The way we present the topic of slavery to young people is all wrong

During the past few years, I’ve written books about the history of race relations (Race [S & S/Atheneum/Ginee Seo Bks., 2007]), the American Revolution (The Real Revolution [2005]), and with my wife, Marina Budhos, the history of sugar (Sweet and Bitter [forthcoming, both Clarion]). While researching these books, I realized that the way we present the topic of slavery to young readers is completely incorrect. I hope you’ll pass this column along to social studies teachers so they can begin to set the record straight. For those interested in learning more about the history of slavery, I’d suggest starting with three books: John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1998), David Eltis’s The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (1999), and Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002, all Cambridge University Press). What follows are a number of important points about slavery based on the latest studies:

• Africans sold other Africans into slavery. The overwhelming majority of slaves were not seized in raids by whites: they were knowingly sold by their fellow Africans. Elite Africans profited from the slave trade.
• Individuals did not own land in the regions of Africa that were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Instead, slaves were one of the main forms of private property—before, during, and after the first Europeans arrived. With the opening of European trade, those Africans who were accustomed to buying and selling other Africans found a new market for their property.
• During most of the period of Atlantic slavery, from 1500 on, no one in the world had a sense of “race”—Africans did not feel kinship to other dark-skinned people. Indeed, until the mid-1700s, slave ships used Africans from one ethnic group to police Africans from other groups—even though all of them would eventually be sold as slaves in the New World. By the same token, Europeans who sold Russians to the Ottomans had no sense of kinship to other fair-skinned people.
• Very few of the enslaved Africans who were taken across the Atlantic (only four percent of the 10 to 13 million people) were brought to North America. Atlantic slavery was almost entirely aimed at supplying the Caribbean and South American markets.
• Most slaves were purchased to work on sugar—not cotton and tobacco—plantations.
• Approximately three-quarters of the wealth that was generated by the entire New World—North and South America—between 1600 and 1800 was created by the labor of Africans.
• The global commerce in slaves, sugar, and provisions for those who were enslaved created the trade links, credit system, and wealth that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
• Conclusion: we should not see Africans as victims of a racial system run by whites. Africans were global actors at a crucial moment in the transformation of the world economy. Rather than being called African Americans, they might properly call themselves Afro-Globals.
• A signature cause in the new era of wage labor and political democracy was the abolition of slavery—a practice as old as humanity. The end of slavery was brought about by concerned abolitionists (primarily in England), the successful slave revolt in Haiti, and by slaves who told their stories through abolitionists.
• Whether as workers who labored on sugar plantations, rebels, or spokesmen for abolition, Africans were central to the creation of the modern world—but as actors, not as victims.
• Thus modern Afro-Globals should see today’s globalization as their heritage, in which they can claim their rightful place.