This article is not a “balanced” take on the good and bad of colonialism. There is already plenty written on the bad by many others and spoken about constantly in public discourse. I have chosen to focus on the benefits as that is where there is little critical debate and discussion which enables us have a holistic view. And for the record, this is not an endorsement of the terrible evils committed by the colonialists.
Did you know that it was the British Empire that was most instrumental in ending slavery in the whole world? Did you know that after they abolished slavery in their lands and colonies, the British sent ships out to sea to patrol the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the 19th century to catch and confiscate slave ships, punish the crew and free any slaves on board? Did you know that they captured hundreds of slave ships and freed tens of thousands of enslaved Africans?
And did you know that they pressured other major European powers that had African colonies (France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Spain) to join them in the global fight against slavery? This history is seldom discussed nowadays. Now, you might be wondering what ending slavery has to do with colonialism. Let me explain.
Slavery was a global institution on every continent, culture, people, religion, tribe, race and ethnicity with very few exceptions. Contrary to the modern day picture of slavery (due to the distortions in the media and popular culture), blacks enslaved blacks, whites enslaved whites. Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, etc all had slaves. The Islamic Ottoman Empire (Turkey today) enslaved whites and in fact, the English word “slave” comes from the white European “Slavs” who became synonymous with the word because so many of them were enslaved.
Africa had thriving slave markets in places like modern day Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and others for centuries before Europeans ever showed up. Zanzibar was the biggest slave market on the African East coast until towards the end of the 19th century and it had to take the British to close it down via treaties accompanied by threats of force. It wasn’t white people running the Zanzibar slave market; it was black people. Black people went into the interior of Africa and captured men and women, marched them to the African East coast and sold them in Zanzibar. Or they bought them from African tribes that conquered other tribes.
The Arab slave trade which began in the 8th Century in Egypt after the Arab invasion from the Arabian desert went on for 700 years before the white man ever showed up. The Europeans were actually late to the slavery party, but they were far more organised so their 400 year participation in the brutal inhuman slave trade was very consequential as they bought about 12 million Africans. The Arabs took more slaves than this (up to 17 million by some estimates) and their slave trade lasted longer (over 1,200 years) than the European one.
But the internal African slave trade in empires like Mali, Songhai, Ashanti, Dahomey or Egypt was the most pervasive and according to historians, more black people were enslaved within Africa by fellow blacks than all the cross-continental slavery combined. Some estimates put the numbers at around 25 million Africans.
Arabs and Europeans joined existing slave markets and greatly expanded them. The picture of poor helpless Africans being captured by white slave traders, as portrayed in Alex Haley’s novel and TV series “Roots” is unfortunately a myth as 90% of all African slaves were captured and sold by fellow blacks. It was mainly the Portuguese who actively took part in slave raids, but this was just around 2% of the total with the rest coming due to wars, rebelllions, etc.
In the 17th century around the European Enlightenment period, some European Christians (mainly the Quakers) began to question the morality of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic and campaigned against it. They banned their members from having slaves and began to publicly lobby for the abolition of slavery. This coincided with the rapid growth of the power of European nations who advanced technologically to the point that they could cross the seas in advanced ships and conquer foreign lands with superior weapons.
The European powers were in competition to conquer and colonise foreign lands and they began to slowly defeat and take over African kingdoms who they had previously been content to do business with by selling them guns and ammunition in exchange for slaves. Hence the Berlin conference of 1884-85 at which they divided up Africa and agreed to stay out of each other’s way.
To be continued…
