My latest animated “bar chart race” visualization above was inspired by John Hinderaker’s post on the Power Line blog “Slavery? We Were a Footnote” (quoted below) and shows the cumulative number of African slaves brought to the New World by region between 1511 and 1870. The data are from the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases, which are the “culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the principal sponsor of this work carried out at Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Hutchins Center of Harvard University has also provided support.” Here are some observations on the animated visualization above:
1. Of the nearly 10 million African slaves brought to the New World between 1511 and 1870, more than one-half (5.1 million and 52.8% of the total) disembarked in Brazil, and more than one-third were brought to Brazil (3.4 million and 36.5% of the total). Of the remaining approximately 1 million African slaves who were brought to the New World, 658,000 (and 6.8% of the total) disembarked in the Spanish Americas (Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, etc.) and only about 366,000 arrived in mainland North America (which became the United States) representing only 3.8% of the total slaves in the trans-Atlantic trade. For every one African slave brought to the United States, there were more than 26 slaves who arrived elsewhere in the New World (Brazil, Caribbean, and Spanish Americas).
2. By ratios, there were nearly 14 times as many slaves brought to the Caribbean and nearly 10 times as many slaves brought to Brazil as the United States (Mainland North America).
3. There were nearly as many slaves (352,411) brought to the Spanish Americas between 1511 and 1620 as arrived in the United States between 1651 and 1870.
4. In 1700 when there were only 12,000 slaves in the United States, there were more than half a million in the Caribbean (517,000) and the Spanish Americas (553,000). By the early 1800s when the number of slaves brought to the United States peaked and stabilized at about 361,000, there were more than 4 million slaves in the Carribbean and nearly 2 million in Brazil. Between 1810 and before the Civil War started in 1861, fewer than 5,000 African slaves arrived in the United States.
5. Even as the slave trade stopped in the United States, the Spanish Americas, and Brazil by around 1860, more than 135,000 African slaves were brought to the Caribbean between 1856 and 1870.
Summary: Despite the common narrative that the United States played a uniquely inexcusable or a disproportionately significant role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the empirical data suggest that America’s role was a relatively “minor footnote” in the historical travesty of slavery. And yet that doesn’t stop many on the left today from directing a significantly disproportionate share of the blame for the “sin of slavery” towards the United States even though Americans played a minor role compared to the Portuguese in Brazil, the Spaniards in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Danish, Dutch, French and British in the Caribbean.
As John Hinderaker explains:
Liberals are trying to rewrite American history, teaching our children that the only thing that ever happened here–until they came along a year or two ago!–was slavery. The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is being enthusiastically adopted by the nation’s public schools, is the culmination of years of left-wing propaganda. The liberals’ task is made easier by the fact that world history is mostly terra incognita to America’s young people. Thus, there is little fear of anyone putting American slavery into a global, historical context. But let’s do it anyway.
Slavery has existed since time immemorial on every continent except Antarctica, as Thomas Sowell wrote years ago. An estimated one-third to one-half of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, for example, were slaves. For more than 1,000 years, slaves (few of them Africans) were one of the basic commodities of trade across most of the world. But let’s focus specifically on African slavery.
Sub-Saharan Africa had a slave economy long before Europeans came along. But the external African slave trade of the early modern era had two basic components: Eastern and Western. The Eastern slave trade went to Arab countries. For a long time, the Arabs bought or captured European slaves, but when that supply dried up, they turned to Africa. Numbers are hard to come by–weirdly, the Arab slave trade hasn’t been as widely studied as the Western trade–but this source estimates that 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery in Islamic countries. If that number is correct, the Eastern slave trade was considerably larger than the Western.
Does this mean that slavery, here or elsewhere, was A-OK? Of course not. Through all of human history, slavery has been a horror. But virtually no one seriously opposed slavery in principle until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Christians in England and America, with a powerful assist from Jews, argued for the first time that slavery was wrong per se. Thereafter, the British Navy played the lead role in suppressing the slave trade.
When I was growing up, the abolition of slavery was justly celebrated in America’s public schools. Today, American children are being force-fed an ahistorical narrative in which America is somehow responsible for the entire phenomenon of African slavery, which extends back into pre-history and in which we have played a minor role.
By such lies do leftists seek to undermine our country. We shouldn’t let them get away with it. When it comes to slavery, America, along with Great Britain, is on the side of the angels. As is manifested by the fact that most Africans have come to the U.S. not as slaves, but rather voluntarily as immigrants, seeking freedom and a more prosperous life.
Here’s the video version of the animation below:
The post Animated chart of the day: African slaves brought to the New World by region, 1511-1870 appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.