Pure Greed: The Economics of The Slave Trade

Logan Ressler

The Slave Trade and the issue of slavery are considered two of the greatest social and moral problems that humanity has ever faced. Abolitionist movements had to work in secret for decades and when they finally did come out it took many more years for substantial progress to be made. In many parts of the world slavery and more so human trafficking are still issues that need to be solved. Slavery and the underlying practice of treating human lives as commodities is a huge moral dilemma. Many people had no problem sacrificing their morals for the profits that were to be made from the slave trade. But to understand the greed of the oppressors, you must first understand how much profit they are actually making, and to do that we must look at the economics of the slave trade.

The best way to understand the scale and size of the profit made by European's at the 'top of the food chain' so to speak is to examine the gross margin made by a specific country over a set period of time. Simply because of the availability of data, I'll focus on England. If we can find the value for England we can imagine the entire European value to be much higher.

England was one of the five most prominent players in the Atlantic Slave Trade which consisted of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and to a slightly lesser extent, The Netherlands. According to a Dutch examination of the gross margin of the slave trade, England's profit from the Slave Trade from 1761 to 1807 was roughly £49,000,000. An astonishing number in it's own right but even more mindblowing when you convert it into today's currency accounting for inflation.

In today's dollars, England's gross margin from the Atlantic Slave Trade was roughly 12 BILLION US Dollars. If England's profits represented a modern day nation, they'd be the third largest economy in the world coming in one billion behind China. Then when you take into account that this is only England's margin over only a few decades and does not include the rest of Europe, you can now see just how monstrously profitable the Slave Trade was. It was this extraordinary levels of profit that led Europeans and devout Christian's to sideline their morals.

When the idea of Slave Trade was introduced to Queen Elizabeth she was immediately concerned for the safety and conditions of the Africans. After seeing just how profitable the slave trade could be, she forgot all qualms she had and allowed trade to ensue. The fundamental issue of the slave trade is not how to better treat other humans, but how to better stop temptations of greed. The Slave Trade is a prime example of how greed can shape an entire continent of people's lives for the worse and change the way we approach issues of labor forever. We will always have to fight greed and there is still much work to be done today. 

Bibliography:

WEEDEN, WILLIAM B. “The Early African Slave-Trade in New England.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 5, no. 1, Apr. 1888, pp. 107–128. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=31h&AN=48055788&site=eds-live.

Galenson, David. “The Slave Trade to the English West Indies, 1673-1724.” Economic History Review, vol. 32, no. 2, May 1979, pp. 241–249. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/2595456.

Fatah-Black, Karwan, and Matthias van Rossum. “Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and Its Economic Impact.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 36, no. 1, Mar. 2015, p. 63. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=101141469&site=eds-live.

James A. Rawley, and Stephen D. Behrendt. “11. The Economics of the Slave Trade.” The Transatlantic Slave Trade : A History, Revised Edition, University of Nebraska Press, 2005. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.MUSE9780803205123.20&site=eds-live.

Galli, Mark. “A Profitable Little Business.” Christian History, vol. 16, no. 1, Feb. 1997, p. 20. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=9703192321&site=eds-live.