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Slave
Trade
The slave triangle is
a depressing piece of world history involving a variety of culprits in England,
France ,Spain,
Portugal,
African Chiefs and traders, and the Arab countries of the middle east. The victims
were poor Africans - Men Women and Children.
The
first part of the triangle was called the outer passage when Europeans sailed
to Africa
where prisoners sold to European slavers in return for cheap manufactured
goods, textiles and alcohol. The slaves were then transported across the Atlantic
in the second part of the triangle (called The Middle Passage) and sold to work
on plantations growing sugar, cotton, tobacco and many other crops. The final
leg of the slave triangle was the Return Passage when goods like cotton,
sugar and rum were brought back from America
to Britain
and other countries in Europe.
Liverpool
played a major role in the transportation of these poor victims of greed and
exploitation, which constituted the second or middle part of the triangle of evil. An
estimated 15 million Africans were transported as slaves to the Americas
between 1540 and 1850. Ships from Liverpool
accounted for more than 40% of the European slave trade.
The
town and its inhabitants derived great wealth from the trade. It laid the
foundations for the town's growth. It is no exaggeration to say that the grand
buildings which grace Liverpool's
waterfront and inner heart today were built with the blood money of slavery.
There was however some
opposition from sections of the public in Liverpool,
mainly from ‘The Liverpool
Anti-Slavery Committee’ led by the Liverpool
Quaker John Cropper.
In 1824 a letter was sent
on behalf of the committee and addressed to ‘The
People of North
America’
deploring the situation and calling for an end to all forms of slavery in the US.
‘Deep and solemn convictions compel us to thus address you. We feel that slavery, wherever it exists, involves an aggravated violation of man’s rights and Gods laws; that it is evil both to the enslaved and to the enslaver; that it is a stain on the national honour, and a blot on its religious character, and that in its extinction your duty and interests are equally combined.’
Liverpool
re-emerged in this shameful episode as a commercial player par excellence in the transportation of cotton bales from the south
eastern ports of America.
In the second half of the nineteenth century much of the initiative in
marketing cotton round the globe shifted from Liverpool
and London to
the American east coast ports. American
merchants were much closer to the cotton plantations and unfettered by the rigid demarcations that had matured in
Lancashire.
The American merchants undermined the Liverpool
system by bypassing the traditional buying agencies in the plantation states
and the selling agencies in Europe,
supplying the mills direct.
After the initial onslaught, Liverpool mounted a
strong resistance, beginning with Forwood introducing the futures trade into
the port in 1876, but much of the initiative was lost to the U.S.A.
More
information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade