Slave trade

Most important as far as Rillieux was concerned, the French were passionately debating their laws about slavery and the slave trade. For brief... 

In early Modem Times, the history of HAT was closely linked to the slave trade [14]. The trypanocidal activity of arsenic was discovered fortuitously by Sir David Linvingstone (1813-1873). He relates in Arsenic as remedy for the tsetse bite that the idea occurred in his mind about the year 1847-1848 [15]. Sir Livingstone tried the remedy on horses (two grains of arsenic) but 2 months after an apparent cure, the mare became like a skeleton and he saw her at last perish through sheer exhaustion. Subsequently, better results were obtained with organoarsenical dmgs (Table 1). 

Organics have a rich background - to my mind far more fascinating than that of minerals. They have been involved in some dark areas of our history, such as the slave trade, when ivory and slaves were often traded together. The illegal collection of some of the organics - for example, Baltic amber - has, in the past, carried the death penalty. Even today, ivory poachers risk being shot. 

Africa was no stranger to the slave trade. Human bondage is one of man s earliest atrocities. It was commonplace throughout the ancient and early medieval worlds. But until the coming of the Europeans, slavery had existed on only a relatively small scale. Once the people of Western Europe "discovered" the continent, however, slavery became big business. Approximately ten million natives were taken from their homes between the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century to destinations sometimes halfway around the world, to be dispassionately sold like chattel. 

Europeans from the Netherlands first settled at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 to establish rest and repair station for ships sailing between northern Europe and the Far East. More than 60,000 slaves were brought to Cape Town, until a ban on the slave trade in 1808. Slaves were brought into the colony shortly after the initial settlement because more workers were needed for food production. The slaves were equally from Africa and Asia. Africans were brought from Madagascar and East Africa, and Asians from India, Sri Lanka and the Indonesian archipelago. African slaves usually worked as laborers Indians, Indonesians and free blacks were craftsmen, artisans, builders, coachmen, and hawkers. Women worked as laundresses, wet nurses, and household servants. 

All said, it was not the biggest, fastest, nor last diaspora from Africa. Whereas the first would have involved a few hundred individuals, many millions of Africans exported in the slave trades over the past few hundred years made a massive contribution to the modern world, leaving genetic markers in many non-African people alive today. But, in comparison the latter great diaspora... 

The expression not worth his salt had its origin in the ancient Creek slave trade, in which people were bought and sold for measures of salt. 

Yet while his principles of justice demanded the immediate abolition of slavery, Condorcet s practical suggestions were more moderate and prudent. Like his friend Jefferson, he proposed the immediate abolition of the slave trade, not of slavery. Surmising that emancipation could provoke violent resistance and be viewed as forced consent (consente-ment force) by white people, he advanced an intermediate solution so that the masters could enjoy the service of their slaves on condition that they would enfranchise them within thirty-five years. The same tension between principles and practice is to be found in Condorcet s position on women s suffrage. 

This cruelty seems at first to be based on totally false principles, but can be explained to some extent by the fact that ships captains who conduct the slave trade receive from the man who commissioned them a certain percentage of the Negroes they transport or a certain percentage of the proceeds of their sale. The privateer is also free to insure the Negroes lives. It is therefore very probable that several of these unfortunate people have perished simply to benefit the privateer at the insurer s expense. Indeed, research conducted in England has provided proof of this. 

Now that this account of the reasons for its establishment has been presented, there can be no doubt about the aims of the Society of the Friends of Negroes. The combination of mankind suffering in one corner of the world while greed and cruelty are encour ed in the other is bound to produce horrific scenes, since the laws of justice are infringed by all nations which are engaged in the Negro slave trade or who benefit... 

The slave trade must be abolished by a general agreement, but this happy revolution can only be the result of our convictions. With this permanently in mind, the Society will attempt to discover, balance and accommodate the interests of all concerned. 

When we consider that Negro women are fertile, that the climate in the West Indies is not dissimilar to the natural climate of the Negroes, that population size adjusts very quickly to the means of survival, and therefore in this case to the owners interest in increasing their Negroes, we find that the slave trade probably is not necessary, and therefore that both the government and the owners have very good reasons for requiring its abolition. 

Wilberforce, William 1759-1833 British politician, leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade Laudanum addiction... 

Though the century ended quite differently, in the beginning of the 1700s, the world found itself an unusual circumstance a period of relative peace. In the Near East and northern Africa, peace was imposed by the Ottoman Empire. In central Africa harbors of slave trade pockmarked the coast, but the interior remained out of reach of outside adventurers. In the New World inhabitants struggled to recover from... 

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