Atlantic Slave Trade to Europe and Mainline North America
See The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces
Provided by D. Phelps
Below is from an interactive site of slave movement from Africa to locations of choice. The reports result from chosen parameters at the site. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces Please note that the default is "flag" indicating which country was responsible. The report below parameters were: Embarkation regions: all of Africa; Disembarkation regions: Europe and Mainline North America; Columns: "Specific disembarkations regions" The years chosen were up to the Civil war - a period allowing for slave movements to America.
Coming to Great Britain
In 1544, five Africans sailed from Africa to Great Britain with Captain John Lok. They were brought to England to train as interpreters and to help develop trade relationships between Africa and Britain. As Great Britain's involvement in the slave trade grew, more blacks came to the country and the interactions between Africans and Britains became motivated by prejudice and racism. By 1596, a number of African slaves and free blacks were living in Britain. This prompted the queen, Elizabeth I, to order that all Africans be expelled from England in 1601 because she blamed them for creating social problems. The attempt to rid England of blacks did not work because blacks had become a part of English society. Many were free people, and many of those who were slaves were owned by wealthy families who wanted to keep their servants.
By the eighteenth century, approximately 15,000 people of African descent were living in Britain, and many lived near the ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol. In Great Britain at this time, there was no legislation that made slavery legal. A court decision in 1772 made it a crime to send an African living in Britian back into slavery. Many people interpreted this incorrectly as meaning that slavery did not exist in Britain and that any black person coming to Britain would be free. As you learned in the previous activity, after the American Revolution, many blacks living in America as slaves were promised freedom in exchange for their support during the Revolution. In addition to going to Nova Scotia, Canada, many of these American slaves came to London.
Blacks arriving in Britain found a country that could not assist them and that did not want them there. In 1731, a law was passed that made it illegal to allow blacks to learn trades, making it impossible for people of African descent to earn a living and live independently. Most blacks at this time worked as servants or begged in the streets. Blacks were blamed for the many problems that the country faced. This is one of the reasons that groups of white men proposed to re-settle the blacks in another country. This led to the settlement of Sierra Leone in West Africa. You will learn about Sierra Leone in the next and final activity of this module.
Source: Exploring Africa – Africa in the classroom - A collaborative endeavor with four units at Michigan State University with invaluable input from external educational consultants and teachers from throughout Michigan and the United States. Primary funding and support for Exploring Africa comes from the Office of International Studies and Programs (ISP) with on-going contribution from the African Studies Center. Unit Three: Studying Africa through the Humanities http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/students/curriculum/m15/activity5.php
Comments by Mel Currie, E1a Project Administrator for FTDNA
No sources originally provided
"I think that E1a, and in particular E1a1, reached Europe via Africa, not the Middle East. My sifting through the evidence does not overlook the fact that the largest concentration of E1a/E1a1 is found in Mali, with rapidly diminishing density as you move north toward the Mediterranean and east toward Egypt and the Sudan. It's easier to make a case for E1 having arisen in the Middle East, although the evidence for that also appears weak to me. In looking for an explanation for the traces of E1a found among white-identifying people today, it seems most reasonable to look to four sources:
1. The European slave trade. The Portuguese slave trade started well before Columbus sailed to the New World. It was a slave trade that brought so many slaves to Portugal itself that by the mid- 1500s it is said that 10 percent of Lisbon’s population was of African descent. [ Added by D Phelps: "by 1500 about a tenth of the population of lisbon and seville were african slaves" from The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, p52. No population records found] More generally, during the period of African slavery in Europe many tens of thousands were brought from Africa and eventually melted into the European population. [Source not found]
2. The American slave trade. Ditto to what was said above. When a person of African descent was able to pass for white, he/she generally did. There was ample incentive to do so. Millions of slaves were brought to the Americas.
3. The Jewish Diaspora. Going back fifteen hundred years or so, the departure of Jews from the Middle East was very likely an additional source of E1a1 in the European population and, specifically, the Ashkenazi Jewish population. One can speculate on how E1a1 entered the Jewish population, but the northern African trade routes would be a reasonable guess. Certainly, the major trading route leads to Mali, the most concentrated region in the world for
E1a and its subclade E1a1.
4. A trickle of E1a also likely reached the European Mediterranean countries through trade and, perhaps, the incursion of North Africans in Spain.
All of these routes into the European population point to a relatively recent arrival of E1a/E1a1 in Europe, not an ancient migration. Africa seems to be the overwhelmingly likely source, even the amount of E1a1 introduced by the Jewish migration points ultimately to Africa. E1a1 is not a major clade among Jews. It certainly ranks behind J and R, and probably G and Q too in this ethnic group. Further, if we consider how tightly the haplotypes of many of the Jewish members of our project are, it would seem to indicate that not a great deal of time has elapsed since E1a entered the Jewish population."
Slaves in Portugal and Spain -Provided by Douglas Phelps
4:19 PM Oct 26, 2010
" Breaking the Silence: Learning the Slave Routes " a joint initiative between UNESCO, Anti-Slavery International, the British Council and the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (NORAD). http://old.antislavery.org/breakingthesilence/slave_routes/index.shtml
Portugal- Muslims were taken prisoner and enslaved by Christians in the wars in Portugal during the 12th and 13th centuries. Although slavery in Muslim people declined in subsequent centuries a trade in African slaves was established in the 15th century following early expeditions to the continent. By the mid 16th century there were over 32,000 African slaves in Portugal,
Spain - At the time of Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492, the Spanish were completing the Reconquista, or the reconquest of Spain from the African Moors who had invaded in 711. Spain was already a major slave owning nation, home to around 10,000 North African slaves (many of them enslaved in the recent wars), and was a destination on the extensive Saharan slave routes supplying Christian and Islamic Europe.