Editorial by Dr. Henry Louis Gates on the Slave Trade

The slave trade is one of the last subjects we cover in History 14. It was part of a "triangular" system of trade whereby manufactured goods from Europe were traded with West African kingdoms for slaves who were shipped to the New World to produce raw materials for European consumption. While we as Americans are often accustomed to thinking of slavery only in terms of our own unfortunate history in the United States, in reality North America was only a small part of a much bigger picture. Only a small fraction of slaves were every brought to North America, the vast majority were brought to plantations in the Caribbean. However slavery is still an open wound in our national consciousness in ways that differ greatly from other states involved with the slave trade.

One of the big contemporary issues in US race relations is slave reparations, the idea that the descendants of slaves should receive compensation for the suffering their ancestors endured. In this article by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, we see that this controversial issue is more complex than simply giving payouts to African Americans. For one thing the class divide between Blacks and Whites in America is arguably derived more from the generations of institutionalized racism that came after Abolition. For another, it was not just white plantation owners who were complicit in this inhuman institution. As Dr. Gates argues, many powerful African kingdoms were direct participants in the slave trade, knowing full well that the conditions they sent their captives into were very different from their indigenous institutions of slavery. This article is an interesting object lesson on the interconnectedness of world civilizations.