Eventually, a truce developed. Suriname Maroons maintained many aspects of their west African background in terms of language, kinship relations, and religious beliefs, but were fused with European and American Indian contacts resulting from New World experience.

The End of Slavery and the Abolition of Slavery:

 * **The end of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic world resulted in economic, political, and religious changes in Europe and its overseas American colonies and former colonies. These changes, which were manifestations of the Enlightenment, the age of revolution, Christian revivalism, and Industrial Revolution, were external to Africa, but one again, they determined the pace and nature of change within Africa.**
 * African societies began to export other commodities, such as peanuts, cotton, and palm oil, which diminished their dependence on slave trade, but the supply of slaves to European merchants was not greatly affected by this development.
 * Opponents of slavery and the brutality of the trade appeared in the mid-18th century, amidst the intellectual movements of the West.
 * Philosopher **Jean-Jacques Rosseau** in France and political economist **Adam Smith** in England opposed slavery.
 * at this time, slavery was viewed as backward and immoral. Slave trade was also criticized, and was the symbol of slavery's inhumanity and cruelty.
 * In England, under the leadership of religious humanitarians, such as **John Wesley** and **William Wilberforce**, an abolitionist movement gained strength against the merchants and the West Indies interests. After much parliamentary debate, British slave trade was abolished in 1807. Britain also tried to impost abolition of slavery on countries throughout the Atlantic.
 * Spain and Portugal were pressured to gradually suppress the trade, and the British navy was used to enforce these agreements by capturing illegal slave ships.
 * by 19th century, the moral and intellectual justifications that had supported the age of slave trade had worn thin and the movement to abolish slavery was growing in the Atlantic world, but full abolishment did not end in the Americas until Brazil's abolition in 1888.