Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade:
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
I’m working on an essay about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade this week. There are a few things that jump out at me:
- The Holocaust of the Jews during WWII, horrific as it was, involved about one fifth of the fatalities of what must surely be considered in today’s parlance “Africa’s Holocaust”. Conservative estimates put the total traffic of the Atlantic slave trade at around 40 million total slaves bought on the African coast. Around 27 million survived the “middle passage“.
- As much as we’d like to think that an altruistic appeal to Judeo-Christian humanistic values led to the abolition of the slave trade, it is more likely that it ended because a)it was becoming less profitable and b) it was in the best interest of the British Empire and its unbelievably large naval fleet to do so.
- William Wilberforce was probably not at all like he was portrayed to be in the recent movie “Amazing Grace” and countless sermons and Christian books. (This might lead me to go on a rant about why we, as followers of Jesus Christ, seem to have a penchant for being dishonest about our history?)
- Thomas Clarkson was a dude worth making movies about.
Rant continues after the break…